« August 2005 | Main | November 2005 »
September 15, 2005
Kingsley Club a Diamond in the Rough
By Mike Terrell
Sun contributor
When you think golf in northern Michigan, especially the northwest corner of the Lower Peninsula, it’s normally of posh resorts and designer courses with some of the leading names in the game attached to them.
Some will pay lip service to the “old masters” and the classic designs they produced like Alister MacKenzie’s well-known Crystal Downs, located near Frankfort along the Lake Michigan coastline. None have taken it to the degree that little known Traverse City golf course architect Mike DeVries took the Kingsley Club.
Located near the small town of Kingsley it was built with a little different philosophy from most of the “up north” golf courses that comprise America’s Summer Golf Capitol.
“We wanted to build a pure golf course; a traditional-type private course with a minimal impact on the landscape. Making money wasn’t our driving force,” said co-owner Ed Walker, a local businessman. “We didn’t want a housing development surrounding the course. It’s designed for people who love the game, and exists solely for the enjoyment of its members and guests.”
They knew what they wanted. It was just finding the right course designer to create it. Fred Muller, longtime pro at Crystal Downs and a mentor to DeVries introduced him to Walker, and the rest is history.
Given a piece of property full of sand, atop ancient glacial dunes full of kettle-like bowls, DeVries built a golf course full of humps and bumps that reminds one of a Scottish links, but still has generous landing areas on the fairways that American golfers are used to playing. It’s a wonderful mix; a true blend of classic and modern.
Lynn Henning summed it up well in an article he did for Links Magazine a couple of years ago when he said, “Two high-rolling businessmen gambled on an unknown architect and came up aces with this spiritual descendent of Crystal Downs.”
Dr. Gary Wiren, considered one of the top 10 teaching golf pros in the world, spent three weeks at the club this summer as a guest of Walker working and playing with members. He’s traveled extensively all over the world and fell in love with the club the first time he visited it a couple of years ago to play in their annual Hickory Open; a tournament played with old hickory-shafted clubs.
“I fell in love with the Kingsley Club the moment I set eyes on it,” he said when I spoke with him at the club earlier this summer. “It’s semi-remote. You end up driving down a dirt road, see a little sign as you round a corner in the woods, drive up to the top of the hill and there it is.
“It’s just like a Scottish course out in the middle of nowhere; so natural and the greens are diabolically fun to putt,” he laughed.
When asked to rank the club compared to other courses he has played around the world, he had high praise for DeVries’ first course.
“It’s a links-style course in the grandest design with fescue fairways, enormous bunkers and huge undulating greens that will test your putting skills,” he said.
Great flashes of sand and humps and bumps, typical of British Isle links mark the first nine holes, with towering pine trees added to the second nine. While only four years old the course is already receiving national praise and comparisons. Golfweek recently ranked the course 22nd in the nation, a heady ranking for such a new course.
“That’s spectacular, especially when you consider all of the great courses its ahead of,” added Wiren. “I think it deserves all the accolades it has received. For his first course DeVries did a remarkable job.”
DeVries, a student of MacKenzie’s designs, grew up in Frankfort playing and working at the renowned Crystal Downs and worked for Tom Doak and Bill Newcomb, well known Michigan golf course architects, and Tom Fazio before striking out on his own. Both Doak and Fazio have multiple courses on the Top 100 list.
Walker described finding the piece of property.
“I was having a cup of coffee in my Traverse City office one morning during the winter when I saw an ad for this piece of property in the local paper, and it sounded perfect,” the businessman enthused. “It was a 400-acre piece of property near Kingsley surrounded on three sides by state land. With high rolling grassland and sparsely vegetated soil, it was perfect for the type of course we wanted to build.
“We didn’t have to create tee boxes and bunker areas. The natural formations were already there, and with no wetlands involved, we had no environmental issues.”
The club is committed to preserving the environment and worked closely with the Audubon Society in the development of the course.
Nestled among rolling highlands, mature hardwoods and white pines, the club is located about 12 miles south of Traverse City. Its high rolling pastures offer beautiful vistas from several points around the 18-hole course. The par-71 course is designed with a wide variety of tees ranging up to almost 7,000 yards from the tips. Each hole – typical of a links-style course – is designed to offer options on routing and types of shots. The beautiful ninth hole has six sets of tees from which to choose.
