I have a line of poison ivy on my right ring finger and its contours remarkably resemble Missionary Ridge.
When I pointed this out to some people in the office, they thought I was complaining that the poison ivy was the size of a mountain and all offered feigned sympathy and snickers behind my back.
Regardless, I know that if you look at a topographical map of Missionary Ridge, it looks just like this line of bubbled up skin going down my finger.
The poison ivy, as it will, spread. It jumped from my ring finger to my middle finger. When I first noticed that it had spread I was delighted. With the proper scratching techniques, I thought I could get the blisters to spread down my middle finger in a fashion that would give it the appearance of Lookout Mountain.
And, I decided, if it jumped to my index finger and formed a nice blob I could have Raccoon Mountain. I could already see myself using my poison ivy fingers to offer the boys lessons on how Bragg used the mountains around Chattanooga to buy him time to get away from Rosecrans so he could regroup and then lick the Yankees at Chickamauga.
I was delighted for the opportunity to tell the boys how, when Longstreet broke through the line and came out of the woods almost staring Rosecrans in the eye, the Yankees ran all the way to Ringgold and would have been completely routed had it not been for Wilder’s Lightning Brigade and his Spencer Repeating Rifles.
Alas, on my middle finger the poison ivy started to grow in the wrong direction and became nothing more than an irritant and a lost opportunity for historical edification.
But what is most irritating is how I got the poison ivy.
I can see the moment clearly in my mind: I was in the woods, reaching down between some weeds, when my right hand ring finger brushed a leaf. “I’ll bet that’s poison ivy,” I thought. And yes, it was.
I was in the woods because I was looking for a Titleist 1. Or maybe it was a Hogan 2 or a Srixon. I lost so many balls – in the woods, in the water – that I have no idea which one had landed in the patch of poison ivy.
When I was a kid, I played golf three days a week every summer with Andy Waters. We played at the old Green Hills Country Club (now known as Creekside), and I wasn’t a bad golfer.
But when I went off to college, I didn’t take my golf clubs with me. And I didn’t pick them up again until last week when Bruce MacPherson suggested that we go play a round.
I’m smart enough to know that after 15 years or more of not swinging a golf club, my game is likely to be off a bit. This is exactly the reason that I haven’t been to play in the last few years: when opportunities presented themselves, I begged off with some lame excuse (“my clubs are getting regripped” was among my favorites) when in reality I knew that if I went to a golf course my performance would embarrass myself and, quite likely, put other people in danger.
But the idea of some sun and fresh air was appealing. And my fond memories of summers spent playing at Green Hills persuaded me, so I agreed and told Bruce to get a tee time.
I did, at least, warn him, that my clubs had spent the last 15 years getting regripped and that my game might be a little off.
The morning started great. Outside of the name, Creekside has not changed so much over the past 15 years that I didn’t recognize it. The first tee felt familiar in a nice, nostalgic sort of way. I teed off and watched, in horror, as the ball sailed from the first tee box to the ninth fairway. Apparently 15 years of not playing is the right way to develop a mean slice. I tried one more, and this time the trees between hole 1 and hole 9 did their job and stopped the ball from going into the other fairway.
I relied heavily on the trees for the rest of the day. They almost never bounced the ball back into the fairway the way I needed them to, but they at least dropped the ball before it got too thick into the woods or crossed into another fairway and jeopardized the safety of other golfers.
I zig-zagged across the course all morning: the ball would slice into the trees to the right of the fairway, then I would hit it straight into the trees on the left of the fairway.
At one point, I told Bruce I was glad that I hadn’t bought golf shoes for this outing, because my hiking boots were more suited to the expeditions into the woods and through the rough.
And even though I shot something like 70 over par, I had a fantastic time, and to the dismay of anyone who may be playing near me, I’m eager to do it again.
A day or two later, when the poison ivy started coming up, I told my wife that I knew exactly where it came from – I’d gotten it playing golf.
“I wonder if Bruce got poison ivy, too?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I told her. “There’s no poison ivy growing in the fairways.”
Rob Peecher is author of the book “Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings & Other Collected Stories,” available at Amazon.com. This column was originally published in 2007.