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 9th 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.
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