“It’s a classic design that follows the lay of the land,” said PGA Professional Muller. “It certainly feels like a golf course built in the 1920s.”
You won’t find any water on the course, but, if you like bunkers, you’re in luck. There are 129 of them scattered around the course. And, if you like to walk, again you are in luck. The course, according to Walker, was designed to walk, which is encouraged by a caddie program. Power carts are available as an option.
“It’s a course that you’ll want to walk,” he added, “and, that’s the way we wanted it designed. I like to be able to see other holes when I play golf. I don’t like the isolation you feel on many area courses; all with individual holes. Classic, traditional courses were designed to walk, and that’s what we’ve duplicated at Kingsley Club.”
The course is open only to club members and their guests, and the club membership is being limited to the first 250 who join. Presently it’s at a little over 100 members. Many members are from outside the state of Michigan.
“We wanted to create a place with few rules and few starting times,” chuckled Walker. “If we took in more members we would have to have rules and starting times. It’s a place where kindred sprits can gather to have a little fun, make friends and play all the golf they want.”
The clubhouse sits high atop a ridge overlooking the first, ninth and tenth fairways offering spectacular views of the course. An extensive practice facility with a short game area, putting greens and a driving range is located across from the pro shop and clubhouse. A couple of “club cottages” with lockout rooms have been built to provide lodging for its national members and guests. Each cottage has eight individual bedrooms and a large common area complete with a kitchen.
Guide services, utilizing local hunters and fishers, is also available for members who enjoy trout fishing on area rivers and a little upland game hunting on adjoining state land.
For more information on the Kingsley Club and all that it has to offer or take a virtual tour of the course, log onto www.kingsleyclub.com, or you can call (231) 263-3000.
Posted by editor at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)
The dogs of New Orleans
By Andrea Maio
Sun contributor
It was my first tropical winter, and the culture of New Orleans had me in slow motion shock. I arrived there on Christmas Day, after a tough boat trip down the Mississippi river. My boat had broken down in a nearby town and left me stranded from my family for the holidays, so I rented a car and drove with my dog into the city. There, I found a dingy bar on Decatur Street offering free Christmas dinners to all of their customers. They didn't mind dogs in the bar, so I brought in my lab mix Butch and sat, and drank with the regulars. By the end of the night I had secured a comfortable, safe place to sleep for my dog and me in the quarter, a possible apartment and a few potential house-painting gigs. The brooding, pony tailed artist that I met at the bar took me aside before he left and said,” I can tell you’re no dummy, but you need to be careful, you've never known a city this dark. It can kill you. It was started by pirates and its still run by them." Walking home that night, it started to snow. The first time it had snowed in New Orleans in 50 years. People and their pets stopped on the street and looked up, hardly believing their eyes.
My first apartment in New Orleans was one block off of St. Charles on Martin Luther King Blvd. where the rent and the elevation are lower. The building was two stories high, and being reclaimed by the earth: vines crawled up the dilapidated porch and through the iron trellis and crept up the edges of the peeling roof. In my bedroom there was a hole in the floor through which I could see the downstairs apartment. A mentally impaired elderly man lived there and liked to watch The Wizard of Oz over and over and over again, always laughing at the same parts. The television was right below the hole in my bedroom, so drifting off to sleep, or waking up in the morning was to the spooky soundtrack of Judy garlands questioning voice lost in Oz. "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."
When I moved to the Treme, another low rent neighborhood closer the quarter, I lived above a retired stripper who was allergic to smoke and other people. We shared one thing in common-- we loved dogs, and would go out of our way to take home a stray and nurse it back to health. For her it was a cure for loneliness and a way that she could interact with another living creature without the fear of being judged, for me it was something simple and constructive I could do in a strange city. The rest of the city seemed to regard dogs as pests but my neighbor and I almost looked for opportunities to rescue them. One day she brought home a disfigured mutt with missing eyes. Someone, the vet had concluded, had gauged the dog’s eyes out for fun, and he had been walking through traffic blindly when she stopped her car and picked him up.
