It’s a Beautiful Day
on the Edge of Civilization
The Atchafalaya Golf Course at Idlewild
Patterson, Louisiana
Greens fee: $40
Date: October 6, 2019
Highway 90 might as well be the border of the habitable world.
For most of its arc through south Louisiana, from Lafayette in the west to New Orleans in the east, the road separates civilization from wilderness: tiny places like Berwick, Patterson, and Amelia cling to the highway, with miles of untamed swamp stretching southward to the Gulf of Mexico. This is the Atchafalaya Delta, part of the system of deltas that negotiate the complicated meeting between America’s second-longest river and the sea. It is a stunning complex of lakes, swamps, and bayous whose creation is owed to the same force that formed most of this landscape: the Mississippi River.
This place very nearly had a front-row seat to the end of the world — as far as the people in this part of the world would have been concerned, anyway. Throughout its history, the Mississippi River’s path has swung across south Louisiana, constantly in search of the easiest route to the Gulf of Mexico — and, every few hundred years, choosing a new path. By the middle of the Twentieth Century, the Mississippi was on the verge of adopting a new route: the Atchafalaya River. As John McPhee explained in a 1987 New Yorker story, this portended catastrophe:
For the Mississippi to make such a change was completely natural, but in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature. The consequences of the Atchafalaya’s conquest of the Mississippi would include but not be limited to the demise of Baton Rouge and the virtual destruction of New Orleans. With its fresh water gone, its harbor a silt bar, its economy disconnected from inland commerce, New Orleans would turn into New Gomorrah.
Today, thanks to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Mississippi River’s path is settled. Not only is the Atchafalaya stable, it has the distinction of being the only portion of the Mississippi Delta not losing land, but actually adding land.
With all that extra land, why not build a golf course?
. . .
The challenging par-4 fourth hole at Atchafalaya Golf Course.
Perhaps the Atchafalaya Golf Course at Idlewild never should have been built. One need not be a zealous minimalist to understand that swampland is not an ideal site on which to build a golf course. One need not be an environmentalist to acknowledge that spraying fertilizers and pesticides across 175 acres of the river delta’s doorstep is inadvisable. And one need not be a historian to see that, in the 2000s, American golf was being oversupplied with courses.
Against this backdrop, St. Mary Parish began planning Atchafalaya Golf Course at least as early as 2002. It hired architect Robert von Hagge, whose credits included Miami-Dade County’s palatial municipal course Crandon Golf. Construction took two years at a reported cost of $4.5 million; more than a half-million yards of soil were moved (Tom Fazio moved a comparable volume to build Fallen Oak Golf Course in Mississippi). The course finally opened in 2005 to great fanfare; the American Petroleum Institute rented the course out on opening day.
Driftwood, no doubt in ample supply in the surrounding swamp, serves as Atchafalaya’s 150-yard fairway markers.
Then came the recession. And the bursting of the golf course bubble. And golf’s years-long trend of diminishing rounds played. And the unavoidable fact that Atchafalaya Golf Course is in the middle of nowhere. By 2018, Atchafalaya had lost money for 11 straight years.
Thankfully, St. Mary Parish taxpayers’ financial sinkhole is golfers’ gain: Atchafalaya Golf Course is a fun, cheap, uncrowded, and frequently thoughtful layout in an interesting part of the world. Its broad fairways are unnaturally flat, but they are girded by impressive (albeit equally unnatural) mounding and flanked by remarkable bunkering. Water hazards are ever present but, given the landscape, an unavoidable reality. As long as your local government isn’t taking the hit for it, Atchafalaya is a lot of fun.
. . .
