Perchance to Dream

We search the fog for a horizon. Cold wind spins in our ears and pushes tears from the corners of our eyes. We don’t try to speak over the engines roaring through the waves. There’s little to say, and we’re all wondering the same things: How much longer? How are we doing this? Will we ever do this again? We’re one-time weekenders traveling with clothes, clubs and a cargo of unreasonable expectations. 

It would be warmer downstairs, among rows of seats where the daily ferry travelers don’t gaze out the windows, nor do they heed the signs claiming the benches for kids headed to the island school. It’s Saturday, and there are no children on this dawn crossing. Just men and women with sleep on their shoulders, tired heads leaned against glass in quiet surrender to weekend work. We don’t belong among them; we’re bag-toting tourists, and we find our spot upstairs along the rail, watching the water and studying our watches. No land in sight, but we must be getting closer, and a small place in our minds still worries that the ferry might change course and return to port. It’s a mechanism born of bad birthdays and canceled field trips, that internal bulwark against disappointment that has us not quite believing the fog will give way to the weekend we’ve been dreaming of for months. 

When we arrived at the ferry that morning, a pre-sunrise pod of golf bags standing guard by the doors was a hopeful clue, and we were careful to follow the guys in Winged Foot sweaters lest we somehow miss our boarding. There was only one destination from the port in New London, Connecticut, and it all looked like a clockwork operation, but our itinerary still felt somewhat theoretical. Ferries have carried me to some of my life’s best golf—to Shiskine and Askernish and Tobermory in Scotland, to Wawashkamo in Michigan. They turn golf travel into an expedition, with all the tension of a crow’s-nest reveal. 

Then, finally, land ho! Through the clouds we spot a dark outline of rooftops, and a dock comes into view. The engines calm from a roar to a murmur. We hustle down the stairs, our steps carrying the excitement of the first crew ever to step foot on Fishers Island.

We squeeze through the hold, where I climb into my car via the passenger-side window. (They pack delivery vans and work trucks onto the first morning ferry, our tires not separated by a breath.) We inch our cars out—don’t dare start this day with a dent—and roll off the ramp to a parking lot where Dan Colvin is waiting. He’s the friend and director of golf who extended us an invitation I’m still not believing, even as I stand here: an overnight on Fishers? And bring a foursome of Broken Tee Society members? Some of its golf club’s own members rarely enjoy such an indulgence. On an island without a hotel or any vacation listings, most players catch an early boat in and a late boat out, but we are set to enjoy Fishers’ evening hours like proper residents. And that’s where this visit separates itself from all my prior golf boondoggles. Plenty have come to play Fishers Island and left with the shirt and plastic tumbler to prove it. But sleeping here shifts our golf getaway toward the realm of cultural reconnaissance.

Beyond images of its golf holes, Fishers’ stories have remained largely unknown, its denizens anonymous (at least to us), its history shared only among the families who have created it—families who’ve also created American history along the way. Sure, we’re here to grind over birdie putts and shop like drunken heirs, but there’s a whiff of anthropology in the air as Dan walks us across the parking lot to meet his friend Dave Denison, who’s here to collect packages from the mainland. He moves groceries and Amazon boxes into a brick warehouse of military origin (the U.S. Army and Navy have their own histories on Fishers Island, an outpost from which they once protected New York City and its harbor), and it’s our first taste of the charms and curiosities of island life. Forget DoorDash. Don’t expect that rug pad to show up for a week. Don’t bother locking your door. Until recently, you’d also have to get used to having a three-digit phone number. It’s a community untouched by convenient commerce, a summer island without tourists, a beach without cotton candy and bumper cars. It would be easy for us to feel like outsiders on Fishers, but for all the wealth and legacy seeded into the soil here, we have things in common with its residents, and they’re rattling around the back of my car as we follow Dan’s SUV toward the golf course.

