Myrtle beach craigslist white war4/11/2024 ![]() Insecticides, herbicides, and fertilizers are applied liberally to make greens and fairways pleasingly iridescent. Elaborate sprinkler systems serve up copious amounts of water. ![]() Golfers seem to think of such landscapes as nature perfected, designed for entertainment and absent messy cycles and seasons, certainly nothing red in tooth and claw. A golf course, after all, may inhabit 150 acres of verdant terrain, but it’s a tamed and highly stylized simulacrum of nature, not nature itself. The natural reclamation of a golf course is not a simple thing. Those were the courses that interested us. Most of the 22 courses that closed in Myrtle Beach turned into residential developments, but half a dozen weren’t converted in time. That worked until the housing bubble also burst and real estate prices plummeted. They leveled the courses and turned them into more housing tracts. The housing mania had so much momentum that when golf’s popularity waned in the second half of the decade, developers simply dropped golf from their equation. Developers put homes and condos alongside every fairway of every new course, using the locations to boost the homes’ sales prices. First the town fed on the sport’s allure, then the housing boom fed on the golf boom. Back then, golf’s popularity was soaring, and the demand for more courses seemed boundless. From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, five new courses opened every year in Myrtle Beach, until it boasted 120 courses – one for every 200 residents. Most of the town’s 28,000 citizens are transplanted Northerners, lured there by golf. We spent three July days exploring the town, and despite the swarming bugs and the blanket of humidity, we felt relief each time we turned off the highway and onto an abandoned course. Driving through Myrtle Beach felt like looking from a three-dimensional universe into Plato’s two-dimensional cave. They include beachwear shops where three t-shirts sell for ten dollars a store called “Vices” that sells cigarettes and liquor jaw-droppingly grandiose miniature golf courses like “Molten Mountain,” which features a smoking, three-story-high hump, around which the course meanders plus golf clothes stores, golf supply stores, and a golf shoe store. Strip malls line the town’s highways like paramecium. Although only 28,000 people live there, it looks like the capital of cheesy enterprise, as if strip clubs and cigarette outlets and fireworks stores from across the country had been shaken from their foundations and set down in Myrtle Beach, where they could all be together. ![]() Nature had been on a long losing streak in Myrtle Beach. In this contest, we were on nature’s side. Photographer Robert Dawson and I had come to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, one of the country’s top golfing destinations, to walk its derelict golf courses, to see what kinds of life persisted on a course after it died, to find out whether nature reclaimed it. The warning didn’t entirely displease us, for we didn’t intend to play golf. Before we walked on the abandoned golf course, the realtor charged with selling the condos around it told us that our plan was “suicidal.” We would run into copperhead snakes, he said, if not the bikers and meth cookers recently discovered on the property.
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