My preference for architectural minimalism isn’t a religious adherence; it’s a practical reflection of my experience that natural features are more fun to play around, and that manufactured features generally feel contrived. Atchafalaya is undoubtedly a manufactured experience, but somehow it avoids contrivance. Its land is mostly flat, but it makes up for that monolithism with thoughtfully located hazards and length (7,533 yards from the tips, and 5,932 yards from the white tees; I played from the blue tees, set at 6,520 yards). And the course makes the most of its setting to avoid feeling like a geographically misplaced gimmick: swampy forests frame many of the holes, and impressive mounding — obviously manmade, but impressive nonetheless — line the fairways. Thoughtful bunkering punctuates the design, from small pot bunkers to large fairway traps with flowing edges, all placed to require genuine thought about how to navigate them.
The fifth hole’s meticulously carved but patently neglected greenside bunker at Atchafalaya Golf Course.
The second hole is representative. After a manageable par-4 first, No. 2 is a long par-3 (241 yards from the tips, and 209 yards from the blue tees) with a green whose front edge boomerangs around a small pot bunker — but whose real danger is the large, meandering sand trap behind the green. The length of the hole and the front-and-center pot bunker advocate for a shot that prioritizes distance over accuracy, and the broad woodlands backdrop creates the impression of an expansive landing area where one can do no wrong. But going long is the worst possible outcome; the smarter play is to land the ball short on the right side of the pot bunker and run the ball onto the green. Length, in and of itself, is a crutch; but Atchafalaya shows that when purposefully joined with other elements, length can be a legitimate component of a strategic golf course.
A series of grassy pot bunkers punctuates the left side of the 13th fairway. Unlike the fairway bunkers at Black Bear Golf Course in Delhi, La., these bunkers are not converted sand traps: aerial photos dating back nearly to Atchafalaya Golf Course’s creation confirm that these bunkers have never been filled with sand; they play as they were designed.
The problem with Atchafalaya’s bunkering is not one that von Hagge could have anticipated: they have been badly neglected — unmanaged with weeds growing in some places, and apparently abandoned completely in other places (images of Black Bear Golf Course, another Audobon Golf Trail site, spring to mind). Both Google Earth and Golf Advisor (equal repositories of human knowledge, to be sure) suggest that this is a recent development, and the course insists that bunkers “will be reworked in the near future.” In the meantime, sand traps are being played as ground under repair.
This undoubtedly deprives Atchafalaya of putting its best foot forward — but for a 15-handicap whose sand game is an abomination, it also eliminates the strategic disincentive of challenging greenside bunkers. After my first five holes, I was just 2-over; I walked off the front nine in 40. A triple bogey and double bogey on the back nine deflated my hopes, but I backed them up with back-to-back birdies (there’s a first time for everything) on the par-3 15th and the par-5 16th. As someone who’d never broken 85, I suddenly became grateful for the empty back nine.
I never add up my scores in the middle of a round, but I stood on the 18th tee under the assumption that bogey or better probably would leave me with a career-low round. After pulling my tee shot onto the upslope of one of Atchafalaya’s large, trademark fairway mounds, I was left with no realistic chance at par, so I decided to play for bogey. A soaring 9-iron got me back in the fairway, and a wedge left me 20 feet from the hole. My first putt finished four feet short, but the dead-center of the cup claimed my second putt — my personal record-setting 84th stroke of the day.
. . .
Bold bunkering along the right side of the 13th fairway gives way to a large water hazard, both of which steer cautious players away from the hole’s well protected green.
If Atchafalaya owes its existence to the development boom that gave America countless golf courses that never should have been built, then it lives its life in the same aftermath in which most of those courses find themselves: whether they should’ve been built, they were built, so now what?
Governments frequently offer public services without expectation of turning a profit: libraries, parks, police departments. Municipal golf courses need not be treated differently. If St. Mary Parish’s taxpayers are willing to swallow a few hundred thousand dollars per year as the cost of enjoying Atchafalaya, then that’s a reasonable decision.
The Atchafalaya Delta itself is a story of growth surrounded by reasons to assume that growth is not possible. If the delta can make it, then perhaps so too can the golf course that shares its name.
. . .
You might also enjoy reading…