Howling in a new era: We could get used to it

We are, for the most part, what we are – a demographic. As such, you would think we’d act our age.

Oh, hell no.

We weren’t partying on a deck hanging over the Hood Canal tidelands, and we had to pay actual money to rent the house, but there were tradeoffs: location, location, and location. You could see the canal in the near-distance from the golf course; you could see George, if you knew what you were looking for.

This year we took over a whole different sector of rural Mason County USA, a little more civilized venue than we’re used to but still Howl-worthy.

This was, of course, the traditional midsummer brawl of the Grey Goatee Golf Association, the 9^th annual Howl at the Canal, the weekend every July that we kick up our heels, kick out the jams and kick down the door (or open it gently, with a key, so as not to endanger our damage deposit).

Yes, it was the Howl, boys and girls, and there was golf – the fourth stop on the 3GA Tour, this time hosted by the good folks at Alderbrook Golf and Yacht Club in Union, Wash.,

Alderbrook is a classy, well-tended and challenging course, ripe for the carving by the 3GA, distinguished by the double-dogleg par-5 No. 8, which, by the way, the local pro plays hybrid-hybrid-wedge.

So, okay, I buried the lead. This wasn’t just any Howl at the Canal … it was the first post-cabin Howl, and it was only painful when I thought about it and/or breathed.

Instead of the cabin, which The Commissar’s family kissed off last fall, the Howl HQ for Grey Goatee Nation was a big house no farther than a fat wedge from the Alderbrook clubhouse.

This was a damn mansion, by 3GA standards, far too nice for the likes of us, but we persevered with the required activities après-golf: charring red meat, drinking beverages of many colors, and burning long brown cylinders into ash.

When an impromptu 10-hole, two-club tournament broke out at dusk, it started at the No. 9 teebox, a  7-iron from the greenside deck. The players came back insisting it had to be a new Howl tradition.

In the real 3GA tournament, well, sometimes change is good. First-place money went to The Commissar his own self, and be assured that does not happen often in this tournament or any other.

Let it be said – dare I? – a Howl was had by all.