This year I traveled back to Anchorage, Alaska to visit my daughter and to attend my grandson's graduation from high school. I told my friend Fred that while I was there I wanted to play golf with him and my other golfing crony Don. I also told him I would not be bringing my clubs and would need to rent. He said he would make the arrangements. As it turned out Don had an accident on his bike and sprained his wrist so he was not able to share in our experience.
I have been playing the Anchorage public golf course ever since it opened back in the 1980s, and I have to admit the fairways were not really playable until around mid-July each year because of the frost kill. The fairways were always matted down brown (as in "dead") and damp under the top eighth-inch. They always tried to have the permanent greens usable by Memorial Day, but sadly this was not always the case and you ended up putting within an orange circle painted in the fairway onto the frost kill. Have I painted a sufficiently gruesome picture?
Now let's talk about May 29th, 2004. Fred had called for a tee time and found they had just started a 5:00 am tee time (sunrise in June is around 4:30 am), whereas the day before the earliest tee time had been 5:30 am; and the 5:00 am time was available so we jumped on the chance to get out early. We were always early birds when I lived in Anchorage because this meant you still had the rest of the day to get the things done which you always saved for the weekend.
Fred beat me there for a change and while I was renting clubs, buying balls, tees and glove he was waiting patiently. The man is either a saint or in a continuous stupor due the chemicals he uses in his line of work, but personally I want to canonize the man.
I had my first surprise at the Pro Shop when they told us all the greens were open for play (before Memorial Day?). I was aghast: this had never happened in all the years I played the course.
