For those of you with a Romantic Complaint like me ruins seem often more felicitous than construction. The falling down as graceful an arc as the rising up. The emptying as filling as a Big Gulp.

I have long been the lover of abandoned places. Growing up in a small house and a large family, escapes to vacant lots, shattered woodlots along the factories and polluted rivers near my home and even the feral beauty of weeds within the chain link confines of the freeway seemed more mine than anywhere else. I saw beauty in defeat, in the disposition of human ideals, where nature could creep in with grass-snake-ease and invisibility. Is there a course of therapy for this sort of thinking; a syndrome to be cured?

Or is the therapy the visiting of these places?

I am not talking about the Acropolis or Chichen-itza  when I say ruins. These places have been polished by dollars, or pesos, or euros, as the case may be, to touristic specifications. I am not talking about the monumental. Simply the abandoned. The old iron mines I botanized in on the Island of Elba, the old farmhouse whose roof had collapsed under the weight of moss on the Kitsap Peninsula where I looked for ‘relics’ with my friend Gavin.

And now closer to home the Tall Chief Golf Course. I decided to not back fill my visits there with a “brief history”. Though visiting abandoned sites can often be about what is no longer there. What is missing, or lost. I prefer to see what is there.

Yesterday I walked down at 6am. The valley was so quiet at that time of day I wondered why I never walked that early before.  When I left the road for the colonnaded confines of the golf course I could hear two great blue herons brawling with pterodactyl-like croaking. Both wanting the froggy pickings of the small pond there I imagine. Swallows whistled overhead, high-pitched screams though to them some morning song. They harmonized with the sharp whistles of western wood peewee.

I waded in the dew soaked grass like Wordsworth on a pilgrimage. But this was no Tintern Abbey.  The smooth fairways were now tousled waves of bent grass in bloom. The walls were Lombardy poplar colonnades, not a stone in sight, and though some struggled with age and decay a great portion were still vibrantly alive, nestled in the moist morning air, the not-quite-fog we call the marine layer. Though I knew it would burn off, and the expansive blue skies we’re enjoying in spades this summer would be back, it had a calming effect, like fall does when it moves into the valley slowly, gently. An unctuous blessing.

No future plans for the golf course make it even more desolate and at one’s disposal. When what-could-become and what–is-becoming mix. I would love to be reductive, to talk about saving nature from development or imagining a magnificent garden estate rising from these ruins. But that was not my goal. I just loved the silence. Though I did eye a few of the dead poplars along the road and thought about our chain saw. Each winter a storm invariably topples one of them right onto the power lines and we are plunged into darkness, sometimes for days.  I love the candlelight one has to burrow into to read. I don’t like the sound of our neighbors generator, nor ours when we realize this  may go on for a while and the freezer is dripping on the floor.

I chided myself for seeking out such a maudlin place on a summer’s morn. After all there are daisies in bloom, tomatoes ripening and boisterous ducks at home as the season continues to crescendo. This walk was not necessarily a meditation, nor as Wordsworth would have it a search for inspiration. I wasn’t sure why I came. Curiosity, I guess. Then a clutch of fledgling summer tanagers swooped by my head as if I were just another stump in their bug-hunting day. And the pop-pop-pop of a not so healthy engine went down the road and the barely incanted spell was broke. My stomach growled: Breakfast.

I picked a daisy from our garden when I got home and put it in a bottle on the kitchen counter. And began to chop potatoes.