LETTING GO

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People ask me if it isn’t hard for me to think about leaving this place that entered my life when I was seven years old. Not really. Yes, there are some good memories and this piece of land has probably influenced my life by far more than any other single thing or person you could point to in this relative world. My father would be a close second, and this land is irretrievably intertwined with my father for good or ill.

But with all the huge birds nest of memories, intense lessons, lost loves, hard won victories, miserable defeats, sparkling moments, and tooth-gritting, endless bouts of endurance, there has been a stream of consciousness with direction, with goal, with intention and purpose and ultimate reward as far as I can make out.

A reward that is intangible and unprovable, beyond logic and reason, beyond hope and desire, beyond the goal of leaving here with some measure of compensation for sixty-seven years of captivity. And maybe that won’t happen, it remains to be seen. But my real goal at this point is letting go.

Letting go the tangibles won’t be hard. The beautiful land, the heavy investment in time and energy and money, they have pretty much been left behind already in my mind. It is the intangibles which the ego clings to that give me trouble, and this appears to be the last and most important gift that this land has to offer me.

Letting go of those things most precious to the ego would seem to be my big life lesson, and everything in my life up to now appears to have been geared toward this. It feels like a life crisis as big as any I have ever gone thru before, and it is. But this one is different in that this is the one I have to get right. I had the luxury of youth before when I walked away when things got too rough. This may be my last shot.

Anger, bitterness, pride, fear, these are all luxuries I can no longer afford, and they hang on with tooth and claw, desperate to survive, the very mechanism of survival thruout the evolutionary story from microbe to humankind. They got us here, and they are obsolete in the course of events that are unfolding before us as we speak. Tomorrow is here and I want to be part of it as much as I can. This is a hard lesson. This is the hardest lesson of all.

I have been greatly helped in all this by a man who died recently, David R. Hawkins. He was a doctor, a psychiatrist, a scientist, a philosopher, a mystic, and a teacher. He explored the vistas of spiritual enlightenment and reported back on his journeys in language understandable to Western consciousness. He is not easy to read but I believe he is far ahead of his time and has opened a way thru the apparent hopelessness of modern life, a way that both ordinary science and religion seem incapable of finding or understanding.

His last book is entitled, appropriately enough, Letting Go. It is by far the most accessible of all his books and the one I would most recommend to anyone in search of truth. His other ten books expand on his findings and can be tough going for the less than determined. As with any teacher I would recommend keeping a grain of salt handy, eating the fish and spitting out the bones.

I am convinced that the concept of letting go of the constraints of the ego is the key to success of life on Earth and the reason we are here. It is the hardest thing in the world to do and it is worth whatever it takes. It makes sense of science and religion and the teachings of the mystics thruout the ages. It shows us the way home and helps us to walk in it.

The way is hard. Sometimes I struggle in desperation and I very much need and appreciate your prayers and good thoughts and wishes, any high vibration sent my way. God is good and I intend to finish the course.

 

SEARCHIN’

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You know spring has arrived for real when the motorcycles and dandelions take center stage. The highway running past here is a favorite road for motorcycle riding and I enjoy hearing them going by on warm, sunny days. And the dandelions are so thick you have to scout out the best way ahead to avoid stepping on them. I’m really glad not having to mow them down, something that always bothered me when we were still mowing.

Dandelions are my favorite flower but I recognize that many people regard them as evil forces of darkness and chaos that have to be eradicated. And they don’t really belong on a golf course even tho I always welcomed them and never sprayed to kill them. In the first place there are golfers who would never return to a course that allowed them, and in the second place it is hard to find your ball in the midst of a thousand white golf ball sized dandelion puffs when they go to seed.

I spent some time yesterday talking with a golf course superintendent out in California who really wanted to buy this particular course along with his brother. I told him there were plenty of courses for sale but he wanted this one because of its uniqueness and history. I had to tell him that we were presently negotiating a transfer of ownership with page after page of contingencies but to check back in a month. It’s nice to know that there are people still interested in not chopping up the land, even if they are not being allowed to fulfill their own dream.

Yesterday I went up north for the day around Reed City, which is the center of the area I am most interested in moving to now. I drove past the farm that was my own dream and which was shattered when a previous deal to sell this land fell thru. Someone else got my dream and I got a huge life lesson that I’m still working on. Bittersweet.

