Summer on the Green

Ah, these warm and sunny summer days... The time of open windows, sprouting gardens, overflowing shopping carts at Home Depot, increasingly frequent laundering of fencing apparel (or at least increasingly frequent olfactory reminders of this need), and golf.

Now, I tend to use golf courses mostly in winter, because my skis don’t slide nearly so smoothly over the sand traps in the heat of August. Also, I’d rather not disturb the nice people with bagfuls of clubs. My spindly ski poles, I suspect, would not put up much resistance against an enthusiastically wielded 9-iron.

This summer, though, I’m spending two days a week out on the links. No, Spaceballs fans, I’m not working on my putz. I’m working on my putt-putts. You see, my course of choice is of the miniature variety. Specifically, it is Galaxy Golf, the science-themed mini-golf course in the side yard of the local children’s science museum, the ScienCenter. I work for its greenskeeper.

Keeping the grass green is rather easier here than on traditional courses. Cut the sod into rectangles, add a few staples in strategic locations, reattach the edging, and you're good to go for years, no mowing or watering required. There's no driving range to worry about, unless you count the parking lot.

Wily groundhogs are less of a pest than spray-paint-wielding teenagers in the night. They're the only ones who make divots. (They can smash our bright blue loop-de-loop on Hole Seventeen and plug up the Black Hole with stones, but they haven't yet managed to break into our ball reservoir on the last hole!)

The biggest concern is making sure balls don’t get stuck. They occasionally disappear down the PVC pipes that lead from a higher green to a lower one. I wonder whether the balls do the same things in those pipes as I used to hear what happened in The Tube on the playground of Rose Glen Elementary... Balls also sometimes pause on their spiraling descent down the DNA model, and once in a while the black hole hole lives up to its name. Although balls don’t get stuck on Hole Two, its blatant ignorance of several basic theories of geometry nevertheless causes the greenskeeper no small amount of vexation.

Mostly the work involves renovating the holes after the winter, the sun, and the children and teenagers have taken their respective tolls. One of my first tasks involved replacing the mesh netting barrier between the holes and the parking lot. This gave me no end of glee when I went to practice that night because I got to tell people that I did fencing in the mornings and then I did fencing in the evenings. I didn’t tell many people that, come to think. It got a disappointingly cool reaction. But it made me happy all the same.

If you’ve never been Galaxy Golfing, I’ll take you on a verbal tour.

The Front Nine:
1: Ricochet your way around a carbon ring.
2: If you hit the ball straight, in theory, it should bounce off the parabola at the end and land in the hole at the parabola's focus.
3: Starting at a plastic owl, make your way down the food chain, past plastic squirrels, plastic insects, plastic "grass" (that was once an ugly doormat), and a wobbly wooden sun.
4: Putt through a slice of a very large tree.
5: Change your ball's potential energy to kinetic energy by putting from a platform into either a shallow or deep valley.
6: Putt just hard enough to keep your ball on a curved, borderless embankment.
7: Putt left-handed. (No easy outs for you leftys—try it right-handed.)
8: Your ball is now a giant particle of pollen, which you must hit up a ramp and into a giant flower.
9: Starting at Pluto, putt through a scale model of the solar system (complete with gravity wells around the planets [but not, of course, around Pluto]) and into the sun.

The Side Nine (They’re on the side of the building):
10: Choose the slippery plastic ramp or the frictionful turf ramp. This one’s called Science Friction.
11: Putt up a ramp and down the double helix of DNA.
12: Forget your club in favor of a catapult! Fling your ball onto rubber, metal, concrete, or sand to bounce into the hole.
13: If you can manage to putt a nice, narrow parabola, your ball will roll over the top of a barrier on a wide ramp.
14: Escape from the black hole by rolling your ball down a large funnel (like the kind you roll pennies down), aiming for the escape hole in the side instead of the event horizon hole at the bottom.
15: Avoid three pendulums, each with a different length and therefore a different period.
16: Get your ball through a narrow opening before two magnets fall slowly through metal tubes and block the way.
17: Try putting past a bee hive while wearing "bee goggles," kind of like strapping a kaleidoscope to your head. Now you know how bees see the world.
18: Putt onto a checkerboard of positive and negative numbers. You only get to aim at the hole when all the numbers you've landed on add to zero.
19: You made it! As a bonus, you get to send your ball down a sloping grid of bells. If it falls straight down the middle, a free game for you!