Dogs we loved, but our tolerance for one another was as thin as the floorboards. She would get angry if I came home after 9pm, because by simply walking into my apartment, I woke her up. She couldn't stand the sound of my dog’s nails hitting the wood floor above her, and she would tape my door shut while I was gone, with notes outlining all of my trespasses. One morning, after a night of listening to folk music on low volume, I woke up to her fist going through my bedroom window, shattering glass everywhere. My other neighbor had a pair of pit bulls, and when he heard the commotion he set them loose. They came up the steps and lunged for my dog and me. One of them clamped on to Butch’s neck and shook and shook, and so I grabbed on to her neck and shook and shook until the owner came out and called them off. As he came out, so did my third and final neighbor, in her house coat, her face red with anger, screaming at my dog and I to get the hell out of her neighborhood.
In places like the Treme, a poor, mostly black neighborhood that has a gruesome history of slave trafficking, the city always seemed on the verge of popping. There was a constant anxiety in the air that pushed against the facades of the old houses. Its as if being below sea level put pressure on everyone’s head, and that pressure would build and build, and not get released because the heat and humidity kept everyone from moving. Then suddenly someone would get pushed over, something would set someone off, and there would be a chase, a fight, gunshots and sirens. And the crime would be particularly brutal, a mugging turned into a murder, a group of kids killing another kid.
I’ve lived in other poor places, where people are struggling to survive, and none of them felt as lawless and fecund as New Orleans. Physically, it was like a beautiful woman on opium, swallowing herself with her own pursuit for pleasure, in a sumptuous and hazy dream. The moist air and plant life seemed to want to take back the structures and turn them into fertile swamp.
In other neighborhoods, the ones built on higher ground, that pressure was fuel for a celebration. Those that could afford it, had a continual end of the earth party, the dangers of the near by neighborhoods added to the exoticism of the city; vacationers could feel like ex-patriots, enjoying a European fortress in the middle of a third world country. Like with voodoo, New Orleans turned its spooky reputation into capital. The city thrived on its own idea of itself, a romanticized version of the dark and desperate things that happen there. The very things the tourist center of the city held at bay were what made the city rich. Like the river, the reasons for the city’s existence were held behind high, precarious walls. Something was bound to burst.
When I left New Orleans, in early summer of this year, a humid depression had set into me. Even with a college degree, and years of work experience, I couldn’t find a job that paid more than 9 dollars and hour. With the exception of the sick dogs I nursed back to health, and the fancy houses I painted for money on Avenue St. Charles, nothing I started ever got done there. It was hard for me to imagine the lives of the people who lived on my block whose challenges were doubled by their race and the place they grew up in. Walking to work, I used to imagine what would happen if the river spilled over into their city; their thin walled homes would crumble, there would be a scramble to get out, thousands of people would drown. At some point the fantasy became too grim, and I would shake it off, and keep walking. It was clear far before the flood that there was a place in America where people had been forgotten.
When the levy broke and New Orleans started to enter its nightmare, all I could think about were the dogs. The wild pack on my block, the puppy left in the park, the neighbors chained up rottie, all seemed more helpless than the thousands of people who were suffering. I know it was a crazy reaction, but it must have been easier than thinking about the true scope of what was happening. The truth was that thousands of people were suffering due to the inhumanity of people towards other people. For years we knew what could happen. For years nothing was done.
Andrea Maio resides just down M-22 in Elberta and is a freelance documentarian.
Posted by editor at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)
Letter to the Editor
The feelings of puzzlement and disgust I felt as a result of reading Mr. Arens’ letter to the August 11 edition of the Glen Arbor Sun, are so similar to the feelings I have towards much that’s current in American “culture”, I have decided to answer it that I might personally find a way to more peacefully live in my own country. This is important and necessary spiritual work all of us might well undertake, for every authentic religious tradition posits the ascendancy of love and compassion over anger, and as a nation torn in two, each half angry at the other, we must find a path to more affection and concern for each other. This is also important for our inner health, as we all wish to be more peaceful and loving, and know from personal experience that inner states of anger and negativity are painful and always lead to agitation and unhappiness. In our civilization we may finally have come to an age in which there is an identity between finding this spiritual path and surviving as a species. What will happen to us if our nuclear and biological weapons, monolithic telecommunications systems which shape our thoughts and perceptions, and our attachment to a level of wealth unsupportable by the finite resources of our planetary home, are in the service of beings who are unable to alter their mental domination by attachment to wealth, and anger toward others?