I did talk with a local Realtor I liked and drove around for a couple of hours, even looked at one place near my dream farm, but it was only five acres. After all these years of walking with my dogs over close to ninety acres, five acres seems like a postage stamp. In Oregon before I came back here I was living on 240 acres all by myself. In many ways that was the high point of my life tho the life lessons weren’t quite as intense. Part of me would like to take a break from life lessons, but time continues growing short.

So once again I’m looking for a place to move to without any money in my pocket and without any assurance that I’m going to have any. But I can’t afford not to look now because if a deal ever does go thru to let me out of here, I will have to get out much faster than is comfortable or maybe even possible without extreme measures. It’s a stressful, nerve-wracking situation like most life lessons and I’m trying to maintain an attitude of gratitude. Some days I do better at it than others.

JODI

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Jodi was a red dog, actually more like burnt orange, a Spaniel mix from all appearances, a mutt, a rescue, my favorite dog of all my life. My wife found her at one of the nearby shelters, the only dog in the whole room who politely didn’t raise a ruckus when my wife walked in. When we brought her home, she acted like she had grown up with us, not excited, not scared, just calmly checking things out before settling down.

It turned out that she had heartworms. Bad. The vet suggested taking her back to where we got her, said it would be risky treating her they were so bad. Taking her back there was not thinkable. We went ahead with the treatment which basically consisted of poisoning her to the point where the worms died and hopefully she didn’t. And she pulled thru. The vet was a gruff old guy but we could tell he went way out of his way to give her every possible chance.

Don’t let her run for a month, he said. Ha! Tell that to Jodi. She had been cooped up in a cage for a month or more waiting for us to show up, and than back into another cage for treatment that she probably didn’t understand. Boy was she ready to run. And run and run. Around in circles leaning in like a seasoned motorcycle rider. Full bore out after squirrels or other critters a quarter mile away. We tried to keep it down but she was past ready to go.

And ready to follow her nose into the next county. It wasn’t like she was trying to run away. All these new smells were just overpowering and her entire being became concentrated in her nose as she followed this critter and that, and who knows what the next breeze wafting in would bring. We figured that’s how she ended up in the shelter in the first place. Just followed her nose one day so far that she broke the thread back to home. We really tried keeping her somewhat under control but she was intent on making up for lost time.

When she was maybe eight years old, my wife came up with another rescue dog, Ralph, half Black Lab and half Golden Retriever. Rescued dogs come already named if you get them from a shelter, altho obviously if they show up at your door you do it yourself. Jodi’s name was actually Jodici, which was the name of a band as I found out when I saw them on late night TV a week after we got her, and never heard of them again. Ralph was half a year old when we got him and I can still show you gnawed off places on the furniture. He more than made up with a big heart what he lacked in brains.

Jodi had settled down a lot by then but Ralph was ready to go and he would take Jodi with him, disappearing for long enough to bring on high anxiety and clenched fists. They would sometimes come back after dark, trying to slip in as if they had just been out to pee. Ralph would be ready to go again the next day but you could tell Jodi was at her limit. We would get reports of them being seen halfway to Glenn or out on the icebergs in the lake in winter.

Toward the end Jodi was going blind but she would still go out with me on the golf course working. She loved to ride on the golf car and would mostly stay with me, but she still liked to follow her nose and would end up far enough to where she couldn’t see me. She would head toward the nearest golfer in a golf car and I would have to call and call until I got her attention, then pick up a rake or something to wave back and forth until she could spot me.

And Ralph would still take her off on his jaunts. He was in his prime and Jodi was an old lady. He would come home without her and I would have to go out looking for her. Often I would find her up by the barn, lying in the tall grass exhausted, unable to make that last hundred yards. I would pick her up and carry her home. She knew I would find her.

I didn’t get to be with her when she left the planet. It was obvious that it was time and my wife panicked, took her to the vet, and had her put to sleep, something she later regretted. I felt cheated, felt like Jodi was cheated, but water over the dam. I buried her in the back field where she liked to roam, near the pond where the sun could warm her rest.

