Buddies Trip: The Mild, Wild West

Snow's a problem, too. "We had 220 inches in six weeks," he said. Temperatures got to 40 below.

"What do you do," I asked, "when it's that cold?"

He said, "Stay inside."

Four guys hitting 365 shots at Tomahawk should have one shot to write about. But bums who need 365 shots are happy just to escape with no broken bones. Smiling, we headed into the night, driving east 292 miles to a golf course that is "the most incredible place I have ever seen," to quote Wade Merry, executive director of the South Dakota Golf Association.

It's Sutton Bay, next to the tiny town of Agar, where you'll see a dozen pheasants before you see a dozen people. The course is built into the Great Plains' hills and ridges carved by glaciers. The land is covered in tawny grasses, dotted with giant boulders and striped with seams of rock. Like a diamond, Lake Oahe shimmers below the hills.

The feeling is, you're in another world, in another time.

Look. There. In that ravine. Imagination sees a dinosaur.

One day at Sutton Bay moves me to say this directly: If ever you get a chance to play there, go. If the boss won't let you off, quit. Spouse says no, change spouses. Go.

The night of our arrival, we ate in the lodge under the gaze of a giant moose whose presence prompted Callahan speculation: "Just think how fast that moose had to be going to get his head through that fireplace wall."

At Sutton Bay, the back tees are marked with cattle skulls. We chose the next-forward set, the rattlesnakes. I might have lost a half-dozen balls in the gnarl and scree a foot off the pure fairways. And it's almost true that I stayed in one bunker long enough to have written a legal brief asking the governor's mercy.

Trust me, those are mere details. Four guys never enjoyed rattlesnakes so much. Ask me one place to play forever, it's Sutton Bay.

If not there, at Bully Pulpit, our next stop, in western North Dakota. Shaw driving, Kindred the co-pilot, Nack quoting the last pages of Gatsby, Callahan studying the horizon-to-horizon prairie and announcing, "Don't know about you, but to my eye it looks a lot like South Dakota."

A young waitress in Bismarck tolerated our attempts at charm until someone told her we liked how they talked in the movie "Fargo," the way everyone meaning "Yes" always said "Yip."

"Nobody here liked that movie," she said.

Why not?

"Why do you think? Made us look like idiots."

It did?

"Yip."

Before Nack could beguile her with a Shakespearean sonnet, she said to someone, "Gonna push you out of here in that chair, pal." Callahan whispered behind his hand, "Threw a Fred Astaire at her, and it came out a Fred Mertz."

From Sutton Bay we drove 302 miles north and west to the small North Dakota resort town, Medora, hard by the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. There we played Bully Pulpit. Like Sutton Bay, it is a course uniquely blessed by geography. Golf Digest's Senior Editor for Architecture, Ron Whitten, has written about "a three-hole stretch in nearly undisturbed Badlands that encapsulates the stark beauty of North Dakota."

This was the west, and it was wild. Mesas in the distance. Ravines slicing into darkness. Boulders hanging on hillsides. Wire-sharp bushes daring us to reach in.

Look. There. Coming down that limestone hill, white dust rising. Imagination sees a pale horse and rider.

Nack said, "I feel like Billy the Kid."

Bully Pulpit's 15th is unforgettable, a par 3, 151 yards for us. The tee box hangs from a hillside. The green is on the far, far, dangerously far, dizzyingly far side of a canyon. Anything hit less than perfectly, you reload. There's a ravine left, scrubby hillside right, heaven only knows what in the void behind. Easier to land a 7-iron in a birdbath.

It is "one of the greatest par 3s I've ever played," said Whitten, who during course construction paid homage to Teddy Roosevelt and the landscape by calling the 15th tee "a bully pulpit." Thus, the course's name.

It's impossible to find a Sutton Bay/Bully Pulpit equivalent anywhere. We just wanted to live through our next stop, at Hardin in southeastern Montana. "You gotta be careful when you're in Hardin," my Montana friend Liz had warned. "It is a seriously scary place, especially for four guys in a motor home."

Callahan might die for his art, but not for a night in an RV. "It's the James Jordan Rule," he explained, James being Michael's daddy shot dead while sleeping in his car. So he and Nack opted for hotel rooms while Bud and I stayed in the barge for nightly fixes of Carl Spackler's guerrilla war against the gophers of Bushwood Country Club.