In his letter, perhaps Mr. Arens was attempting to express the sentiment that if one felt something precious was lost when the Woodland Indians were slaughtered by invading Europeans, that it is necessary, for the sake of moral balance and emotional honesty, to equally lament the dispossession of wealthy landowners in Cuba when Fidel Castro put a long overdue end to Batista’s ruthless military regime in 1959. Unlikely this was his rational intention, for a brief review of twentieth century Cuban history would make any such assertion impossible to defend.
Batista rose to power in a military coup, which ended a liberal and broadly representative democratic government in 1933, replacing it with a brutal military dictatorship, lasting with brief interruptions for more than two decades before if fell to Castro’s populist revolution. During his first decade in power, Batista developed a significant long-term association with the American Mafia, whose influence helped corrupt the fabric of Cuba’s moral and economic life. Much of Batista’s economic base derived from the profits of Mafia operations in Cuba, whose power and violence in the US had its counterpart in Cuba, where Batista, essentially a mobster himself, had gunned down or simply disappeared thousands who spoke or acted against the brutality of his regime. This pattern of violence broadened and escalated over the last decade of his rule so that by the time he was forced into exile, it was directed against 80 percent of the Cuban people and cut across nearly all of its social classes. (J.A. Sierra, Fulgencio Batista: a Biography of Cuba’s US-friendly Dictator)
When the Castro government took control of Cuban affairs, economic policies turned sharply in favor of the poor, and some who had profited by the economic and political climate of Batista’s rule, whether they had directly participated in its creation or not, were dispossessed and later exiled. The poverty of the campesinos was particularly desperate, because their options had been institutionally curtailed in order to ensure the presence of their cheap labor on the plantations. Thus landowners were hard hit in the post Batista era, and Mr. Arens’ grandfather was apparently one so affected. While lingering resentment is understandable, reflection on the realities of the terrified and impoverished majority of Cubans under Batista, should nurture a more balanced understanding of the situation. Thus from the standpoint of historical facts it is impossible to equate the slaughter of the American Indian who was minding his own business in his own country, with the interruption of the wealth of a landowner in Cuba as a result of a revolution, which took place for reasons most of us can understand. Even the CIA, which had sided with Batista throughout much of this escalating repression, towards the end sympathized with Castro’s revolution. (Lyman B. Kirkpatrick Jr., The Real CIA, chapter 7, 1968).
Since whatever underlies Mr. Arens’ position cannot therefore lie in the realm of reason, we must search for its origin in the arena of emotions, which would include feelings of attachment, anger, and related emotions. Attachment would include the elements of ‘my land’, ‘my wealth’, ‘my family’, while the possibility of being deprived of things that are ‘mine’, gives rise to the related emotions of resentment, anger and hatred towards those who would harm or take away ‘my things’. It is critical to appreciate that the disturbing emotions naturally function to exaggerate and distort the perception of their objects, and impute to them qualities they lack from their side. Objects of attachment therefore, appear to us as if they really possessed the attractive qualities we perceive, while those we hate or are angry towards appear to us as really possessing the essential qualities of being terrible or hateful. No matter how true and compelling many of our viewpoints and opinions seem however, much that constitutes our inner world is incongruent with reality, and failure to appreciate this discrepancy between the way things appear to us and the way they really exist is our greatest source of error.
Therefore, when we act on these distorted perceptions, our behavior is necessarily always mistaken, and instead of the happiness we wish, we inevitably create only unhappiness for others and ourselves. If we could see those who threaten to harm us from another angle, in this case from the side of the revolutionaries, and 80 percent of the Cubans who suffered under Batista’s dictatorship, our enhanced understanding of their true nature would weaken our certainty they really possessed the qualities we had earlier attributed to them. If we are honest about this quest for inner truth it might even be possible for us to experience the emotions of understanding and compassion towards those we previously hated. If we can accomplish this admittedly difficult task, our mind would experience peace and happiness, rather than the destructive effects of anger and hatred and the unhappiness and restless agitation these feelings always create.
