Authors: Don J. Snyder
It was a dark, depressing place that smelled as if old meat had been left under the wall-to-wall carpet. Cars sped past on a busy highway maybe ten yards away. Jack had done well to survive here, but he was packed and eager to move when we arrived. He looked lean and fit. Colleen rode with him in his car, and I followed them to the campus. It was 3:30. We had left home that morning at 5:30 for an 8:00 flight out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which took us to Columbus, where we rented a car and drove three hours to Toledo. I added up the distance between me and my son in real terms now for the first time. I could be here in eight hours, standing right beside him, if he needed me. I felt that I could live with that.
He was very busy, but we had a few dinners together, including a special one with Jim White and his father. Looking at them across
the table, I was struck by the passage of time. Seventeen years earlier Jim had been my student at Colgate when Jack was just two years old. Ten years later, I had spoken at his wedding. Now he had two little children of his own, one of them a son who looked a lot like Jack had at the same age.
When Jack arrived, he looked handsome as he strode across the room in his golf shirt and pants. “How did you do today, Jack?” Jim asked him as he sat down.
“Came in first,” he said.
Jim smiled at me and nodded.
The day before we left, Jack treated me to a round of golf at Inverness. It was late on Sunday afternoon, and with the weather threatening, we had the place to ourselves. He surprised Colleen by getting a cart and insisting that she drive around with us. I was amazed by how steadily he played. He had taken his game to a new level since he’d left home. When it began to rain, he smiled at me and said, “Just like Carnoustie.”
The next morning he had his first class, an English class in a building named Snyder Memorial. We laughed about that as we said good-bye. I watched him hug his mother, and then we drove off. The only thing I wanted to do before we left town was walk the course where he was going to be playing his challenge matches all fall, a lovely place called Stone Oak, about ten miles from the campus.
It was raining again, and Colleen sat in the rental car reading while I walked alone. I was memorizing the layout so I could picture Jack there when I was back in Maine. Houses lined the fairways, and I thought about the people who lived there, who might glance out their windows some afternoon and see my son walking by.
I had tears in my eyes when Colleen caught up with me. I hadn’t
noticed that the rain had stopped. She had brought me a cup of coffee. “It will warm you up,” she said.
I told her that I hated leaving Jack. “Nell will be in Boston soon. Erin in Spain. Jack’s in Toledo. In a few years Cara will leave too. How can life ever make sense again when our children are scattered around the world like this?” She took my hand in hers as we walked and said, “Give it time. It will make sense again. You’ll see.”
Five months have passed and I have not stopped missing Jack. I have missed him so much that even when he was home at Christmas for five days, sitting beside me on the couch or at the dining room table, I never stopped missing him. This winter I have been spending a lot of time in front of the television, and that was where Colleen found me today watching an old British Open Championship at St. Andrews on the Golf Channel. “You’re wearing Jack’s shoes again,” she said as she sat down beside me.
“I just miss him,” I told her.
She looked at me a moment, then said, “You need to do something different. Go somewhere. Where would you like to go?”
I was staring at the TV screen when I answered her. “Right there.”
That’s how it began. I wrote to Jack that night and told him that I had decided to go to Scotland to learn to be a caddie so that in three years, when he finished college and played on a professional tour, I would be ready to meet my pledge to him to carry his bag. It was as
if I were resurrecting a whimsical childhood dream, the kind that evaporates with the passage of time, but it suddenly seemed real and tangible to me.
Later he wrote back to me. “You go to St. Andrews, Daddy,” he said. “Learn all you can and we’ll meet up someday, before you know it.”
Elie, Scotland. Almost three weeks ago, I flew to Scotland and took residence in the village of Elie, just up the road from St. Andrews, because there is a golf course here open through the winter where I can get back to the game and into decent shape. For the last ten days I have walked two rounds a day at the Elie Golf House Club, carrying rocks from the shore in my golf bag for extra weight, always marching at a good clip and pacing off the yardages in my head. Not an easy task for a fifty-seven-year-old, but the exertion feels productive. “I’m in training!” I yelled to a groundskeeper during the gale last week when the wind knocked me to my knees twice.
