"FORE"

I forgot to mention that I have also learned to golf. How do I explain this learning? How do I explain the course? First of all, golfing here, is free! There are no electric vehicles, no caddies, no green fairways and no other people. The club house is an old single wide trailer painted army green. Inside there are carts full of clubs and buckets of brightly painted balls (so you can find them in the sand). There is also a porta potty, the kind your parents may have put in the back of the station wagon for you when you were a kid in order to avoid having to make pit stops every 47 and a half minutes.

The first time I went golfing, was with a women from Brooklyn NY working on her PHD from Columbia University. She and I rode our bikes out along the river and let ourselves into the club house with the key one picks up from the airport hotel desk. As I was trying to determine what type of clubs to take I learned that she had only golfed once before herself and it was also here at the Kangerlussuaq country club. She didn't know a wedge from a driver; in fact neither of us carried a putter. Never the less, we went out with the course map and did our very best to hit the tiny little balls towards a flag, any flag. We beat at the sand, searched through the willows and swatted at mosquitoes for 2 hours without ever putting a ball into or near a hole.

My second time out golfing, I convinced Steve to play. We accompanied a colleague of ours who was just up from Denver, for a week of remote office work. Jason, actually plays golf. It is because of Jason that I learned to use words like putter, driver and wedge. I also learned to keep my head down, but for all of my slugo -home- run -baseball -type whacks at the little ball, seldom did I ever manage to connect the head of the club with the dimpled orange sphere. The few times that things went right I watched with absolute childhood wonder as my ball went soaring through the air. But where did it go? From, Jason,

"That dog'll hunt..........." Translated means: "Hey! Your ball is actually in a darn fine place {use an incredulous voice} and very close to the putting "green"!

Strewn cryptically around an old river bed, with little boggy water swamps the whole course is one big sand trap. Just for an added challenge. And in case you were to forget that golf was invented in the foggy sheep pastures of highland Scotland, you get to carry around a square patch of astro turf to drive off of. Without it, you are wedging out of sand on every par, unless your ball lands in a willow. At the place where you are to put your ball into the hole, there are prickly stiff patches of inflexible sedges and rushes and the flags will not come out, so anchored in by timeless sand storms, they are impossible to budge. On a par 4 I averaged around a par 16. We played 7 holes in 3 hours and finally gave in to the late afternoon heat. Back at the musty dusty club house, we collected empty soda and beer bottles to take up to the store for some redemption. We tried on a few left behind hats and filled in our names in the guest book. I think all in all, we only lost a few balls, which is nothing given the willow shrub studded desert we were playing in. I decided to like this free admission, wild Greenlandic golf, and am finding myself surprised to want to go out and practice driving. That is, as soon as my arms recover from what felt more like bludgeoning baby seals than having been out enjoying an afternoon's game of civilised golf.