However, if we cannot or will not accomplish this transformation in our thinking, we will experience the mind’s ceaseless and futile agitation as it seeks to justify its attachment and anger, a frantic activity that leads us only deeper into more serious realms of error. I see in America today an increasing domination by attachment to wealth, grown beyond any reasonable proportion, while our anger and hatred of those whom we see as threatening our possessions, and our ‘group’ has prompted us into senseless violence and destructive activity. Our failure to undertake the difficult inner spiritual work necessary to understand the nature and function of our inner mind states, and the distortions in perceived reality they create, has lead us to accept a war now proven to be unnecessary by the falsehoods uneasy minds have concocted to justify it. That this mistaken violent activity cannot possibly create the peace we desire is made amply clear by the alienation of most of our friends in the world, by the multiplication, unification and increased strength of the enemies we seek to destroy, and rejection by those into whose affairs we have intruded.
Accumulating evidence illuminates the mistaken nature of our attitudes and actions, but rather than working to adopt more realistic attitudes and behaviors, in an ever more desperate freefall towards self- justification, our minds have now seized on the most potent force of all to resolve this problem. We have recruited God to our side, and in so reducing Him to the status of a national or household idol, have entered a realm of utmost peril to others and ourselves. We have married our nations flag, the symbol of one group, to phrases like ‘In God We Trust’, and ’God Bless America’, in a final attempt to justify our distorted mind states, and our violence in Iraq. A little thought will show us how completely out of balance such behavior has become. Look up into any clear Michigan night and you will see hundreds of millions of stars in the Milky Way, only a part of one galaxy. The Hubble telescope has revealed billions of such galaxies, whose final extent we have yet to glimpse. Must there not be countless beings on countless worlds around these countless stars, and all of this the creation of the God we worship? How small are we, and how miserably minute are our petty struggles against other beings on this tiny atom of a planet, that we would have the temerity to suppose that the power which has created this unbelievably vast, immense complexity could or should in the infinite mercy and love we attribute to him favor our faction over that of our enemy!
What is nearly as absurd on a planetary scale is our persistence in such behavior even though we see our enemy doing the same, believing the first thing he will see, after blowing himself up to destroy his enemies, is the face of Allah, the God he believes responsible for the creation of this selfsame immense universe, smiling on him with approval for the destruction wrought in his name, and for a flag. Is not this truly insane? How could such a loving God have anything but pity for a race of creatures stupid enough to think and act in such a manner, and how could there conceivably be a taking of sides? The danger inherent in assuming our group has exclusive rights to God’s love and power, and that He will use this power to defeat our enemies, from whom his loves has presumably been withdrawn, should be self-evident, but given the freewheeling manner in which this primitive idea has gained a foothold in our society, it apparently needs explanation. The danger is that it removes all restraint to our behavior, and makes it possible for use to commit any act with the assurance we are right in doing so. It is the ultimate lubricant by which the end smoothly and without friction justifies any means, and although Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction, with God on our side, there are now no barriers to using the ones we do possess.
Jesus must have exerted great effort to purify his mind of attachment and hatred, and to perfect great compassion, thus becoming capable of sacrificing his life for others, an act of overarching humanity that proves what the highest levels of the human soul is capable, and an example of what pursuit of a truly Christian life may require. Being a Christian is not going to church, professing faith with mouths only, slapping fellow church goers on the back in gestures of mutual assurance of their membership in God’s exclusive club, and later in the week waging war with a clear conscience. It is doing the hard inner work necessary to understand that the mind’s attachment to useless wealth, and hatred towards our fellow beings are the real enemies, and that the only way we will ever realize a happy and peaceful world is to seriously undertake the work of creating a quiet, happy, and compassionate mind in ourselves.
David Hendricks,
Empire
Posted by editor at 09:09 PM | Comments (0)
County residents avoid tossing tons of E-waste into landfill
By Dianne Navarro
Sun contributor
“This monitor still works. We’re just updating our computer and we can’t even give this thing away. No one wants it” was a common theme voiced at Leelanau County’s Electronic Recycling Collection event, which took place on August 20 at Glen Lake High School. Thanks to Leelanau County and the dedicated residents who participated, approximately nine tons of outdated and nonworking computers, monitors, televisions, stereos, cellular phones, VHS and DVD players and other electronics were diverted from the landfill and sent downstate for recycling. Add this amount to another eight tons from last May’s collection event, and it’s difficult to imagine the magnitude of the electronic waste generated from a single county in northern Michigan. Try picturing a 48-foot semi-trailer at each of the collection events, completely loaded with every type of electronic device imaginable.
