A Poor Man’s Mid Pines
in a Poor State’s
Fallout Zone
Pine Creek Golf Course
Purvis, Mississippi
Greens Fee: $12 to walk 18 holes
Date Played: May 12, 2020
An earthquake rolled through this place in 1964. And like a lot of disasters that have befallen Mississippi, this one was self-inflicted.
By the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union and the United States had agreed to strict limits on testing nuclear weapons. But neither country fully trusted the other to abide by the deal. In particular, U.S. scientists feared that the Soviets could evade detection of their nuclear tests by performing their blasts deep underground. So the U.S. decided to test the idea by doing the same thing.
For that, it needed huge underground salt domes and a hospitable state government. Mississippi offered both.
So on October 22, 1964, 20 miles southwest of Hattiesburg and half a mile down, the U.S. set off a small, 5.3-kiloton nuke (the Hiroshima bomb had been 15 kilotons). As Atlas Obscura records, the experiment rattled the local community — literally.
Baxterville, Miss.’s postmaster comforts his dog, Old Blu, following the area’s bumpy nuclear test in October 1964. Photo credit: Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Steve Thompson and his family had cleared out of their house for a picnic at Lake Columbia, about 10 miles away. They watched a wave spread across the water—and then through the ground underneath them.
“It was like being in a boat,” says Thompson, who was 15 at the time. “There was two big waves and a bunch of ripples.”
To Brenda Foster, “It felt like the Earth just raised up and set back down.”
“The windows on the house were shaking and rattling, and you could see the chimney on the house cracked all the way down,” says Foster, who was a few days shy of her 10th birthday. “That’s about all I remember of that, but I never will forget it.”
The New York Times reported that the blast lifted the ground four inches: “A cloud of dust resembling a large puff of smoke went up over the detonation site and the ground rose, setting off a ripple that lifted the surface as it moved outward.”
“The earth rose and roiled in waves,” Mashable records, “pecans fell from trees, dogs howled in fear, creeks ran black with disturbed sediment, and buildings thirty miles away swayed for minutes on end.”
Pine Creek Golf Club in nearby Purvis is just 20 miles east of the blast site. It opened in 1963, the year before the nuclear test. The blast at 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning would have been felt here, too.
And an earthquake triggered by a nuclear bomb might be the only thing that could make Pine Creek more remarkable.
. . .
Everything about Pine Creek is unassuming, beginning with its entrance.
A parking lot slammed full of cars on a Tuesday morning was my first clue; the line of golf carts queued up behind the first tee was my next. I’d arrived nearly 90 minutes before my tee time, hoping to take off early and blow through the course quickly. But there was no chance of either: Pine Creek was slammed. I couldn’t decide whether the pandemic-created free time or the preposterously low greens fees ($25 during the week for 18 holes and a cart; $12 to walk 18) deserved the credit, but either way, I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. So I checked in, added a bucket of range balls to my tab, and decided to mull it over on the driving range (which really is less a driving range than it is just a big backyard behind the clubhouse).
In between 6-iron shots that wouldn’t stop leaking right, I kept peering back toward the first tee. The line wasn’t getting any shorter: new groups were showing up and taking off every seven minutes. One bucket of balls turned into two. Finally, less than 20 minutes before my tee time, I wandered back into the pro shop and asked whether any more groups were scheduled to go off before me. “Not at the moment,” the teenaged cashier said. I groaned; he’d been sliding walk-ins in front of me all morning. If I’d just asked to move up when I arrived, I probably could’ve snuck in an hour ago.
Regardless, now it was my turn. And standing on the tee box, I finally got my first glimpse of why the parking lot was full. The opening tee shot plays downhill into a dogleg right, to a small green perched sharply uphill that gets blinder the closer you get. Framed by pine trees and natural, ragged gashes of exposed dirt, the scene was unmistakably familiar: this wasn’t so different than Mid Pines’ first hole. And Pine Creek makes no effort to hide its quirkiness: the second and third holes are back-to-back par-3s, and the sixth climbs uphill with every shot blind until the player is on the green. Even Pine Creek’s length (6,152 yards from the tips) is comparable to Mid Pines (6,163 from the white tees).
Pine Creek isn’t without its shortcomings, but even most of those are more endearing than not. Light conditioning makes it difficult to figure out where the fairway ends and the rough begins, but the minimal watering makes that distinction less important than usual: the fairways are firm, and the grass to either side is too thin to be much of a penalty. The putting surfaces are small, but Pine Creek has no bunkers — so there’s no reason for players not to roll approaches onto the greens rather than trying to throw darts with their irons.
Pine Creek’s quirky ninth hole is a short, sharp dogleg right that requires a fade off the tee, as close as the player can bear to a pond that separates the fairway from the green.
Not all the course’s eccentricities are forgivable, though. On the tough par-3 second hole (227 yards) and again on the short par-4 fifth (261 yards), the layout obstructs tee shots with a wall of towering pine trees in front of the green — too tall to fly, and navigable only by slinging a wild, right-to-left shot around and behind. Even if there’s some arguable value to including a feature like that, twice in four holes is overkill; as Lyle Lovett explained, once is enough. Still, a $12 greens fee buys a golf course a certain amount of forgiveness.
If there’s any downside to cheap, fun golf, it’s that Pine Creek’s secret seems to be out among locals. By the time I walked off the seventh green, the tee sheet full of foursomes (and sometimes more) had caught up with the course: I was still standing on the eighth tee waiting on the fivesome in front of me to clear the fairway when the foursome behind me came off the seventh green — four senior citizens crammed into two carts, smoking cigarettes and blaring Elvis Presley’s “American Trilogy.” After watching me stand on the tee box for a few seconds, one of the men shouted, “Hit up into ’em! I know the sonsabitches, they won’t do nothing!”
After nine holes, I walked off. The course was great — but not even the Elvis tunes blaring behind me could make the waits tolerable. It’s easy to see how Pine Creek could attract such a full tee sheet on a random Tuesday — it’s fun, cheap, and doesn’t stand on ceremony. And it’s easy to understand why Pine Creek would want to pack in as many players as possible: with the economy sliding into a crater, you take any revenue you can get. But the reality is that the crowding compromised the experience: Pine Creek’s greatest asset is its fun, laid-back atmosphere, and waiting on fivesomes to clear a green is neither of those things.
. . .
Behind the ninth green at Pine Creek.
The October 1964 nuclear test wasn’t exactly the end of the story.
Two years later, the U.S. set off a second nuclear device in the same salt dome that had contained the first blast. But the second test was much smaller — and together, the two tests effectively disproved the theory that large tests could be performed secretly underground. With their conclusion in hand, the feds packed up. Local hopes that the tests might turn Mississippi into a nuclear technology nursery faded away like fallout particles in the breeze. Instead, the blasts went down merely as the U.S.’s only two nuclear tests known to have occurred east of the Rocky Mountains.
There is a danger of going back to a place like Pine Creek. There is a danger that it won’t be as enjoyable as you remember it being — that the surprise that comes only from a first impression won’t lift up the experience the second time around. Courses more heralded than this one have been second-time letdowns.
What’s certain, though, is that I’ve paid a lot more for a lot less than I found at Pine Creek. And whether it holds up on a return visit is an experiment worth running.
I’ll be back, hopefully on a day when a lot fewer people are enjoying the secret they’re in on. But I will be back.
. . .
You might also enjoy reading…