They’re a subset of a subset—places like Maidstone in New York, Jekyll Island in Georgia, Yeamans Hall in Charleston and Mountain Lake in the humid heart of Florida. For me, America’s great dynasty golf clubs resist rankings and shot-value metrics. They linger at the intersection of museum and playground, where Vanderbilts and Rockefellers and Kelloggs summered and kept cottages, retreats for a wealth that transcended the mundanities of actual money, and where most vanities of abundance were dismissed as profane. No sprawling clubhouses; no labyrinthian locker rooms. The changing room at Mountain Lake (no mountains, but there is a lake) is a small space with two chairs and some shelves for your shoes. (I’ve long admired the inverse relationship between locker room extravagance and golf club vintage.) And it was from Mountain Lake that Fishers Island Club got its start, thus joining that league of golf courses where you might be playing beside a du Pont or a Firestone and, because old money is the quietest kind, need to see their bag tags to prove it.

In the early 1640s, both the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Connecticut General Court granted Fishers Island (originally named Vischer’s Island by Dutch explorer Adriaen Block) to John Winthrop Jr. Officials in Massachusetts weren’t sure they owned the island, so Winthrop covered his bases by also obtaining a Connecticut pledge. (The island would eventually end up as part of New York when the Duke of York grabbed it away from Connecticut, nursing his grudge against the New Haven elites who had offered safe harbor to the judges who sentenced his father, King Charles I, to death.) Winthrop secured his claim with a purchase from the local Pequot tribe, then left the land to farmers for grazing their herds. It would remain largely uninhabited until the Winthrop family sold the island to Robert R. Fox in 1863 for about $60,000, and it was his family who would begin the process of replacing livestock with people, selling home sites, opening a small hotel and welcoming steamships of day visitors. But it was the Ferguson brothers who truly transformed Fishers—they bought 90% of the island in 1889 and embarked on turning it into a resort for “families of culture and means.” According to the Hay Harbor Club’s centennial history, the Fergusons built their own electrical and telephone networks, revamped the hotels and shut out the steamships from the docks they now controlled. The east end of the island remained undeveloped, left to farmers and walkers, but when some of the Fergusons visited Florida in the 1920s, that would change.

The Mountain Lake Club in Lake Wales, Florida, about an hour south of Orlando, had been developed by Frederick Ruth in partnership with the famed Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm and course designer Seth Raynor (partner/protégé of the original American golf architect, Charles Blair Macdonald). Ruth and the Fergusons saw a chance to get the band back together at Fishers, and they commissioned Olmsted and Raynor to lay out a plan for the island’s eastern acres. (Raynor and the Olmsted firm also worked together at Yeamans Hall.) After Fishers Island Club’s opening in 1926, its connection to Mountain Lake only strengthened; families summered at one and wintered at the other, and the clubs shared staff and a golf pro (George Wolf), moving them north or south as the weather turned. (In case you’re wondering what dynastic, generational wealth looks like, it looks like traveling to Florida and having your favorite waiter from New York serve your steak.)

Fishers Island would be Seth Raynor’s last original design. He died six months before work on the course was complete, and if you ask golf architecture pundits, they might tell you it’s the culmination of a master’s lifework. They’ll likely note that the templates for which he and Macdonald were so famous are ideally utilized on this site, where they don’t compete with the surging topography; rather, they’re reimagined or restrained to exalt the land’s unique natural features. By the third hole, we don’t quite care how the place rates or ranks or if it exceeds expectations, because it’s the rare course where you can study the numbers and download the pictures yet still feel stupefying delight at what lies ahead. The drive I’m asked to hoist into the third fairway seems aimed at a landing spot that defies geometry, and as we summit a hill toward the end of the punchbowl fourth, we find what might be the most cinematic moment not just in golf, but in summiting. We stop and catch our breath while a world of water confronts us, a flag nestled down below as if hiding from the waves. Then, the Biarritz fifth—a hole I’ll replay instead of counting sheep until I finally cover its 229 yards up a wall and over sand and through a valley, a par 3 of no discernible end. Golf doesn’t lend itself to superlatives—whether they be holes or swings, our bests can be bested—but it does have room for that which feels special, and for personal favorites. Add up enough of the former and you often arrive at the latter, and after leaving No. 5 with happy bogeys, our foursome is there.