The need to divert electronics from landfills has become a paramount issue that an increasing number of communities and governments are finally beginning to acknowledge. Technology is advancing rapidly. New products arrive on the market faster than others become obsolete. Landfills now face the new burden of these “E-wastes” — tons of it.
But the incredible amount of space required to dispose of these high-tech wastes is not the only issue. Our everyday electronics contain several hazardous substances, making it crucial to keep them out of our environment. Some of these substances are known carcinogens such as beryllium and cadmium. Lead is damaging to the nervous system and has toxic effects on the kidneys and reproductive system. Mercury, a substance of concern in the Great Lakes area, is stored in the fat of animals and humans. At high levels it can damage the brain and kidneys. When passed down through breast milk, it can also harm a developing fetus. Brominated flame retardants, hexavalent chromium and barium are other components with serious toxic effects.
Redirecting these items to responsible destinations is becoming an issue of national ethics and responsibility. Communities and governments now acknowledge the threat these materials pose to our environmental and public health. While tons of e-wastes have been diverted from our own landfills, the burden of disposal has often shifted to other spots around the world, mainly third world countries. Electronic wastes are frequently collected at various locations around the United States under the pretense of “recycling” when, in reality, they are sent overseas to be dumped as E-waste. Often, locals and even children process these exported electronics using primitive and dangerous techniques such as burning plastic and wires, melting and burning toxic-soldered circuit boards, using acid to extract gold and cracking and dumping toxic lead-laden cathode ray tubes.
Entire communities that receive these wastes have been documented suffering from groundwater contamination and serious illnesses resulting from the crude practices. A lack of protective labor and nonexistent environmental laws makes poor countries prime targets for North America’s high-tech wastes. For these reasons, Leelanau County’s Planning and Development Department wanted to find a company that recycled using responsible methods.
Valley City Environmental Services located in Grand Rapids is where Leelanau County’s electronics arrived for recycling. David Perry, Valley City’s Electronic Recycling Manager, asserts that all components from electronics received are totally dismantled at their facility. Once the components are dissembled and sorted, they are sent out within the this country to companies for complete recycling. From there they are sent out as finished products into the global markets. For instance, glass mixed with lead, like what’s found in the Cathode Ray Tubes, the component that shields us from radiation output, is sent to a company in Ohio for complete cleaning and recycling. From there it is sent to Brazil and Asia for the manufacturing of new cathode ray tubes.
In order to rid their households responsibly of their high-tech wastes, a certain amount of motivation was required by the Leelanau County residents. Participants first had to make an appointment and then drive to a designated site where they paid a fee of $10 per household. Many residents brought in several electronic items, making the $10 fee a real bargain. According to Perry at Valley City, the fee for recycling a PC and monitor typically costs $13. A television set, which contains the highest percentage of hazardous materials, could cost $25 to recycle. Sarah Lucas, Senior Planner of Leelanau County’s Planning and Development Department explains: “The $10 fee is low enough to encourage people to participate while getting them used to the idea that they do need to pay a fee for the service.”
Obviously a $10 fee alone would fall short of sustaining a program like this. To make these events possible, Leelanau County was one of five communities in Michigan to receive Pollution Prevention (P2) grant money from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. A total of $24,590 was awarded to the county. This money was made available from Michigan’s unclaimed bottle and can deposits. Leelanau County provided the required match of $9,433 as well as in-kind services, promotional, processing and transportation costs. Despite the drive, drop-off fee, and an occasional wait for some, participating residents were very grateful to have the program available to them. All would agree that they felt better knowing they were doing the right thing and that it was well worth the extra effort.
Leelanau County residents can continue to look forward to P2 grant money assisting e-recycling through next fall. After that, the county hopes to keep the program going by relying on funds collected from the $10 fees. Future fees will need to increase after the grant is over. Leelanau County residents may call 256-9812 for information on future electronics recycling scheduling.
Valley City’s David Perry was quite impressed with Leelanau County’s turnout. “Usually the more rural communities don’t have as high a participation as you did in Leelanau County.” Now there’s something to be proud of!
Posted by editor at 08:17 PM | Comments (0)