Spring Fever

The Kahkwa Club, a mile from Lake Erie, experienced a historically bad winter. But that didn’t keep its stalwart super from the job. 

- Michael Bamberger

GROWING UP, spring arrived by ritual. My mother weeding her flower bed. Opening Day box scores dropped on our gravel driveway, along with Dave Anderson stories with Augusta datelines in the New York Times. “Jumbo, Jumbo” was the headline of his Saturday column from the ’73 Masters. Jumbo Ozaki, tiptoeing through Amen Corner. Spring! The new one is probably already in bloom for you, and by now you know what I don’t: the name of the man suddenly at large in the world in a green, three-button sport coat.

I am typing up this field report a month before the new winner will emerge from Butler Cabin. On the first Thursday of March,I made an eight-hour drive from Philadelphia, where I live, to Erie, Pa., my trusty Subaru’s windshield wipers barely able to keep pace with the driving snow on the final stretch of I-79, the radio catching static-free Cleveland Indians spring training baseball. Erie is midway between Cleveland and Buffalo, on Gordon Light foot’s Lake Erie. Maybe you heard about the five feet of lake-effect snow the city got in late December. Merry Christmas.

I parked in front of a State Street taproom (with an impressive Lenten menu), my ears assaulted by the scratching of a metal shovel on a cement sidewalk. Inside, a local TV weatherman was predicting the final snow tab for this wraparound season: 175 inches. That’s 14-plus feet and thought to be an Erie record. A standard flagstick, by the way, stands half that tall.