“You’re mad!” he yelled back at me.
I’ve been thinking maybe he’s right. During that gale, the town had to plow two-foot sand drifts off the main street, and I began wearing my headphones day and night to block out the noise of the wind. Some of those winter days I was so cold as I dressed to start my first round that I put on my three layers of clothing right over my pajamas.
This morning I waited out a downpour with a couple of the greenkeepers inside a shed off the 13th fairway that looked as if half of it had blown off its foundation in the storm. Both guys had such weathered faces that it was impossible to believe they could look so old and still be standing up. They spoke with thick accents, and I couldn’t understand a word one said, and only about 30 percent of the other. What was curious about them was that the large fellow’s clothes were too small and the small fellow’s clothes were too large, so I was distracted from our conversation at first by the ridiculous
thought that maybe they’d accidentally dressed in each other’s clothing.
When I told them that I was going to the Old Course in a few days to sign up as a caddie in training, they told me about some lads they knew who had worked there long ago. A fellow called “Shell” because he often passed out and spent the night in the Shell bunker off the 11th green. “Ringo,” who allegedly played the drums better than Ringo Starr before he had one hand mauled by a pit bull. “Soap,” who never washed, and “Rotar,” who had worked the grounds crew at an RAF base and learned to roll his cigarettes
inside
his pocket in the gale winds. When I explained that I was down to my last pack of American cigarettes and at the equivalent of almost $12 a pack would not be replenishing them, they took out their papers and gave me a lesson in rolling my own. I was surprised to see that they used little white filters. “We’re tight,” the one I could understand said. “You can’t smoke the last wee bit of tobacco, so you end up wasting it without a filter.”
That began a conversation about the cost of living and the Yanks who came to Scotland “on holiday,” as they put it. I pointed out right away that I was not one of them. “I’ve got four kids in college at the same time,” I explained. “I need to earn every penny I can and send it straight home.” They nodded with sympathy and together explained that at the Old Course I would average two rounds a day at £60 per round. I did the math inside my head. In a season that lasted around two hundred days that was around forty grand in U.S. dollars. Music to my ears, and I immediately set down two objectives for the six months ahead of me—learn to be a damned good caddie for Jack, and earn $40,000 for my family.
The rain, which had been coming down in sheets, suddenly got even heavier, peppering the metal roof above us like machine-gun fire. “Get yourself some good waterproofs, tops and bottoms,” one fellow said. “Gore-Tex. Nothin’ else works in this shite.”
The whole time we were in the shed I wondered how difficult it
was going to be for me to be accepted by the other caddies. Tonight I made up my mind that I’m not going to tell anyone that I’m a writer. If someone asks, I’ll say that I was a teacher before I came to Scotland. I won’t say I was a college professor, just a teacher. Wherever Americans go in the world they think they’re better than everyone else, and if word gets out that I’ve been on the
Today
show, and chumming with Hollywood stars on the set of a movie I wrote, and riding through Chicago in Oprah’s limo, I won’t stand a chance. In truth, those things are faraway memories now, just things that happened to me across the years and don’t have anything to do with why I’m here. And none of these boys I will work with comes from a more modest childhood than my own, and so I have earned my humility.
I rode the number 95 bus to St. Andrews this morning, a journey of maybe twenty miles from Elie that takes just about an hour as the coach sails past the North Sea and oceans of rich farmland at a pretty good clip, then crawls through the narrow streets of villages named St. Monans, Crail, Pittenweem, Anstruther, and Kingsbarns before it reaches downtown St. Andrews. The ride took me past five golf courses, counting the new Castle Course, which is still under construction on a cliff just outside the town of St. Andrews.
