The Golf at Canadian Lakes

I am a bad golfer, and I have made peace with it — the peace of a man who has lost enough balls in enough ponds to stop keeping score around the turn. So take this as a report from someone who will not lie to you about his handicap or a course’s difficulty. Canadian Lakes has golf. More of it than a place this size has any business keeping mowed.

Three courses sit inside the community, run together as the Canadian Lakes Country Club. The Royal is the big one — eighteen holes, built in 1977, stretching to 6,867 yards from the tips if you are the kind of person who plays from the tips. It is the championship layout, the members’ course, the scorecard people frame. Then two nine-holers that do most of the actual work. The Highlands runs across the hills on the higher ground, all elevation and side-hill lies, the sort of nine where you flush a drive and then find the fairway has dropped forty feet without telling you. The Pines is the opposite. Flat. Built in 1963, older than most of the houses around it, small greens, an easy walk for a body that no longer walks easy. My kind of course.

Here is the part worth getting right, because the internet will steer you wrong in both directions. Canadian Lakes is a gated, member-run community — the whole apparatus, guard shack and all. But the two nine-hole courses have long taken outside play, and the tee-time sites carry them as public. The Royal is the one held closer. What that means on a given Tuesday in July is a question for the pro shop, not for a blog. Call ahead. The answer moves with the season and the membership rules and whoever is working the counter that morning.

The smell tells you what you need to know either way. Cut grass and two-stroke exhaust off the mowers at seven, sprinklers still ticking, everything wet to the ankle until the sun burns it off near nine. That is the good hour. Play then, or play at six in the evening when the heat quits and the mosquitoes come up off the water to collect their toll.

And the water is the whole story out here. This is Mecosta County — lakes stitched into the land, wetland strung between them, and the golf draped over whatever high ground is left over. Which brings me to the reason a golfer actually points a car at this corner of Michigan, and it is not the country club.

It is Tullymore.

A short drive up the road, in Stanwood, sits St. Ives Resort and its two public courses, and one of them is the kind of course that gets written about by people who write about golf for a living. Tullymore opened in 2001 — a Jim Engh design laid across more than 800 acres of wetland and woods, par 72, water in play from the first tee to the last green. Then the lists came. Golf Digest called it the number one new upscale public course in America in 2002, and has parked it inside the top fifteen public courses in the country more than once since. Engh built strange, good holes here. Bunkers shaped like knuckles. Greens that feed a ball toward the pin one minute and spit it into the reeds the next. And it is public — anyone can book it, no member to know, no lot to own, no gate to clear.

So the honest shape of it comes to this. The community golf is fine and familiar and cheap enough, the kind you play in a T-shirt with people you like and a cooler you are technically not supposed to have on the cart. Tullymore is the round you drive up for. The one you talk about on the way home while your buddy pretends he did not lose four balls on the front. Both are inside a short drive of the same bed.

Which is the pitch, and I will make it once and leave it. Take a house on the water — one of our Michigan cottage rentals, Cedar Shores Retreat, sits close enough that you can play the Pines in your sandals before breakfast and still make an afternoon tee time at Tullymore to get your money’s worth of humility. Come in September if the calendar lets you. The courses thin out after Labor Day, the light goes long and gold across the wetland, and the mosquitoes finally give up the fight. The rest of what the place is good for lives in the Canadian Lakes guide.

Bring more balls than you think you need. You will feed the ponds. Everybody does.

The starter won’t hurry you. Nobody up here does.