I’d played Raynors and seaside courses before, but I can’t recall a golden-age course where one sees water on every hole, and, aside from the charms of traveling to a golf Treasure Island, maybe that’s the key to the spell that’s cast here. It might not work on every golfer—the club history mentions a visitor who told the staff in the shop that he “hated water holes.” He asked how many they had here, to which the pro replied, “All of them.” The book says he left the island on the next ferry. 

I knew there would be water (it’s more backdrop than hazard, unless your driver goes completely feral), but I’d been half-hoping it would be set against a brown golf course. (Fishers famously lacks fairway irrigation.) Dan explains that a damp summer has kept this year’s fairways a pale shade of green. They still buck and bounce—a Fishers calling card—and always will, because even if they wanted to add sprinklers, the island lacks enough freshwater to make a soft golf course feasible.

“We work off wells for the greens and tees,” he says as we sit in his office after golf, “but we really don’t have enough water for the fairways. Unless you buy town water, but we don’t want to do that because that would reduce what’s available for the whole community.”

The same goes for electricity. “There’s a power line that runs from the mainland, down on the ocean floor,” he continues, “and during the summer, when the island’s busy, the lights will flicker sometimes, and the computers run a little slower.” We start to understand why Fishers never became Nantucket, where scoring tickets on a July ferry is a cutthroat affair. Its small-town-floating-in-the-ocean vibe is built into its infrastructure, or lack thereof. Without hotel rooms, and without the water and power to service them, there’s little room for much to change on Fishers. Since Dan came to the island in 1981, the changes mostly have had to do with how many people want to play the golf courses.

“When I first came here, the island phone book was full of three-digit phone numbers. Then we went to four, and then we got an exchange and added 788 in front of the four numbers. It was quieter then, at least on the golf side of things,” he explains. “My interview to be the assistant was 18 holes with the head pro, Dave Alvarez. I didn’t even know I was interviewing for the position. We just played golf, and when we got done, he said, ‘OK, Dan, you’ve got the job.’ I said, ‘But Dave, we haven’t talked about the job.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I just wanted to make sure you can play well enough so that we can play golf together after work.’ And that was it.” (A position at Fishers is different today: It’s become a steppingstone job, attracting assistants hailing from as far away as Ireland and hoping to follow the paths of former staffers who have landed head jobs at clubs like Ekwanok and Green Spring Valley Hunt Club.)

And play together, Dan and Dave did. “It was really a throwback kind of place then. I was the first assistant here, which meant I was essentially the head pro at Hay Harbor,” he says, reminding me that our tee time at the nine-holer down the road is approaching. “I’d run the nine holes, and help him up here when he needed it. This club did about 6,000 rounds a year back then, and my instructions were to close the shop at Hay Harbor every day at four-thirty, drive up here and make sure I was on the first tee to meet Dave by five minutes to five. And we did this every day, Monday through Friday.” He laughs. “That has definitely changed. Can you imagine closing the shop at four-thirty so the pro can go out and play?”

I can’t, but it sounds like a nice antidote to the scourge of club-pro burnout. Rounds at Fishers have more than doubled since the ’80s. The contemporary wave of golf-architecture awareness has shone a light on golden-age courses and educated golfers on names like Seth Raynor and Fishers Island, pushing this once-hidden course onto wish lists around the globe. “It’s after Labor Day, and we’ll do 130 rounds today,” says Dan. “That never happened back then. We’d have 40 players, tops. Come Labor Day, the place would be empty.”