Ralph is an old man himself now like me. For some time I have been thinking of digging up her bones to take them with me wherever I end up going. Like one last time of making sure she was safe at home. Finally this afternoon I took a shovel and a box and moved the big rock which had marked her grave and started digging. I dug and dug and didn’t find anything. I guess it has been something like ten years and I thought at least there would be a skull and some leg bones. Nothing.

I wasn’t sure what to think, I know it was the right place. I didn’t fill the hole back up since I thought I might dig some more tomorrow, but she just may have returned to the earth from whence she came. I say “she” when obviously it is just her body we are talking about and she has been following her nose in doggie heaven all this time waiting for me to show up, hopefully in a golf car.

Accounts of near death experiences often speak of loved family members appearing on the other side. I don’t expect to go thru that door for awhile, tho you never know. In any case, my hope would be to see a streak of red fur heading toward me at breakneck speed, eyesight fully restored, nose open to roam, ready to go exploring the ever present Now.

 

SPRINGTIME

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Well, sort of. Today was the warmest day since last September and I caught some Vitamin D. The first brave daffodils are starting to wilt a bit, I saw purple violets for the first time today, and maybe a Pileated Woodpecker, tho I’m not sure on that one. Hibiscus and Forsythia, those tiny little white flowers about an eighth of an inch across whose name I never have learned. Everyone is weeks late but making up for lost time. I went barefoot for the first time today and the ground was already getting warm.

It’s like I’m living in two different worlds simultaneously, and I guess in fact that’s what it actually is. On the one hand there is an ongoing offer to buy out my shares in this enterprise and it involves hard feelings and hurt feelings and things that shouldn’t go on in a family situation who supposedly have each others back. But most people I talk to have a similar story to tell. Go figure.

So I’m doing a lot of gritting my teeth, a lot of lying awake for hours in the middle of the night, a lot of unnecessary figuring and consulting and watching my own back. And at the same time I go out every day with my doggies and we take a walk in our yard, a mile, more or less, depending on how we feel and what the weather is like and which way the wind is blowing and how the spirit moves.

We don’t go around and around in a little circle. We make one big circle, and every day it is a different one, and every day is just as beautiful as the day before and the day before that and on back sixty-seven years. I see that the MegaMillions lottery is up over a hundred mill. You could win that and you would have a hard time coming up with a more beautiful yard than the one I get to walk in every day.

I’m trying to enjoy it while I can because I know it is coming to an end. That’s the way in the relative world, everything comes to an end sooner or later. That’s just how it is, and it’s part of the lessons we are intended to learn. I’m giving it my best shot, but it’s hard. It’s my understanding that life on this planet is the hardest school you can enroll in. I don’t really have a lot to compare it to but it resonates with me.

So the home page on this web site still says the property is for sale. The big yellow sign down by the road says it’s for sale. But it ain’t so, or not exactly, check back in a month or so if you are interested. Or sooner. If you stop by or telephone or e-mail I’ll take your name and contact info and tell you to stay tuned.

I found an arrowhead here many years ago down by our pump house, lying right on top of the ground where thousands of people had walked, a really nice one. I still have it somewhere. It was a sign that one or another of the aboriginal people of this land had actually been here somewhere along the way.

It would have been a lot more grown up in natural forest then, but I wonder if whoever that was, maybe out after a deer, didn’t also go up to what I call Doggie Church and just sit there taking in the view across the valley and enjoying the quiet and soaking in the Spirit. Maybe what we are going thru here today is a consequence of the change from that to this.

SUPERINTENDENTS

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Superintendents, that’s what you call the job I did here for, what, some twenty-two years before we closed. This time. I did it for ten years starting when I was fourteen years old until I couldn’t stand it one more minute. Back then we were called greenskeepers. The little sign on the door of the office I never got to use says my name with “Superintendent” underneath. I should remember to take that with me if I ever get out of here.

Superintendents are like calling garbage collectors sanitation workers. I remembered how to spell the word when I came back by thinking that “dent”, the end of the word, is what you get in your head when  a golf ball hits it. It didn’t take me a long time to figure out that what I really was was a greenskeeper, just like when I had left some twenty-some years previously. A keeper of the greens.

Actually, superintendents are picking up on my distinction lately, but they prefer to keep it somewhat hoity-toity by calling it “greenkeeper”, which is what the Brits call it, and after all this whole industry was started out with British shepherds bored out of their skulls and looking for diversion. I say British, but the Scots might quibble. By the time of Queen Elizabeth the Original, it had become a pastime of the rich and famous.

