BLUFFING:

Losing your golf course and beautiful things born out of grief

I live in a very small town that has a great golf course. The problem is that it is now mostly buried under several feet of various grasses and florus voluntarius¹ (probably not a real Latin term). There are no greens anymore just rolling hills and memories. Through various iterations and ownership transitions which seem to have eroded the local confidence, the course finally closed for long enough to become grown-over and sad. It hurts to even drive through there sometimes.

The Bluffs on Thompson Creek is just a neighborhood now (a great one), but not a golf community. If you are a golfer at all, you can imagine how the slow decline and rumors of rescue efforts going unrealized have affected those who considered this their home course.

One of my golfing buddies and now best friends moved into our community during the course’s death throes. He had just recently taken up golf and, as you might imagine just after 2020, had become thoroughly captivated by the game. Fr. Brad Doyle is the parish priest here in St. Francisville, LA. I am the Presbyterian minister of 6 years. This means that any story about us could sound like the beginning of a dad joke. “A Priest and a Presbyterian are playing golf one day…, meet at a coffee shop…, walk into a bar… ”

And to be fair, that is sort of what we have become. Fr. Brad had the idea, after The Bluffs closed, to offer a context for maintaining connection with any of the guys who wanted it. A Bourbon Club²? A Barbecue group? A Bible Study? Nope.

A Dance Troupe.

Brad decided to send out a text to everyone he could think of with hopes of creating an all-middle-aged men’s dance team, modeled loosely on and without sanction from a group he had seen in and around New Orleans. (Credit to the 610 Stompers³)

Up from the ashes of The Bluffs on Thompson Creek came The Highway 61 Bluffers. Though Brad is a dreamer (and a get-things-done-er), I think that his realistic vision was simply to collect a group of the guys together a few times for some silly fun with a nod to our suppressed grief of losing the golf course and the time we spend out there together.

We live in a town that still has homecoming parades down main street (Ferdinand St.) and still has a Christmas Parade on the first weekend of December during the “Christmas in the Country Festival”. I have lived in a few towns in my life that carry varying degrees of self-importance⁴, and St. Francisville is definitely on that spectrum. But St. Francisville maintains a refreshingly solid base of not-taking-itself-too-seriously. One of the clearest evidences of that is the collection of guys that show up to do the Christmas parade each year. Local businessmen, Doctors, Lawyers, Bank Presidents, Town Officials, Retirees, Engineers, Priests, Pastors, Farmers, TeeTotallers, TooMuchers, you name it. Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptists, Episcopalian, some who claim all and some who claim none.

We are not a precision dance team. If you have seen us, you will know that our first few rows keep a semblance of uniformity which diminishes with each row as you move toward the back of the formation. There is an odd dynamic in which we all get “better” at the choreography as the parade goes on, and at the same time we get “worse” for our fatigued joints, liquid courage, and the jarring experience of being recognized by someone in the crowd who you did not expect to see you doing your best MC Hammer / Rockettes impression.

We have come now to our 4^th year. I would not have thought we would make it this far. I am not sure that I would have wanted to and am honestly still not totally sure that I want to dance this weekend. But I am proud of the guys who get out there. I am proud of Fr. Brad for having the foresight and the tenacity to keep it going in a day-and-age when adult male friendships are languishing if they exist at all. I am proud that, other than the first meeting four years ago with the high school spirit squad sponsor offering some tips, we (mostly Brad) have come up with our own dances. And I am proud of the townspeople for putting up with us and making us feel like we are way more entertaining than we really are.

I still hope that The Bluffs on Thompson Creek will feature closely mown greens and pin flags again, and that West Feliciana Parish will once more have a golf course⁵, but I am thankful for the rise of The Bluffers and the ways that I have seen my community members make fools of themselves for the sake of a small town trying to keep the small-town-dream alive.

The 2024 Christmas Parade takes place in downtown St. Francisville at 2 pm on Sunday December 8th. Christmas in the Country

It is important for all bluffers to surrender their egos, and some their car keys

1. It is amazing how fast and thick and really tall that plants can grown in the environment of an abandoned golf course. I hope its a sight that you never see, but also, its also fascinating and grotesque.

2. We did also start what we considered a low brow unsophisticated Bourbon gathering that we named the Brown Water Advisory. It has been take over by people who actually know something about Bourbon but we have kept the name.

3. We have made no money, only spent money on this project. I hope that any perceived connection will result in people looking up the 610 Stompers and seeing what an actual precision dance team could be.

4. Fort Worth, TX and Oxford, MS both fall somewhere on the list as well.

5. Some one with some vision make an offer :-)