They haven’t reached the need for a second course at Fishers Island, though Dan explains that the club’s founding fathers weren’t opposed to the idea. Members were aware that Raynor had identified several potential sites for the east-end golf course and that Fred Ruth favored building more holes following the original 18, but not until 1993 was it known how far those plans went. A complete blueprint for a second Fishers Island golf course was discovered in the Olmsted archives, a bold routing with tees perched on peninsulas and forced ocean carries that stretched westward toward what is now the driving range. (The range is a five-minute drive west from the club, and we stopped to warm up on the way in, marveling at this unmanned practice tee by the side of the road, replete with buckets of shining Titleists—island life, indeed.) A passage in the club history from 1926 to 1993, Sixty-Seven Years of the Fishers Island Club Golf Links, notes that the second course “would have been…reminiscent of Cypress Point in California. Perhaps without the Great Depression, Fishers Island Club might have had two 18-hole links courses!”

Dan tours us around the clubhouse before we leave for Hay Harbor, noting that the building was renovated six years ago to allow for casual dining, which has added to the cars in the parking lot. “Everything used to be very formal—jacket and tie for dinner,” he says. “Now you only need a jacket on Saturday nights, and with a new building and a relaxed setting, you’ve got more members proud to bring guests here for lunch and dinner.”

The massive original clubhouse was even more formal, Dan says, with about 40 guest rooms—far more than the club required. By the 1960s, “the dinosaur had outlived its day,” according to Sixty-Seven Years, in which the circumstances surrounding the demolition of the clubhouse are described as “cloudy.” As several du Ponts called Fishers Island home, it seemed fitting that DuPont de Nemours explosive powder take down the old structure, but, according to the published account, when the plunger was pushed, the charges failed. The building remained upright until a few weeks later, when it somehow caught fire one evening. 

But Dan knows a different story, one that sounds a bit less cloudy.

“They put the demolition job out to bid, and a local builder came in with a very low one,” he says. “The club said, ‘OK, the job’s yours. How are you going to do it?’ The builder said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m just going to do it.’”

And so he did. Thoroughly. According to island lore, he drained all the water pipes in the building and filled them with kerosene. One stick of dynamite and boom—no more clubhouse. Apparently, the blaze was visible from both Connecticut and Rhode Island; on that point, both the history book and legend agree.

There’s a wedding on the island today, which means a local is getting married—they don’t import wedding business here—which means we’re likely the only four people sleeping on Fishers tonight who aren’t invited. We joke that the lone single member of our foursome, Austin, should crash it and find himself a nice young lady with a Fishers family membership. He smirks and dismisses us. There’s nothing so tiresome as three married guys coaching a bachelor on how to meet girls.

We follow Dan’s car back through town, toward the ferry port and the business end of the island, where the folks who work here live. (The main industry on Fishers Island is looking after Fishers Island—water and electricity workers, plus caretakers who maintain the seasonal homes.) We pass the driving range again, and the oyster farms just offshore, past the post office and ice cream shop and wine store, where signs in the window announce, “Closed! Going to the wedding!” Turns out the morning ferry was full of folks working the event—caterers and setup people. Even the hairdresser had been shipped in for the affair.

Dan lives by the ferry dock with his buddy Randy, the Fishers starter we met in the morning. Randy is unseasonably tan, with just enough starter gruffness to make us heed the sign on his goodies box: “Please refrain from taking a handful of tees. 4 tees are sufficient for a round of golf. Enjoy your round.” (I may have taken five.) Dan and Randy live in former military housing. “Hurricanes can’t shake that building. The Navy built it. You can’t knock it down,” Dan says. Across from their fortress is the Fishers Island School, with an enrollment of around 70 students spread across K through 12. Half come from Connecticut on that morning ferry every day—it’s a public school, but with its tiny teacher-student ratio and healthy island tax base, it’s a destination for gifted kids from New London and beyond, who pay a modest tuition (plus ferry pass) to attend.