When I came back this time, back in 1989, I determined to make the best of a bad situation and give it my best shot as a golf course superintendent, the last thing in the world I wanted to be. Fair enough. I joined a regional superintendent’s association and started attending meetings. Slowly it became apparent that they weren’t really concerned about the things I was concerned about, like my greens dying every summer when it got hot.

And slowly it became apparent that what they were concerned about was making the job of greenskeeper, excuse me, superintendent, more “professional”. Translation, more able to sit at a desk all day while other people did the grunt work and eventually be able to wear a tie and command a big bucks salary.

Not at Glenn Shores. I never did make near the average income for the state, and my workers weren’t working for minimum wage, but close enough. Meantime my greens were dying every summer when it got hot and the top honcho at the top university in the state for the golf industry couldn’t figure out why.

The last time I went to a meeting of the golf course superintendents was at a fancy golf course in Grand Rapids where they have local minor league tournaments. I put on my best blue jeans for the occasion. I figured it would be held in the maintenance building but, lo, it was in the clubhouse, and, lo, my blue jeans were an international crisis.

I never went back.

We always got a truckload of golf industry magazines while the golf course was open, and I never read them. It was just too depressing reading about the latest methods and products and equipment that we simply couldn’t afford as we kept things together with baling wire and duct tape and borrowed money.

But since we have closed they still keep coming and I have started reading the Superintendents magazine. It is amazing. The rest of the industry has caught up with Glenn Shores in the meantime. This so called recession started off in Michigan, and in Michigan it started off with the golf industry, and in the golf industry it started off with Glenn Shores. I had a ten years heads up on the whole shebang and everyone else thought I was crazy. A prophet of doom.

And now the Superintendents are lying awake at night trying to figure out how to keep things going with far less money and much more expectation, just like I was ten years ago. Do I feel vindicated? Not really. Most people don’t see what’s coming down the road. They are too busy trying to make their dreams come true, People are who they are. I just want out of here.

DID I SAY FLOOD?

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A bit ago I posted about our first flood in over a year. That was before this last one, which made the first one look like a puddle. Grand Rapids, the nearest metro area, is having the highest water in over a century. We weren’t that bad here but bad enough. Took out one bridge, but amazingly not any others. And that one bridge washed out according to the design which left the culverts intact and only needs a dump truck load of crushed rock plus some road gravel to bring it back. Do I need to tell you how happy I am that I’m not out there struggling with fixing it so that golfers could cross the creek again?

If you went far enough back in these musings, you would see that we aren’t that far away from two years since I started jotting these down. Actually I didn’t really pick up steam until something like a year and a half ago, which is when we gave up on our first realtor, who we hung in there with for three years. We went with a commercial realtor after that. She assured us that her church was looking for a campground facility which was almost a slam dunk but we needed to sign up right now to get in the latest brochure being printed.

We stayed with her for half a year. In that half year she brought out one prospect, and I did the selling. Afterward she asked me if I would continue to do the selling with people she brought out. Okay, I just want out of here. As it turned out, that was the only one she rustled up. I showed the property to half a dozen more who stopped by because of her sign, which was big and yellow. Really big. That’s what I learned from our half year stint with her. A big yellow sign works. Oh yeah, the church? Seems they had changed their mind.

So we went to For Sale By Owner. To her credit, that realtor left her sign posts in the ground for us when she took her sign. That made up for the client we spent days getting ready for and who never showed up. We put up our own sign on her posts. A big, even brighter yellow one. We got a lot of hits off that sign, more than all the previous three and a half years combined. And I learned that a lot of people don’t like dealing with realtors.

Actually we considered listing with one realtor in particular before we stepped out on our own. He specializes in property like this, unique, highly desirable, for the discerning person of way above average taste and intelligence. He had driven by it a hundred times, he said when I showed him around, and had no idea what an extraordinary treasure it was. He really wanted us to list with him, but he, too, wanted me to do the selling. Hmmm. We ended up telling him we would pay him a commission if he brought us a buyer, but we were going to go it ourselves. He never did. Nice guy, tho.

