A Northern Michigan Golf Story About Beauty, Pain, and Benadryl
A few years back, I’m up in northern Michigan with my brother and a couple friends, playing this absolutely gorgeous course called Black Forest at Wilderness Valley. And when I say “up north,” I mean way up north. Outside of Gaylord. (Yup! Real City!) Thirty to forty minutes of driving through trees, unpaved roads, and the kind of woods where you half-expect to see black bears, deer, or a toothless guy with a banjo watching you from behind a pine tree.
You don’t just end up at this place by accident.
The course itself? Unreal. Classic northern Michigan. Tall pines, rolling terrain, pristine fairways. The kind of setting where you immediately think, wow, I should be way better at golf than I actually am to be out here.
Spoiler: I was not.
This course was hard. Like, legitimately hard. Like my brother quit on 14, sold his clubs for diaper money and didn’t golf again for a decade kind of hard! And as a Snowman Golfer, my scorecard that day had a lot of eights on it. Par threes? Doubles and triples. Par fours? Also doubles and triples. At some point, you just stop doing math and start telling yourself that today is about “the experience.”
Which, to be fair, it was.
Because when you’re surrounded by that much beauty, the forests, the quiet, the feeling that you’re a long way from real life, you can almost convince yourself the score doesn’t matter. Almost.
All day long, we’re getting assaulted by black flies and horse flies the size of small drones. You swat. You curse. You hop in the cart and drive away. It’s annoying, but manageable. A couple beers in, you power through.
Then we get to around the 12th hole.
I reach down to grab my beer, and out of absolutely nowhere, a wasp the size of a flying dinosaur comes screaming out of the sky and hammers me directly on the top of my left hand.
I didn’t swing at it. I didn’t provoke it. I didn’t even acknowledge its existence before this moment. Maybe it thought the Labatt Blue was his. I don’t know. But this thing came in hot and committed.
Up until this exact moment in my life, I did not believe I was allergic to bees.
Ten minutes later, that belief was no longer holding up.
My hand didn’t just swell where I got stung. The entire thing blew up. Like a rubber glove you inflate into a balloon. My fingers looked like sausages. I could barely grip the club. It was legitimately alarming.
The stinger itself felt less like a sting and more like getting stabbed with a hypodermic needle. Or maybe a prison shank. Either way, this was not “walk it off” territory.
Now, a rational person might say, Hey, maybe we stop golfing and seek medical attention.
But here’s the thing.
I play maybe five times a year. I’m four hours from home. I’m up north. I’m with my brother. I’m on one of the most beautiful courses I’ve ever seen.
So obviously… I finish the round.
Was this smart?
Absolutely not.
Do I remember my score?
No. It was definitely over 100. It would’ve been over 100 even without the dinosaur wasp.
But I remember the round. I remember laughing about it. I remember the ridiculousness of trying to swing a golf club with a hand that looked like it belonged to a cartoon character.
And from that day forward, I learned two very important things.
One: apparently, I might be allergic to bees.
Two: always carry Benadryl in your fucking golf bag.
Because when you’re a Snowman Golfer, the scorecard fades fast.
But the stories?
Those stick forever.