By Joanne Light
Imagine that Cathy Jones and company from “This Hour has Twenty Two Minutes” air a skit, in which they try to play golf on the coastal headland, formerly known as Owls Head Provincial Park… now turned topsy-turvy with tawdry turf.
Eighteen plagues, one for each hole are forthcoming :
1/ Black flies, gouging flesh from ears like a divot from a fairway,
2/ Clouds of mosquitoes sucking blood from the tanned forearms of those who came to relax and suck bloody Marys,
3/ North Atlantic winds snap golf duds like sails in a gale and those who walk into it are dislodged like truth from a politician’s playbook,
4/ Watch where you walk for a flock of a thousand wild geese will stop by between 4:30 am ’til opening time… pooping all the way. Owls Head is on their route. (golfing at Owls Head idea is just one slippery slope after another),
5/ Storm surge swamps the leisure class and salt rots those who sport “Foot Joy Men’s Arc Xt” Golf Shoes,
6/ Golf cart falls over the edge of soggy sod, blanketed over spray-soaked, trucked-in tons of soil,
7/ Fog, fog and more fog,
8/ An attraction doubling as a hazard on the fairways are deer dancing with their ticks. After a day of golfing, be sure to remove your clothes before getting in your car. Oh, and some may have Lyme Disease, even though they tell you it’s not in Nova Scotia and, if you’re hanging around Canada’s Ocean Playground for a while, you won’t be able to get tested for it because no one knows how,
9/ Manager of the course, Liam Franklyn, a former dauphin to the former Great Gov’nor, trips over his “sycophantasy” of dull quips and awkward suck-holing and the golfers ignore him,
10/ Windigo spirits of the lost web of life intercept their balls and throw them to Glooscap who sells them at a benefit for the legal cost of the Mi’kmaq who weren’t consulted,
11/ Mi’kmaq Knowledge Keepers show up, encircle the green, drumming and preventing the hoity-toities from putting out. Golfers shout “butt-out” and knowledge keepers drum on,
12/ Glooscap creates a storm of golf ball-sized hail so the re-creators can’t distinguish them from the object of their quest,
13/ Gerald Martineau from C.B.C. radio’s “Reclaimed” shows up with the bands, “A Tribe Called Red” and “CerAmony,” so those in “Brooks Ghost Mid-weight No Show Socks” say butt out. The rockers just rap and ramp it up,
14/ Bald Eagles swoop down and further distract those in “Public Rec All Day Every Day” pants,
15/ The eight groundskeepers hired at $12.00/hour mix twelve parts pesticide to one part water (by mistake…we think) and those in “Patagonia Capilene” jackets are overcome with nausea and migraines and retreat to the clubhouse to throw up, then vamoose for Connecticut in their private jets,
16/ In August, hungrier-than-The-Hulk-after-am-emotionally-stressful-rampage horseflies bite through those wearing “Bionic Stable Grip golf gloves to feast on morsels of flesh and the stable grip goes the way of “Nike SQ 5900” golf club,
17/ Coastal squall suddenly releases three inches of slanting rain on those wearing “Taylor Made Tour Radar” golf hats at $30.00 bucks a pop and six of them go flying like a bogie shot over…yup…the cliff,
18/ One golfer wearing “Ray-Ban Clubmaster” sunglasses has a heart attack but the Internet reception is intermittent out there on the North Atlantic’s former glorious heathland and the ambulance takes forever to get there so he succumbs, never knowing if he made his last birdie. The ghosts of the now-extinct piping plovers wearing “Biodiversity’s Bleached Bones” (size zero), eliminated when the Nova Scotian politicians of 2020 bulldozed their breeding grounds, peep as stardust from the universe in code that translates as:
“This was such a double-bogey-bad move. Did we have to disappear to make such misery manifest?”
The “eagles” we had there were all we needed.
Joanne Light
Joanne Light is the author of Coastal Nova Scotia Outdoor Adventure Guide and Hiking Nova Scotia with Nimbus Publishing. She would love to see a comprehensive, online ecotourism guide for the Eastern Shore, complete with the natural history, cultural stories, accommodations, and maps published.
