As a matter of fact, yes,
I was lost in Wisconsin.

After 317 miles of a 318-mile trip to meet my daughter at college and help her move back in, the locator on my GPS decided to pretend it was dancing the Macarena (I don’t know any dances more recent than that, so give me a break) and bounced all around the map of Waukesha, briefly keeping me from my appointed destination.

But that’s neither here nor there. Well, it’s there, actually, but it really doesn’t matter.

What I found most interesting about my trip to the Dairy State was how one’s perspective changes based on experience. Every other time in the past 30 years that I’ve driven past Lake Windsor Golf Club (pictured), just north of Madison and visible from I-90/94, I’ve thought about the half-dozen times I played that course while living in Madison way back when.

When? Well, it was a year in which JoAnne Carner was LPGA player of the year. And Ms. Carner is 74 now, so suffice it to say it was a coupla years back. You might remember persimmon woods. Or you might not. Anyway, it was a persimmon-wood year. And disco still hadn’t died, though it was gasping its final Kool & The Gang-aided breaths.

Anyway, on the trip back to Minnesota this year, I decided for the sake of nostalgia to take the exit off 94 and drop in on Lake Windsor. This is where current perspective comes in. As I drove up to the golf course, what struck me most was its perimeter — some relatively large areas of empty land, including some lines of trees that served no apparent current purpose but looked strikingly like they could have been borders for old golf holes — possibly a redesign, at the least.

I’m pretty sure only a person whose brain had been fogged over by an obsession with lost golf courses would notice such a thing. That’s me — lost courses equals fog, obsession, kit, caboodle.

There’s no other real story here. I haven’t even Googled the place to see whether I’m right or whether I just want to believe there are lost golf holes at Lake Windsor. (A year ago, I would have Googled until my eyes googled out of their sockets just to try to find an answer.) It’s just that now, in places where normal people see flagsticks and greens and tee boxes, I wonder where the lost golf course is.

Coincidentally, I took more backroads on my return trip and drove past a large piece of land next to U.S. Highway 12 in Eau Claire that appeared to be a former golf course fully in the throes of passing into history. Bulldozers and road graders were turning it into a housing development, it appeared. I do believe I vaguely remember hearing of a course in Eau Claire closing, but again, I haven’t looked it up. I will at some point, but on the off chance anybody knows anything about either the Lake Windsor or Eau Claire site, I would be most interested in hearing about it. By all means, leave a comment here if you can.

Coming soon: a few more concrete details about my book. At some point, I’ll offer access to a map of the Minnesota lost golf courses I know about.

UPDATE, 8-22: I threatened not to Google. Predictably, it was an empty threat.

I checked on the Wisconsin courses I visited / passed. Here’s what I found:

Lake Windsor: I couldn’t confirm it, but based on a couple of Google-aided hints and an aerial view of the course, I believe my memory was correct. Lake Windsor used to be a 27-hole course, I’m almost positive, and nine holes were shut down and the rest of the course perhaps reworked to some degree.

Eau Claire: The course I passed along Highway 12 (technically in Altoona, not Eau Claire) was Hillcrest, which closed last year and is being developed. Though it’s relatively easy to come to terms with golf courses that passed into oblivion 15 or 55 years ago, there was a shock factor in driving past Hillcrest and seeing a large piece of land that was a golf course just months ago now being bulldozed to its death. Sad, but in many cases inevitable.

The boast on the old Whitewater Valley Golf Course scorecard amused me when I first read it:

“Minnesota’s Most Scenic.”

Yeah, right, I thought. And my front yard, with the patchy grass and half a maple tree, is Minnesota’s Most Stately.

I grew up 40 miles from Whitewater Valley State Park, which Whitewater Valley GC was part of. It’s Bluff Country, and it’s beautiful. Still, even though I had never been to the state park, I doubted a golf course in that area could seriously make a claim to be Minnesota’s most scenic. But others told me the place was special, and a February 2012 visit to the park, where I slip-slid around for an hour on the thawing cross country ski trails, told me this site had serious potential to become the cover shot for my book on lost golf courses.

Enter Peter Wong. Minnesota’s best golf photographer had agreed to lend images to the book I was writing, “Fore! Gone. Minnesota’s Lost Golf Courses, 1897-1999.” After the longest winter since the waning days of the Ice Age, we finally had an opportunity in June 2013 to zip down U.S. 52 and over on I-90 and up Minnesota 74 to Whitewater Valley State Park. I figured our likely book cover shot would be a semi-aerial view looking down on the old golf course site from the 90-foot limestone bluffs above it.

Three days earlier, Peter and I had done a shoot from a lost course in Bayport, and we had procured a dusty old golf bag and clubs courtesy of Bloomington pro Joe Stansberry. We never used the clubs in the Bayport shoot; they weren’t a good fit. But at Whitewater, after Peter took his equipment out of the SUV and just before I shut the hatch, Peter said, “Hey, bring those old clubs along.”

I knew there was an old bench-and-shelter from the golf course still standing in the state park, and that was our planned first stop before we headed up the hills to take the “aerial” shots. This is where Peter’s vision came in. Among the many of Peter’s attributes, vision perhaps ranks at the top. The old shelter was intact, almost 40 years after the course had closed, the wooden bench aged and the roof grown over with dirt and moss. “Give me those clubs,” Peter said, and after taking shots of the shelter unadorned, he propped the clubs on a bench and started clicking again.

We hiked around the park for two more hours, mostly atop the bluffs, and Peter took photos from various vantage points. (Props here to Andy Bissen, who suffered the indignity of having to haul much of Peter’s equipment along hill and dale, like some southeastern Minnesota sherpa.)

A few days later, Peter emailed me the photos from his Whitewater shoot. Spectacular, every one. But I could not take my eyes off the half-dozen he took of the shelter, both with and without the old golf bag and clubs propped alongside. I couldn’t possibly do them justice by trying to describe them, but to me, they said “golf” and “old” with a quality that was almost haunting. (Speaking of haunting, check out the chapter on the old Chanhassen golf course if you get the book. But I digress into shameless self-promotion.)

From there, the handful of photos in the running to be part of the cover of the book were forwarded to my book designer, Tami Dever of TLC Graphics, Austin, Texas (more promotion there, even less shame). Equally as visionary as Mr. Wong, Ms. Dever arranged a half-dozen brilliant cover-design possibilities.

Long story longer even though I tried to make it short: No doubt some of you saw Tami’s cover designs and voted and opined on them. So many valid points, so many reasons to pick this cover or that one because of the photography or typography or or composition or combination thereof. In the end, though, as Tami and I talked one last time about cover designs, I was encouraged to “go with my heart.” And my heart was, and always will be, with the brilliant “Hey, grab those old clubs” photo that Peter Wong took of the shelter at the lost Whitewater Valley Golf Course.

Well done, Peter and Tami.