Don’t Forget Your Roots
St. John Golf & Country Club
At least 5 times a year, I’ve made the drive from home (whether that was Wenatchee or the Seattle area) through the rolling hills of the Palouse to Pullman. We rarely took the same way there and back, especially when I was younger and we’d take the back roads through the area where my dad grew up.
Sometimes we’d stop to see my grandma who still lived where my grandfather had tricked her into going after getting married during WWII while he was serving in England - a town as aptly named is it could be: Dusty, Washington. Other times we’d stop to see our family in La Crosse (honestly not sure how that town gained that name…). The point being, I spent a lot of my life among those Palouse hills - running around like an idiot, learning how to drive as my dad gave me the wheel to his Buick LeSabre or our Suburban when I was like 12.
I got to thinking the other day: my kids won’t have those experiences. We live on the “West Side,” where you can’t very well have a 12 year old driving… and honestly, that’s probably for the better. But I don’t want them to forget where “we” came from. So, I threw our clubs in the car…
Whenever we drove through St. John growing up, I looked at the small golf course that had a couple holes running alongside a State Highway 23 - usually empty, sometimes with a lone golfer out there.
When my son and I packed up the car for your annual father/son trip to Pullman, I threw our clubs in the car. I was finally going to play that course.
So we did - and it was everything I expected it to be: Fun, unassuming, flat. It was also a few things I didn’t expect it to be: incredibly well-maintained, filled with some fun shots, and weirdly nostalgic (even though I’d never played there before).
The greens fees are paid in a drop box (or by mobile - which blew my mind, if I’m honest) - $18 gets you as much golf as you can play in a day. It’s only 9 holes, but if you double up, you’re playing 5,752 yds at a Par 70 from the blues.
As we finished up, only seeing one other person around the place (a guy who showed up, looked like he checked the tee sheet where I’d signed us up and noted that we paid), my son asked “Did Papa and his dad used to play golf here?” I honestly didn’t know the answer… I forgot to ask my dad all those years (but they didn’t - it opened in 1995, my grandfather died before I was born). I said “Maybe they did…” but ultimately the important part was that we did and that I had created our own little connection to Eastern Washington and the Palouse.
It wasn’t as cool as driving a car along the winding back roads or rolling around on four wheelers or even just running around the “farm,” but it’s something that’s ours.
