Free Walking with Jack by Don J. Snyder

than Ringo Starr before he had one hand mauled by a pit bull. “Soap,” who never washed, and “Rotar,” who had worked the grounds crew at an RAF base and learned to roll his cigarettes
inside
his pocket in the gale winds. When I explained that I was down to my last pack of American cigarettes and at the equivalent of almost $12 a pack would not be replenishing them, they took out their papers and gave me a lesson in rolling my own. I was surprised to see that they used little white filters. “We’re tight,” the one I could understand said. “You can’t smoke the last wee bit of tobacco, so you end up wasting it without a filter.”
    That began a conversation about the cost of living and the Yanks who came to Scotland “on holiday,” as they put it. I pointed out right away that I was not one of them. “I’ve got four kids in college at the same time,” I explained. “I need to earn every penny I can and send it straight home.” They nodded with sympathy and together explained that at the Old Course I would average two rounds a day at £60 per round. I did the math inside my head. In a season that lasted around two hundred days that was around forty grand in U.S. dollars. Music to my ears, and I immediately set down two objectives for the six months ahead of me—learn to be a damned good caddie for Jack, and earn $40,000 for my family.
    The rain, which had been coming down in sheets, suddenly got even heavier, peppering the metal roof above us like machine-gun fire. “Get yourself some good waterproofs, tops and bottoms,” one fellow said. “Gore-Tex. Nothin’ else works in this shite.”
    The whole time we were in the shed I wondered how difficult itwas going to be for me to be accepted by the other caddies. Tonight I made up my mind that I’m not going to tell anyone that I’m a writer. If someone asks, I’ll say that I was a teacher before I came to Scotland. I won’t say I was a college professor, just a teacher. Wherever Americans go in the world they think they’re better than everyone else, and if word gets out that I’ve been on the
Today
show, and chumming with Hollywood stars on the set of a movie I wrote, and riding through Chicago in Oprah’s limo, I won’t stand a chance. In truth, those things are faraway memories now, just things that happened to me across the years and don’t have anything to do with why I’m here. And none of these boys I will work with comes from a more modest childhood than my own, and so I have earned my humility.

      MARCH 26, 2008     
    I rode the number 95 bus to St. Andrews this morning, a journey of maybe twenty miles from Elie that takes just about an hour as the coach sails past the North Sea and oceans of rich farmland at a pretty good clip, then crawls through the narrow streets of villages named St. Monans, Crail, Pittenweem, Anstruther, and Kingsbarns before it reaches downtown St. Andrews. The ride took me past five golf courses, counting the new Castle Course, which is still under construction on a cliff just outside the town of St. Andrews.
    From the bus station I walked four blocks to the caddie pavilion just off the 1st tee of the Old Course, where I waited outside in the rain with half a dozen on-duty caddies who glanced at me and nodded their acknowledgment when I moved in next to them under the overhanging roof. I figured all of them to be younger thanI by anywhere from ten to forty years. Dressed in clothes that had seen better days, smoking their hand-rolled cigarettes down to their knuckles, they glanced up at the low gray sky from time to time like sailors or fishermen looking for a break in the weather. There was a weary dignity about them that I found instantly compelling. I couldn’t understand most of what they were saying to each other, but just being in their presence for half an hour, I realized that they were not merely talking to each other; they were telling stories. I’ve never been around caddies. I never