Sky Valley Elegy

Make way for the sports fields and hydra course, whatever that is

Dad (far left) with the FCHS golf team in the early 1970s

I remember when they closed down the golf course in my hometown.

Sky Valley was a little nine-hole course built on one cow pasture and bordered by another, a course with some rolling hills and a manmade lake and a ball-eating drainage ditch and a par-five you could actually birdie now and then. The #2 and #6 holes shared entirely too much fairway for my taste: One went north, one went south, and in my high school days I lived in constant fear of taking a ball in the face on my way to the second hole.

The little course had a couple of tempting par-threes, too. One morning I arrived before the dew burned off and before the clubhouse even opened, and since I was the only one on the course I decided to hit every ball in my bag at the 100-yard third hole, hoping for a hole-in-one. Fruitlessly, it turned out. I hit at least two dozen balls off the tee and some of them didn’t even hit the green. My dad and brother scored their holes-in-one the legitimate way—in the middle of a round—and Dad even managed to do it twice.

My dad was a hell of a golfer: consistent, patient, and a good straight hitter. He taught me to play and hoped I’d love it as much as he did—though that, I believe, was impossible. He was our high school golf coach, too, and each spring from 1975 through 1978 I was out at Sky Valley every afternoon after school, trying to lower my average score enough to qualify for the varsity matches and succeeding only rarely. Dad would send us out in random foursomes and we’d walk the former pasture carrying our clubs, shooting the breeze, discussing girls and school and life, praising each other’s best shots, occasionally bending Dad’s rules and awarding a gimme if the situation called for it. While the baseball players were doing conditioning drills and the track team were running their lungs out, we were enjoying a stroll on a sweet cool spring afternoon, pausing occasionally to hit a ball a little closer to the hole.

Sky Valley was generally the smallest and scrubbiest of all the courses the golf team played on. The fairways were far from lush and the greens sometimes got rubbed down to dirt in places, but that never bothered me. I liked the fact that it was ours. At the time there were only two golf courses in Fountain County, and I liked the fact that one of them belonged to Hillsboro. We traveled to some much nicer facilities over the course of each season, but the bigger and better cared-for they were, the more they intimidated me. Sky Valley felt like home.

I stopped playing regularly after I moved away in 1985. Seven years after that, the entire Sky Valley complex—golf course, campground, lodge, and restaurant—was purchased by the Indiana Regular Baptist Youth Camp, who changed the name of the place to Twin Lakes Camp and Conference Center, closed the restaurant, and converted everything but the golf course into a church camp.

I don’t think the Baptists’ hearts were in golf course management. They probably would have been happier closing the course down right then. As it was, they originally planned to close the course on Sundays but someone must have said you know, if we’re going to run a golf course we might as well keep it open on the most popular golfing day of the week.

The change of ownership didn’t affect my dad’s love of the game. By the time the Baptists took over, he’d turned my mom into an avid golfer and the course was the hub of their social life. When they were both retired, they were free to go out in the middle of a weekday and play a round or two—and since they had a family membership they could tack on an extra four holes before going home. They golfed with couples their own age and couples who were younger, and if none of their friends were around they golfed by themselves.

Some of the younger couples ostensibly adopted Mom and Dad and soon they were all going to Overpass Pizza in Covington after their Friday-night rounds. (This appreciation for pizza was relatively new and certainly did not exist when Ric and I were growing up.) On Saturday afternoons it was common to see 20 or more of these regulars lining up on the first tee and dividing into foursomes for a best-ball scramble, and then at the end of the round switching into new teams and playing again. Whenever I was home for the weekend, I’d join this motley crew and experience firsthand the camaraderie and competition of people who truly enjoyed each other’s company.

My dad’s health began to decline in the mid-2000s, and in 2006 he was on oxygen full-time and only felt well enough to golf about four times that year. Most days, though, he went out anyway and rode in the cart with Mom, taking pleasure in the warm weather and the warm presence of his friends.

And that winter, when they were looking into course membership for 2007, Mom and Dad decided it made sense to buy only a single membership for her.

I could hardly imagine a summer without my dad golfing, so I can imagine how he felt about that. I’m sure it hurt to see Mom mail that check for just one membership, and to know he’d be limited to a summer of being the golf cart chauffeur.

But even that was taken from him—from both of them—when Mom opened the mail one day in early 2007 and found a refund check for her membership. According to their website, Twin Lakes had decided to use the golf course land for “sports fields, bike trails, disc golf, a hydra course, and a nature/welcome center in the former pro shop.”

I heard that a group of locals tried to raise the capital to buy the course—just the course, none of the church camp trappings—but either they couldn’t get the funds together or the Baptists were already committed to their sports fields and hydra course. They closed the golf course and something unique to my little hometown disappeared. Something good, something fun, something that was important to quite a few people.

A new course had opened in Covington in 1993 and there were plenty of others within a 30-minute drive of Hillsboro, so it’s not like golfers had no options without Sky Valley/Twin Lakes. Indeed, Mom and some of their core group would play at Crawfordsville Municipal now and then. But they were visitors there and it wasn’t quite the same.

Dad died in 2008 and a couple days after the funeral I drove out past the old golf course to see how the sports fields and bike trails were coming along. The course looked like a prairie reclamation project.

And it definitely didn’t feel like home.

Free Music Friday

This song had lyrics at one point but they did not hold up to scrutiny after some 35-40 years. The music to “Carnival Girl,” however, survives as an instrumental.