We’ve left the gated eastern side of Fishers Island—Dan signed us in at the guardhouse this morning and estimates that two-thirds of the island is private, though “private” here seems to mean little more than you’ve bought a season pass to travel from one end of the island to the other—and it’s here, on this opposite end, where golf first arrived. Locals refer to them as the “Big Club” and the “Little Club,” and though Hay Harbor is smaller in terms of acreage, it’s a label that belies the large role it plays in island life. Split into two campuses (the nine-hole course on the island’s eastern shore, and the country club amenities on its western side), it’s where generations of kids have learned to golf, swim, sail and serve—the four survival skills for a Fishers Island childhood.

Our first impression of Hay Harbor isn’t made by the golf holes, though they stretch romantically from the pro shop down to the water. It’s the vegetables. On the sidewalk by the clubhouse, we meet our friend Dave from the warehouse, sitting on his scooter with a plastic bag full of zucchinis and peppers. Dave had been the superintendent at Hay Harbor for some 48 years, Dan explains, maintaining the course pretty much on his own. Dave shakes off the praise and gets to filling a plastic bucket with his bounty, adding watermelons and tomatoes as he goes. They’re for passersby to take and enjoy, grown in the gardens that surround the tees at Hay Harbor. When they started running sprinklers to the tee boxes, Dave noticed that a lot of water was being wasted on the surrounding turf. One doesn’t waste freshwater on an island, so he began planting vegetable gardens around some of the tee boxes and sharing the crop with the community. It’s island charm distilled down to a bucket, and a reminder that I’m not from here, as my mind immediately goes to missed profits and the threat of vegetable theft, plus the potential for their use as projectiles.

Inside the shop, Dan introduces us to a young head pro named Andrew Kegarise, another of his protégés, who now runs Hay Harbor. (We met Andrew’s wife, Lauren, this morning at the Big Club, where she’s Dan’s head pro. It’s a small island.) Andrew points out the features we’ll be crossing in a few minutes on a shoreline layout that we can see in total from the windows.

“You’ll play across a ridge right over there on No. 8 that used to be tracks for a gravity-powered munitions train. They would load up the train atop the hill there and run it down to where the ferry is, where you’ve probably seen the turrets and bunkers.”

We don’t recall any turrets, but Andrew goes on to explain that the government claimed the highest chunk of the golf course in 1908 and created a small fortress for detecting submarines and enemy ships, even adding 16-inch guns to the hilltop during World War II. A gate once had allowed golfers to access the original third tee box (the most dramatic on property, built on a wooden platform overlooking a 138-yard par 3), even though it sat on military property. Club officials would later discover that the government owned far more of their property than they knew—three entire greens and tees—and decided to remain mum on the issue lest they lose half their golf course. But when an island resident raised questions about the third tee with the Army, the cat was out of the bag, and a lease had to be negotiated. The deal worked until the government finally sold the contested land in a sealed-bid auction, and a real estate speculator from Queens scooped up the acres. According to Hay Harbor’s centennial history, this development mobilized a healthy amount of island capital from residents who didn’t want to lose their course or see their views interrupted by a carpetbagger. Hay Harbor was able to buy back its golf holes, but as for that third tee box—the Navy held on to that three-quarters of an acre, and it remains a distant Hay Harbor memory.

“That whole side of the property is Navy land,” Andrew explains. “A door in the side of the hill opens up, and back in the day they used to run a sonar device out on rails, out over the water, to detect Soviet submarines. There are still people up there. The rumor is that if you go under the hill, there are rooms still ready for a nuclear situation, if that’s ever needed.”

We feel well protected as we leave the shop, tossing bags on our shoulders and heading for the first, where we meet a dozen young women coming off the ninth. They’re dressed in pink T-shirts and finishing off skinny cans of fizzy booze—the wedding party, we guess, which isn’t terribly insightful, considering one of them is wearing a pink veil. Dan described the place as an ideal learning course, where island kids have to prove their mettle before they can play the Big Club—a sort of golf prep school for future Fishers members. It seems an ideal arrangement—a top-10 classic twinned with a gentler course down the road, where a bachelorette party can play a few holes on a Saturday without risking exile or embarrassment. 

