“Would you like a golf cart?”

We pull up to the maintenance building in our County truck. As usual, the round label on the truck: “for official use only” is the only thing that validates our presence as we drive on to Private Property. Today private property is the exclusive grounds of the Whidbey Island Country Club. We’re here to survey a pond in the middle of the golf course. Stepping from our truck, the first thing the maintenance director asks us is: “So, do you want a golf cart?” Now on new territory, our legitimacy rides on a new vehicle – the golf cart.

Mechanically simple yet perfectly functional, the golf cart takes us through the waves of golfing ladies, on the way to their first tournament. “If there is one thing that bothers golfers, it’s a disturbance on the green”, Chris tells me. So once out of the shelter of the golf cart we crouch in wetland plants, until the golfing ladies have finished their put, then dash on to the next vegetated clump.

I didn’t think that there’d be much to see in a pond in the middle of a golf course. I was expecting the most artificial and degraded pond possible. After all, it is surrounded by a golf green- one of the most intensely manicured, fertilized and otherwise chemically enhanced green-spaces imaginable in America that can still actually be said to consist of living things. The pond was nearly as tuned to meet human desires for nature. The maintenance director explained that the pond was designed for functionality. The water stored in the pond is pumped to irrigate the green, and a high cement wall on it’s southern end was designed to hold back up to 500-year floods- as flood control is necessary to protect the upscale condominiums that line the golf course. Vegetation within the pond is controlled by “grass carp”, a fish that can eat any of that ugly vegetation floating on the water’s surface.

We manage to complete our survey, and sketch out the story of a wetland that works perfectly to “not disturb” the golfers and maintain their needs.