Am I tooting my own horn? Maybe. You must realize that all these musings are not just because I have too much time on my hands. We have been trying to sell this place. Desperately, if you want to know the truth. And I had it sold a few weeks back. The whole property to someone who wanted to keep it intact and would probably have bought two of our three lots in the subdivision. My sister wanted the third. Might have bought some of our equipment too, I dunno. Full price, no dickering, absolutely aware that he was getting a steal.

It never got that far. Our corporate decisions of this nature take a majority of the three of us who have joint ownership. As you may have discovered in your own family, people do not always agree. To make a long story short, the buyer found out that there were contingencies which would have left him not in control of his own property, and that lawyers might be necessary to sort it out, and he headed for the hills.

That is a sad story, people. Our home page on this web site still says that the property is for sale, as does our big yellow sign, but if you come to buy waving a fist full of dollars, you will find it ain’t so. I took the answering machine message describing the sale off the phone today. I will probably be shutting down this web site this coming week since the whole point of it was to sell the property. If I do, I hope to continue the saga elsewhere.

I am told that an offer to buy me out has been sent to my lawyer. I will wait to see what it has to say. The last holdout against development from Milwaukee down thru Chicago and on up to the bridge is most likely going to be chopped up and sold to enable private dreams. And I have to hire a lawyer. This is how the world works, people. I just want out of here. I am working very hard on letting it go. Stay tuned.

THE MASTERS

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I just finished watching the Masters Golf Tournament, arguably the most important tournament in the world tho it is near the start of the season. I was rooting for the old man, being one myself, but the kid won at the last with a masterful putt. He deserved it and was gracious in victory. The old man appeared to agree and was most gracious himself in defeat. In spite of the occasional one who doesn’t quite get it, golf still seems to be a game for ladies and gentlemen of whatever background.

The tournament is played at the Augusta course in Georgia. Those who understand the ins and outs of golf realize that this particular time of year when the tournament is played is when a golf course down there is at its prime. It is a world class ritzy private course to start with, and they spend vast amounts of time and money getting the course ready to be picture perfect shown on television all around the world.

This has resulted in something called the Augusta Syndrome which golf course superintendents at the better courses now have to contend with every year at this time. It consists of the players at their own course wanting to know why their course doesn’t look as perfectly manicured as the one they have spent days watching on TV.

Truth to be known, the Augusta course won’t look that good any other time of the year. They actually shut it down in the summer when the heat and humidity make playing golf and maintaining the course too difficult. And ritzy as they are, they don’t have the money to maintain it at that level except when they are making money off the crowds and the television coverage.

That doesn’t stop your average bozo golfer who probably learned to play golf watching TV from making their superintendent’s life miserable. Demands for perfection with a probably declining budget. Such is life today. One of the skills superintendents now need is the grace to answer those demands intelligently and with good humor. We never had that problem at old low budget Glenn Shores, but it’s one more reason why I”m glad I’m out of the game.

FLOOD

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We flooded here a couple of days ago for the first time in over a year. When I say flood, I mean the creek out of its banks so you need to use a bridge to cross the fairway. The only reason this happens is because being a golf course, the creek was run underground thru tiles so golfers weren’t always losing their ball and holding everyone else up.. Now that the golf course is closed, a person could dig up the tiles and it wouldn’t flood except for exceptional storms that rarely come along.

Last year the creek quit running in May and didn’t start again until December. I don’t remember that happening before. Last year the fruit farmers lost most of their crops because we had summer in March followed by a hard freeze over many days. It was good for those golf courses that were still open tho. Many had their best year in too long a time.

I wouldn’t want to be running a golf course this year. We haven’t had spring yet and the forecast talks about below average temperatures continuing thru the end of April. There were a couple of days when it got a little warmer but for the most part only die hard fanatics would be out golfing. Meanwhile you have hired your staff and workers and the course needs maintaining whether anyone is playing to pay for it or not.

I saw some daffodils today that were seriously thinking about blooming but most of them are still hunkering down. Last year at this time they were past their peak and starting to wilt. Funny how weather goes its own way now from year to year. I can remember when there were variations but you could at least depend on the seasons happening in the right order on a fairly regular schedule. Not anymore.

I’m glad I’m not running a golf course any longer and glad I’m not a farmer.. Or running a ski resort for that matter. A lot of things depend on the weather in Michigan, maybe more so than a lot of other places. It should be interesting to see what happens as we head toward summer. Can you call it summer if you didn’t have a spring?