From the bus station I walked four blocks to the caddie pavilion just off the 1st tee of the Old Course, where I waited outside in the rain with half a dozen on-duty caddies who glanced at me and nodded their acknowledgment when I moved in next to them under the overhanging roof. I figured all of them to be younger than
I by anywhere from ten to forty years. Dressed in clothes that had seen better days, smoking their hand-rolled cigarettes down to their knuckles, they glanced up at the low gray sky from time to time like sailors or fishermen looking for a break in the weather. There was a weary dignity about them that I found instantly compelling. I couldn’t understand most of what they were saying to each other, but just being in their presence for half an hour, I realized that they were not merely talking to each other; they were telling stories. I’ve never been around caddies. I never hired one in my life or ever really gave the profession any thought one way or the other, but this morning as I watched and listened, I felt as if I had known these men before I saw them. These men who immediately made me wonder if they were not like the porters on the great old passenger trains. They work for tips. They rub shoulders each day with people from all over the world, people who occupy a higher station in life than they do. They learn to walk a certain way with the contours of the train track and to carry their heavy trays a certain way. And I imagine when they’re off duty, they share stories about the people they’ve met.
It took half an hour this morning for me to decide that all I want is to spend the next six months with these guys, learning as much as I can from them, and walking the ground of the Old Course and glancing up from the 1st fairway, and then again coming up the 18th to the windows of the Rusacks Hotel, where I lived as I wrote my novel in the winter of 2002 and where Jack and I stayed just over a year ago. Every day I will get to walk past the place where we buried his golf ball last winter and took our pledge. I have a history here with Jack that has already taken its place in the wide and luminous history of this old golf course.
I had a real stroke of good luck this morning after I rode the bus back to Elie. I walked to the golf course and met up with an old
fellow named Pete who had worked twenty-three years as a caddie at every golf course in the area, including the Old Course. He was the only person in sight, and he was thoughtfully rolling putts on the empty 18th green and pausing to share his mince pie with a tiny squirrel when I walked up to him and introduced myself. “You’re a long way from your kids,” he said as he took out his wallet and showed me photographs of his young school-aged daughter. Then he told me that he hadn’t seen her since before his wife ran off with a furniture salesman from Dundee and moved somewhere in Turkey, he believed, though he’d only heard that as rumor in local bars. That was seven years ago. The story he told me was that he was working all day as a caddie and then driving taxis all night to support his family. One night he left the taxi company he normally worked for when his cab broke down. His boss sent him to help out another taxi company whose driver had failed to show up for his shift. So there he was driving the new taxi, and the first call he got was to pick up someone on a back road that ran along the river Tay outside Dundee. He pulled to the side of the road. He saw a guy and a girl walking up arm in arm from the riverbank. The guy had his hand up the girl’s dress. And then he recognized the dress. He had bought it for the girl on their sixth wedding anniversary. “There was a lot of mayhem,” he said sheepishly.
“You’ll see your daughter again,” I told him. “She’ll want to find you.”
“Aye, maybe,” he said. “But she’ll be grown up. Old enough to see her father’s flaws.” His eyes were fixed on the photograph as he put it back in his wallet.
I wrote an e-mail to Jack about this. “What a damned story. And the way he told it made me understand a little something about the relationship of caddies. I had told him that I was just signing on as a trainee, but apparently this was good enough for him to trust me. And because he trusted me, I had no difficulty telling him that I was
very uneasy about the road ahead as a caddie here. He told me that after fifty loops I would know the place like I’d spent my life here.”
When I told Pete that I was most worried about the putting, he walked me to the practice putting green, where he pointed to one hole about fifteen feet from where we were standing and asked me if I could see the break. I saw nothing. “Well, it’s there, right at the hole, a wee hump that will move the ball to the right.” I knelt down and took another look. Nothing.
Thus began my first lesson in reading putts, with Pete saying, “I’m going to tell you everything you need to know.”