Low Country Love Affair
LOW COUNTRY LOVE AFFAIR
By Wayne Mills
Every golfer worth his salt has gone on a buddy golf trip. They are adventures where adults can spend their time and money on pure enjoyment and occasionally revert to acting like a teenager without risking the wrath of their spouse.
I am a born and raised New Englander and the only time I had spent in the South as a young man was in Florida which doesn’t really count as the South since it is just Northerners in Bermuda shorts anyway.
My first golf buddy trip was in 1984. I had taken up golf rather late in life at age 32 in 1982 but fell for it hard. By ’84 I was ready to take my game on the road. Since I was the organizer in our group it fell to me to make the arrangements. You have to understand that we don’t get to play golf in the winter in northern New England where I lived at the time. From early November to mid-April we are holed up in our shacks amidst snow, ice and below freezing temperatures suffering from cabin fever and green golf course envy. When the pro golf tournaments start showing up on TV from warm weather sites, we just sit and cry. Therefore the decision was made that we will go South in the early spring, sort of a golf spring training for us Yankees, to sort of run out on the last days of winter in the North.
After studying all the advertisements in the golf magazines for months I finally decided that we would go to Wild Dunes Resort on the Isle of Palms near Charleston, SC. Why? I don’t really know but it looked good in the pictures, had a beach, was near the city and I liked the name and it was within a (long) days drive. Oh, and they were running some kind of silly spring special of like $34 per day per man for golf and condo.
So we took off in Freddy’s beat up old Buick which didn’t look like much with the front hood kind of crinkled up, but man, it had leg room and rode like a dream on the highway. When faced with 17 hours in a car, comfort wins out over appearance every time. So we took turns driving and when finished with our shift adjourned to the back seat and drank beer.
Sometime the next day after driving over what looked like a rickety old bridge from Charleston, we landed on the Isle of Palms and pulled into Wild Dunes. From the moment I laid eyes on the place I was in love with the Low Country, a love that has not dissipated with the passage of over 25 years.
Wild Dunes was just covered with palmetto trees and live oaks with Spanish moss amongst rolling dunes and a deserted 9 mile long beach. We stayed in a little house on stilts next to the ocean and I could hear the surf crashing from my bedroom. The next day we played the most gorgeous golf course I had ever laid eyes on that was designed by some unknown by the name of Tom Fazio. It played through the oaks, palmettos, marshes and out along the beach. The oceanfront par 5 18th hole embodied the heart and soul of golf to me. It was beyond being a religious experience. If I had had real religious experiences on this level, I bet I would have become the Pope.
We went to dinner where a classy Southern black man served us oysters, she-crab soup and hush puppies and some other Southern dishes that warped my mind and delighted my palette. Given a choice between heaven and where I was, I would have stayed right there.
Later that week we went into Charleston at night and ran into some sort of festival where the natives were dressed up in Colonial garb and let us into their Antebellum homes and showed us what Southern hospitality was all about. I said out loud that this all had to be some kind of dream.
Eventually the week ended and we had to leave. I have never been back. Oh sure, I’ve been to Kiawah, Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach a million times. I saw that Hurricane Hugo came ashore there in 1988 and did big damage. I’ve been afraid to go back. It’s like trying to decide to go to your 25th high school reunion for fear of seeing your high school sweetheart. Is it best to not go and just remember how beautiful she was all those years ago or go and see her and see how she has gracefully weathered life’s storms?