FIREWOOD

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People who think of heating with wood as romantic and charming have most likely not had to ever work up firewood themselves. It is really hard work, even for someone in their prime. With variations depending on circumstances, a good rule of thumb is that one person can come up with one honest cord of wood cut, split, delivered, and stacked in one twelve hour day of backbreaking work that leaves you worn out and hurting.

I managed to get my winter supply of wood all done before winter really hit a month late in January, thanks to a couple of good friends who helped me one day and saved me another week by myself. I’m not in my prime any more and it gets more difficult with each passing year. And firewood is going for $160 a cord last I looked. That could really mount up if you are trying to keep this leaky old house from kicking on the furnace set at sixty degrees.

It was my hope that the firewood would last to the end of April. Normally by then things have warmed up enough to where the woodstove is keeping things too warm and you can let the propane furnace pick up the slack without dipping into the emergency fund. We are just out of the first week of April now and the stacked wood ran out a few days ago. Now I’m going out with big cardboard boxes and collecting all the bits and pieces left over too small to stack.

They will probably last another day or two. I could go out and scavenge larger sticks and branches scattered all over the property from the series of storms over the winter, but I doubt if I will. I am tired. Not just tired of working firewood, but tired of the twenty-four year grind this time back to this place, not to mention the now four and a half year push to sell this property and get on with my life.

We had a good offer to buy half the property a couple of weeks back followed by someone who wanted the whole shebang but not with what he considered to be unrealistic demands attached to the sale. We are working on that. It is an internal issue. I’m hoping for a resolution. And hoping that if I have to work up next winter’s firewood again, that it will be on my own piece of the planet free and clear. We’ll see.

EASTER

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For all those who celebrate Resurrection Sunday, blessing on you. For those who don’t, blessings on you all. The weather yesterday would have been more appropriate for today, but we’ll take it like it comes. Yesterday was really nice, sunny and much warmer than it has been for way too long a time. I spent six hours showing the property to three different parties, a new record.

One of those was a couple looking to buy a few acres across the road from their existing summer cottage. I explained that we didn’t want to split the property at all if possible and that selling off a small parcel like that would greatly diminish the value of the rest of the land, but we would let them know if things changed. I let them go out and walk the course on their own because they found it so beautiful.

Both of the other two parties seemed to be highly interested in acquiring the whole property and appeared able to do so. We were already in negotiation with yet another party to buy half of the land without the buildings on it. This person didn’t want to split the land either but was not in a position to buy it whole. We were seriously considering this since no one else was stepping up to the plate and we have been trying to sell for four and a half years now.

And within twenty-four hours of a family meeting that only emphasized our increasingly desperate situation, we had the potential for negotiations where “Or Best Offer” might actually go upward rather than down. We have never posted our asking price with an OBO afterward but it has always been understood that we we ready to talk about anything even if only to say that we weren’t taking a real lowball offer yet, but stay tuned. I told everyone concerned that we would give it a week until next Saturday and determine which of any offers was best. The offer to buy the half was extended a week so we’ll see what happens.

After I ate for the first time in the day and recovered some I took advantage of the warm and pleasant weather to sharpen a new pocket knife I got recently. This was the first time that I got back into my knife sharpening shop since I cut the end of my finger off two months ago and I was a little nervous about it. I’m having to learn how to do a number of physical tasks over again in a new way and working with a knife on a sharpening machine is somewhat dangerous under the best of conditions.

So that went well, not perfect, but well enough for me to see I could get good enough again to do it for someone else. It’s mostly a matter of focus and concentration, and fingers can learn new tricks, even these old ones. I’m also learning to type all over again and I still have hopes of someday being out from under this golf course and able to take up learning to play keyboard again.

Speaking of golf courses, traditionally we would have opened up for the season yesterday, and both my brother and I are still overjoyed at not having to do it. This will be the third season we were closed. I noticed the golf course down the road had mowed their greens and probably got some golfers yesterday. Probably not today unless a few crazies. It’s overcast and getting colder out today, and I bet whoever mowed those greens had his winter gear on. I never did feel right about being open on Easter anyway, but you can’t think about those things running a golf course.