WILLIAMSBURG — How many times have we driven by a fondly remembered meadow and cursed the big yellow machines ripping it apart to make room for one garish enterprise after another? In due time we won’t even recall what was there. But this is not a story about greed or loss of habitat. This poses a different question: Can something great be replaced by something as great?
There was nothing quite like it, the Beaver Brook Golf Course, called “Bogey Brook” by many for its challenging and often bedeviling holes, not to mention a fast-moving stream that appeared and re-appeared at inopportune times. But it was a well-kept little gem smack on the main drag (Route 9) and it didn’t cost a fortune to play and a lot of our kids grew up there.
Beaver Brook is rewilding, slowly returning to what it was before it became a golf course in the 1960s, where parts of the brook were diverted to make it more difficult for golf. Soon to be known as the Beaver Brook Conservation Park, the former clubhouse will serve as headquarters for the Trustees of Reservations and its affiliate, the Hilltown Land Trust, whose aim is to create accessible trails throughout the park, foster diverse habitats and begin the ecological restoration of some 250,000 acres.
You can’t help but take a few air-swings as you begin to tread familiar ground, but instead of dozens of duffers hauling their bags from hole to hole, it’s dogs, far as the eye can see, pulling their owners from one sweet-smelling rock to another.
“We love it!” cries Stacy Calabieta, a sign language interpreter from Williamsburg, hiking with her dog Totoro, 9, who’s totally blind. “It’s nice to have the openness of this, so he’s not bumping into stuff. He has a rare retinal disease but he doesn’t complain — you put his little coat on him and he’s out the door.”
Calabieta never set foot on the place when it was open for golf. “It was nice for the golfers before but I think it’ll be nicer for everyone now, especially animals,” she says.
As the place becomes more and more wild, the grass will get too high for walking—it’s too high for golf already—but the old cart paths provide for easy footing, their ongoing maintenance part of the land trust’s game plan.
The First Tee. Already you’re in trouble. The par-4 features a series of descending knolls that don’t help a bouncing ball as much as you’d think — and I believe we’ve mentioned the stream that guards the green. But the second hole is a thing of beauty, a 90-degree dogleg that opens to an enclosed nook, where three deer once emerged from the woods and crossed the green, regarding your foursome’s balls with disinterest.
It is here where you are gregariously greeted by one George Yeager and his dog, Dexter. “Just a wonderful piece of property!” says Yeager, opening wide his arms. The Montana farmer and rancher has been in town a couple of weeks and walks it every day. He’s here visiting his girlfriend, a retired professor from Smith. “She’s convalescing. I came back to help her out.”
“I’d driven by (the course) before but I’m not a golfer. I tried it a few times but I suck,” he said with a grin. “What they’re doing here, trying to find the wetlands — I’m so thankful that there are organizations that work to make this happen.”
Yeager likens the park to the spacious prairies back home, except for the trees. “When Catherine and I met at Middlebury College in Vermont, it was too many trees for me.”
Back on the ranch, Dexter helps herd Black Angus cattle. “He’s old (11) like me (74) but we both have to keep moving. We calve in March.”
Yeager left ranching as a young man but went back. The deciding factor? “Trees!” he says with a laugh, yet he and his ranch dog go searching over the next hill for more.
Of daughters and sons
Golf courses are insanely costly to maintain — all that watering, mowing, spraying and the fine-touch manicuring of greens. You should see the greens now — oy! A squishy smorg of bootprints, pawprints and pinecones. The sport is also derided by some as snooty, with the carts and cocktails and such, but Beaver Brook’s regulars were a mixed bunch, including a father and son, both tradesmen, who washed up at 6 p.m., played until it was too dark to see, left their balls on the fairway and came back at dawn to finish the round before work. Golf carts and cocktails eschewed.
And now come a father and daughter from Williamsburg, artists Kevin and Greta Cooper, walking with dog Hopper, named for painter Edward Hopper, a favorite of both. “Such a solid use for repurposing this land,” Kevin said. “You can go up by the snowmobile trails and circle around. You can have fields and forests, very comprehensive if you want to be outdoors walking dogs.”
“Williamsburg has great trails,” says Greta. “What’s different about this one, it’s very open, very easy to navigate, and they left all the bridges.”
Kevin gave up golf years ago when it got too expensive, he says.
“At least you don’t have to pay for hiking here,” his daughter notes.
The hidden park
The (gulp) Third Tee. A challenge for the real golfer, let alone stumblebums like you. The deception! It looks like wide open space, except that you smash your drive from way back here hemmed in by evergreens, so you overcompensate and end up on the 5th (wrong) fairway way over there. Even if you bomb it square down the middle, and admire its unerring flight, you’ll probably end up fishing it out of Beaver Brook itself, which cuts brazenly across the fairway like an electric fence. Many golfers carry retriever poles for such occasions; the stumblebum must choose to either take off shoes and socks and start wading, or say the hell with it, take a drop and move on. But today, it’s downright weird to peer down into Beaver Brook and not spot someone’s long-lost Titleist. The brook, alas, no longer feasts on golf balls.
But what’s this? As you take out your imaginary driver from your make-believe bag, you squint at something behind you worth exploring, an old quaint trail from another time with a rickety brook-crossing bridge — a park within a park. This apparent snowmobile trail would have been noticed by very few golfers — your playing partners would have said, “What the hell you doin’? Get over here and hit your damn ball!”
Anyway, if you can squeak through this hole with a double-bogey, and not have your ball roll back down from the elevated green like a frightened quail, you will find yourself on the legendary 4th, which features a target that tightly hugs Route 9. Balls have hit that road, and balls have hit cars, and motorists have gone on national television to speak of it. Though not Tiger-strong enough to send one to the street, you (like many) have shanked your ball to the 6th (wrong) green but (unlike many) actually played it out. “I’m looking at a birdie putt!” you cried in defense. The putt (like most) was missed.
Then, somewhere between the 6th and 7th fairways you run into Jenny Jackson and her dog Cali, who said she started exploring the trails even before the transaction was announced. Though never a golfer, she’s familiar with the thwack of well-struck ball.
“We live right around the corner, but never dreamed we’d be walking our dog here. My husband once tried to cross-country ski here and got yelled at,” says Jackson, a longtime “flex” nurse at Baystate, trained to go on 20 different units like a pinch hitter. “I love it! There’s a group of us who deploy out, wherever the need is for the day,” she explains. “It’s wonderful because were not part of the floor politics, they’re happy to have a nurse, and we get a little extra money for being flexible. Every day is a new day.” And off the two ramble, Cali leading the way as their adopted path beckons.
Ah, the 8th. Heroically remembered as the site of your first (and only) birdie, where you somehow managed to crank a 3-wood over the pond, over the large bunker guarding the green and onto the green itself for a 10-foot putt. Holy Hannibal! You dropped your putter and babbled into your phone to son Pat. The next time you played 8, you hit it over the pond, the bunker and also the green, never to be seen again. Ah, the 8th.
At the 9th, you air-swing a gorgeous drive from that overhanging cliff … and … and … did it clear the brook? Yes! Always room for hope and renewal at Bogey Brook Park.