By Jeffrey Carl
Working at the Westmoreland News in 1994 was the best summer job I ever had. I worked for peanuts and had a two hour drive each way from Richmond, but I got to do it all at a small county newspaper where I was a reporter, feature writer, copy editor, layout editor and photographer (because there was nobody else to do those things). Best of all the paper’s editor, Lynn Norris, gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted – way more journalistic and comedic freedom than anyone should rightly give a know-it-all 21-year-old writing for a weekly in the deeply rural Northern Neck of Virginia.
They say that you never learn to curse until you learn to drive. For those under the minimum 16-year age, I recommend golf.
Golf is a sport for lazy people and a passion for dedicated people and a nuisance for uncoordinated people and a test of creative cussing for most of us and it’s actually really a lot of fun if you don’t mind how badly you’re doing at it. At least it is at Cameron Hills Golf Links, in King George.
My friend Katie is a wonderful person – sterling character, nice legs and so forth – but she’s a horrible golf partner. For one thing – and I’m not making this up – she almost killed us in a golf cart.
The green of the 18th hole is down beyond an relatively enormous steep hill, and as we wearily rode towards it, our old pal “gravity” started displaying its warped sense of humor, and we began to pick up speed.
Katie, who was behind the wheel, seemed rather puzzled at how to remedy this, as the only pedal she had used on the cart thus far was the gas. I thought it over and suggested one contingency politely by screaming “BRAKE! BRAKE! BRAKE!” at the top of my lungs.
By this time we were picking up speed and hurling towards our deaths – and believe-you-me, no matter who you are, if you die in a golf cart accident they send you straight to Hell just for being stupid. Katie slammed on the parking brake, and let me just tell you that if you’ve never laid rubber in a souped-up golf cart, man oh man are you missing something.
But I digress. The problem with Katie’s golf game was that she was actually attempting to dig for buried treasure or oil or truffles – the theory being, I suppose that if you make enough divots you’re bound to find something.
However, it would be unfair for me to posit myself as having played an entirely superior game of golf that afternoon either.
Through a mistake at the clubhouse, however, I was given small dimpled wood-seeking missiles. I suppose that it was the military’s day to test new secret weapons at the course because some of them were also the rumored F-124 Stealth Golf Balls, which disappear from all known methods of detection as soon as you hit them.
These charmingly innocuous-looking little demonic terrors managed to veer off into the woods or a stream – and certainly not because I hit them there, thank you very much – and hide themselves in whatever seemed handy.
I would occasionally wander into the woods looking for a ball and discover some long-extinct species of killer mosquito with a handicap much lower than mine or, if I ventured deep enough into the woods, be asked by a polite dinosaur or lost company from the 13th Massachussets Zouaves if I knew the way back to the fairway.