Rattling Chains and Hyzering Around Memory: Disc Golf, Lost Things, and the Camp Fire

by Steven S. Vrooman

I just started writing a blog series at UDisc, a disc golf scoring app. My role at the UDisc blog is to write data analysis of amateur and professional stats. So the following piece, a personal tale, is not exactly in the focal area of the UDisc blog, much less my part in it. But sometimes pieces of writing just have to come out, and this is one of those pieces, so I'm publishing it here. 

If you are not a disc golfer, the first few paragraphs will be a bit dodgy with terminology. I could stop and explain it, but I feel like maybe you won't really care enough to figure out what an anhyzer is in order to read a piece about my sports relationship with my Dad and my son? Instead, imagine that I am talking about wizards, maybe, casting discs like spells through tree-lined courses. You don't have to know how we cast the spells, just that the words are magic and that eventually brightly colored discs clang into a basket. I think you will still find the piece worth the read.

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Disc golf is a game of time.

So many practice drives need to be thrown to break 400 feet. Many hours + a bag of putters is often just the ticket to getting decent. The rounds add up as the year goes by and we watch our average strokes decline.

And there are other kinds of time.

We move from summer shorts to whatever cold weather gear we can still X-step in by the time daylight shrinks enough to summon the glow discs. One day, eventually, that Z plastic will start to turn over. Small trees get larger and reach farther onto the edges of fairways. The big oak in middle loses its fight with winter storms one December, although we often still catch ourselves hyzering around its memory. Big rips that used to be easy get less so, and perhaps we grudgingly admit we're on the back nine of life.

Disc golf is a game of time.

And time comes with loss. Today I'd like to write about three lost things while I tell you a bit of a story.

Hole 8

On the brisk morning of November 8th, I was beginning work on my first post for UDisc, the list of the most popular courses in the United States, trying to figure out the right colors and sizes of dots to use on the map. Visualization always takes longer than you think it will, so I had to stop, eventually, to walk across campus to teach class to first-year students. Plato's cave. 

That walk always takes me right past the basket for Hole 8 on our university's’ disc golf course:

(Texas Lutheran University, Seguin, Texas. Photo by author.)

It’s a 554 foot par 4 right down the middle of campus with ceilings so low some days you have to duck. But we are redesigning the course to get the fairways away from the middle of the campus before a student gets hit by a loose Destroyer. So Hole 8 will disappear forever this winter. It’s for the best, but I will miss passing it on the way to class and having the chance to practice putts 100 feet from my office.

That day I was waxing nostalgic, and I thought about teaching my son to play right here on campus.

“S” Driver

On a whim, years before, during the dark times in which I’d sort of forgotten about disc golf, I bought two of these orange discs for a dollar apiece in a bin someplace:

(Photo by author.)

You can see this one is worse for wear, including an enormous gouge on the bottom from when I drove it right into a NO PARKING sign on Hole 18. I taught my son to play with this disc, or perhaps its identical twin, which was lost this summer on another course, perhaps forever, as so many discs are in Texas, on a runaway roller into a swamp.

It got me thinking back to when my Dad taught me to play, at Twila Reid Park in southern California. I remember constantly missing the curve around a mandatory light pole. I remember watching my Dad's drives sailing on to forever. And I remember what the chains sounded like when I made my first putt.

I taught my class, and as I walked back to my office past Hole 8, nostalgia hit again. I remembered the big numbers in the center of my Uncle Leo’s Midnite Flyers, but I didn’t remember what my Dad’s Wham-O discs looked like. I texted him at 12:31 CST to see if he could find them in the garage and take a picture for me.

I have never once in my life asked my Dad to go take a picture of something for me in his garage.

Wham-O World Class

31 minutes later my sister in Oregon messaged me this: “I don’t know if mom called you or not but everyone is evacuating there is a fire.”

At the exact moment of my text, my parents had just finishing a panicked stuffing of essentials into their cars and had started a journey that would take them 8 hours to drive 25 miles off the ridge. The Camp Fire had arrived in Magalia, California, “Just North of Paradise!” as the old motto went, and as you’ve probably seen, it was a monster of a fire.

After an hour just to drive out of their neighborhood, they reached a crossroads. To the right was what my Mom described as “a dragon of fire” roaring through the pine trees. They turned left, which saved their lives, but were out of cell contact until that evening, because the fire destroyed cell service as well as everything else. We all waited and waited and waited to hear from them.

My Dad did not get my text to take pictures of his discs until well after the garage and its contents had been obliterated, along with the house and generations of memories inside.

My folks are fine now, physically at least. They have an apartment. My Mom, just today, sent me a picture of the first beautiful, precious thing she’s allowed herself to buy since the fire. 

My son and I were about to drive on Hole 2 at the time she sent its image, so I sent her back a pic of him waving with his yellow Defender. She sent me back a picture of my Dad’s hands as he scrubbed ash off the few scorched ceramics they were able to salvage from the wreckage. I don’t think his back could take a round of golf these days, and their local course, Lava Creek, has “Fire damage. Closed until further notice” as its last UDisc course conditions update. But in that image it looked, while I was standing on a fairway listening to my son hit the chains, like Dad was holding a disc, not what was left of the china cabinet.

They wished Sam luck in the round and told him to beat the socks off of me.

We tied.

Real Talk

Listen to me now.

Someone taught you how to play this fantastic sport. Someone showed you how to splay your fingers on the putter, how to ease off on that natural hyzer, how to get more distance by not trying so hard. Someone out there was with you when you first nailed a putt.

Or, reader, if you don't play disc golf, you have similar memories about something important someone introduced you to along the way.

I am lucky enough that that my someone is still here. If you are also so lucky, give them a call. Let them know what it means to you that they shared this game that is still a part of your life. And let them know the other things, too, the things you don’t usually tell them out loud. The holidays are coming up. It’s a good time for such things.

It’s also a good time for some rounds of disc golf. I’ve got some nieces and nephews to visit and a bag of old discs. It's time to pass down a family tradition.

Disc golf is a game of time.

It’s time to rattle some chains.

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There are lots of ways to help the thousands of newly homeless people from Butte County as Christmas approaches, if you are so inclined. There are the traditional routes like the Red Cross or Salvation Army, a number of GoFundMe pages, and local brewery Sierra Nevada is brewing up a Butte County Resilience IPA and donating 100% of sales.

(The Resilience! Photo by author)