Before I can push Austin in their direction, we’re teeing off on a mix of straightforward par 4s punctuated by an explosion of a golf hole, fighting our way up the second fairway toward a green set beneath the naval outpost. It’s a seaside stunner and a green from which we all get greedy with our cameras, but we aren’t sure to whom we owe our gratitude. Hay Harbor’s 1897 design (almost 30 years before the Big Club) is credited to Scotsman George Strath, the first golf professional at Royal Troon and co-designer of its 12- and 18-hole layouts, but the Hay Harbor club history notes significant changes made to that routing, as well as a lack of documentation to prove which holes were his. Perhaps it’s Strath’s ghost that bangs doors in the clubhouse, I wonder. In our conversation, Andrew was adamant that his clubhouse was haunted, and Dan backed up his claim. Clubhouse ghosts are old tales often told, but Andrew seems like a no-nonsense guy, and his retelling of the upstairs mysteries is eerily straightforward.

“We’ve got a door that will slam upstairs just about weekly, and it locks every time,” he told us. “We keep it unlocked because the people who live up there don’t have the master key, and they’ll lock themselves out. I’ll have to go up there and unlock it for them. There will be 10 people sitting in the middle room, and the door will slam. They’ll go up to it and it’s locked. I’ll unlock it until a week later, boom, slam, locked again.”

Funny, I think, for an island where nobody locks their doors. The story doesn’t trouble me—a childhood incident has placed me firmly in the believer category—but I can tell that my playing partners are ready to leave. Twenty-seven holes and we’re starving, and Austin has but a few hours left to find a fiancée.

It’s quiet for a Saturday—hard cheese for Austin—as most of the island is dancing at the wedding down by the ferry dock, but by midnight, we’re told, the Pequot Inn will be chockablock as partygoers land there for last call. There wasn’t really a last call when Dan started coming here. “They would close from 4 a.m. to 4:30 a.m.,” he says, “so there would be a little tailgate out in the parking lot while people waited for them to open back up.” We’ve scored a corner spot at the bar, where our bartender, Ian, keeps bringing pizzas and clams and burgers by the half-dozen.

I won’t make it to midnight, let alone 4 a.m., when the Saturday Night Fever–style dance floor will be hip to hip. I check it out on the way to the bathroom—yup, Dan was right. The square floor panels roll through a rainbow of colors, and I step foot on one just to say I did the dance floor at the Pequot.

Though the crowd is thin—the bar is full, but we’ve got room to move—it’s clear how much this place matters to Dan and the people who call Fishers home. Aside from the American Legion and the golf club, it’s the island’s only place to eat and drink, and it occupies the bottom floor plus some outdoor space around what once might have been a four-story summer flophouse. Dan calls it “the melting pot,” where folks from both ends of the island come to lean on one another (perhaps literally), where it doesn’t matter your last name or net worth. You’re all here for the same reasons: a bite, a buzz or a break from the isolation of island living.

Ian is well tattooed and knows everyone at the bar by name, including my gang after a few rounds. He’s remarkably efficient as the bar grows two and three deep, and he even has time to tell me he moved here from Brooklyn, where he’d had a good job but was looking for something different. His wife works for the land trust on Fishers, and they love their lives here.

“It’s great,” he enthuses. “Leave your doors open. Don’t worry about parking. Leave your windows down and your keys in the car. Nobody’s going to take it.”

“Not deliberately,” Dan says with a smile. “Some of the people who come out of here…you might want to keep your keys with you.”

