Come autumn, the rugged hills of western Massachusetts and Vermont form a blazing backdrop for golf and
personal reflection.
The southwest quadrant of Vermont and the adjoining northwest corner of Massachusetts are
important emotional territory to me. I wasn’t born or brought up in the area,
nor did I attend school there. My family had no summer home tucked into its
hills. But I came to live amid its rugged beauty for two decades, during which I
experienced several major milestones: the publication of my first novel; the
death of my father; the birth of my two children; and, not as any mere
coincidence, the onset of a life’s devotion to golf. Return trips to the region
are always freighted with memories, never more so than in fall, when the
mountainsides burn with color and the tang of wood smoke marks the approach of
another long, golfless winter.
In late September and early October, dozens of
two-lane routes through western New England
offer excellent golf and some of the hemisphere’s most dramatic foliage. On a
recent autumn golfabout I followed an itinerary that would take me through
well-remembered outposts, beginning in the center of Vermont at a daily-fee
course called Green Mountain National. I believe the best way to experience any
golf course is on foot, but any golfer who walks this one should have a strong
pair of lungs. The routing climbs between rock outcroppings through an
extravagant variety of holes, including a dogleg-over-water second and the
free-fall, par-3 13th. Architect Gene Bates made good use of segmented greens
that dictate markedly different approach shots according to different pin
placements, and the course’s twists and turns bring hillsides of scarlet, orange
and yellow into view from various angles.
After a round at Green Mountain National, you can
choose to drive east toward the beckoning luxury of Laurance Rockefeller’s
Woodstock Inn. But I prefer to bed down at the more modest (despite its name)
Killington Grand Resort Hotel, with its large outdoor heated pool and jacuzzi.
The Grand is situated at the foot of the famed Killington ski area, where I
broke my back in a violent fall 25 winters ago. That meant surgery, big
chiropractor bills and decades of chronic pain, but I’ve never let the insult or
the injury keep me from returning here. Soaking away my aches in a hot tub while
gazing at the peaks outside my window always feels like some kind of mad
golfer’s triumph.
Next stop on this route would be Rutland, Vt., a humble city in which I spent a frigid
winter during my mid-20s. I took a room in a boarding house owned by a
warm-hearted couple conveniently named Fran and Fran Waterman, and passed a fair
amount of time strolling the snow-covered fairways of century-old Rutland
Country Club, wondering how far in life I might go with the two liberal arts
degrees I had accumulated.
I look at those fairways differently now, with a
golfer’s eye. Unpretentious but impeccably groomed, Rutland measures a
deceptively difficult 6,134 yards from the back tees, and Bobby Locke’s
course-record 62, set in 1959, still stands. Wayne Stiles and John Van Kleek ran
this mountainous 18 back and forth across East Creek and notched several greens
into the sides of stony, fescued hills that look as if they were imported
directly from Scotland.