Dan owes more than most locals to the Pequot. “I met my wife, Aimee, here, almost 40 years ago,” he says. “We actually met on the ferry, but she was on her way to work here for the summer, and this is where we got to know each other.” It being the only place on Fishers to meet a potential partner after 8 p.m., I wonder how many marriages owe their start to these vinyl seats. Aimee’s at their home in North Carolina, Dan explains, and he’ll be joining her there soon. The golf club closes in a couple weeks, shutting down from the last Sunday in October to the first Saturday in May. He’ll be off to Raleigh, but I suspect he’ll be itching to get back. Looking around the room of islanders laughing and slapping backs and getting stuck in deep and lubricated conversations, I see folks with Fishers Island in their blood. And that doesn’t mean wealth and privilege—quite the opposite. I can’t distinguish the well heeled from the wage earners. It’s all T-shirts and sandals and polos with wrinkled collars. An island is a leveler, it seems. Everyone here has the same things: a roof somewhere, a meal in front of them, a ride home (hopefully). All the other stuff matters elsewhere. People here need one another—for a laugh or a conversation, or a hand doing something I’d typically accomplish via an app on my phone. Or maybe even adult companionship. Austin hasn’t spoken to anyone who isn’t wearing a Golfer’s Journal hat yet, but Dan meeting Aimee here proves it’s possible.

It isn’t always a love-in at the Pequot, Ian explains. They do get visitors who think big-deal status on the mainland travels with them on the ferry. This room is proof that you don’t come to Fishers to impress anybody. Rather, it seems a place where impressive people enjoy being unimpressive.

“We had some finance bros in here a little while ago,” says Ian. “They came for dinner from golf and were at that long table, acting loud and obnoxious and ordering the staff around, treating the servers like shit. One of them comes up to the bar and says, ‘Hey, buddy, what’s the Wi-Fi password?’ And I told him, ‘Yeah, it’s G-O, F-U-C-K, Y-O-U-R-S-E—” 

We laugh, and I admire his guts for sticking it to a patron, though there probably isn’t a Fishers resident who wouldn’t have Ian’s back. They’re more than servers here—they’re treasured as essential island staff. I suspect even Old Lady Ferguson would have finished the spelling for him.

I leave the boys at the bar and retire to the home Dan found for us, a guesthouse beside the main residence of a longtime Fishers member. The door is open when I arrive, and as I walk through the living room toward French doors leading onto a brick patio that overlooks the sound, I’m happy for no hotels on Fishers Island.

I pick the corner room and open the windows so I can fall asleep to the lapping water. I lay in bed and plot my shots for tomorrow. We’re off at 8 a.m. at the Big Club, and in our battle for pro-shop trinkets (Austin and I are 1-up after 27 in a duel for goods priced under $40), I expect my reasonable bedtime will have us at least 2-up after nine. (My cohorts might have a late night ahead of them—they met a local who lives on the course, and I overheard talk of night putting.) We’ll have to hustle after golf to catch our ferry reservation, but we played in under four hours today, even with a stop for Fishers’ peanut butter, jelly and bacon sandwiches, which I now rank a close second to Olympic’s Burgerdog.

Today’s weather was borrowed from our Fishers dreams—60s and sunny—with more sun forecast for tomorrow, and I wonder what it must be like to not have to leave this place. Is it better to live the perfect weekend and remember it as that? Or to stay and keep playing? It’s the nature of islands, I suppose. Arrival and departure. Exploring and moving on. 

My thoughts are slippery with sleep as I try to fit Fishers into my choose-a-door rubric: If presented with a dozen doors that could transport you to the first tee of your favorite courses, what doors would be there, and which one would you walk through right now? Mine tend to be courses where land meets water. Those places are more than high-return real estate; they’re sacred spaces to walk and wonder at a coincidence of contraries, where the unknown mixes with the known, where dominion loosens and the fixed mingles with the infinite, peril blended with safety at this brink of here versus there…and a pretty good place for golf, too. 

I hear it all outside my window, water washing against the shore, and soon I’ll be in my dreams and choosing a door to where land meets water on every hole, and, as with all the doors out here, finding it unlocked.