Building the Perfect Snowman

Inspired by the writings of Hunter S. Thompson

Prologue
As a matter of fact, someone is home, he simply chooses not to open the hidden
chamber doors of his heart cave for the masses to stand and stare into, proclaiming their certainty of the inevitable failure and foolishness, that journeys down roads less traveled always seem to illicit.
Hole One -- Par 4
Then (as you may recall) he was 54 years old. He stood at the threshold of yet another beginning of his life, but the magic caravan had sunk deep into a quagmire. All the goods were still on board but, if they could not be delivered on time, well, the elements and the thieves were only a day or two behind him. Smoke from his fires worked a twofold function, one of sustaining his hearth, the other belied his whereabouts. For you see, normally, by the time the smoke from his campfire became visible by the light of dawn, he was well away from his evening harbor.
Being thus stuck in the mud, he began devising ways to free the van from it’s earthly stronghold so that it might once again roll on upon it’s loftier mission, that of providing not only for the base requirements of body, but the continued development of matters of the heart and soul. Matters he knew he could not keep merely simmering on the back burner of some mortal stove indefinitely. One cannot help but feel a bit lowly when, as the result one of life’s corkscrewed twists of fate or,when one is inconvenienced by some nuisance that starts steering one off course, matters of true importance, start to slip. Slowly, a hand-to-mouth sort of mentality starts to prevail as it were. Tee shot, a wicked slice into an unplayable lie.
Being thus stuck in the mud, he found far too much time for introspection. Matters of quality of operations, at a personal level, regularly surfaced from a bottomless lake of of unconsciousness. The re-living of situations he felt he might have handled in a higher quality manner begin to drag him down, at times so low he wondered if the effort to resurface again was even worth the effort. Drop ball, penalty stroke, hitting three.
We all tend to operate under unwritten laws of human nature. Behavior outside of these loosely defined parameters, is tantamount to pulling rugs out from under people’s feet. Rugs that they tend to think of as bedrock. “They found your manuscript you crazy son of a bitch! Now all the cops in the North-state will be lookin’ fer ye!” Here it is in a nutshell folks! When a boy goes into the desert with a head full o’ magic, you can expect some of the pieces of the boy to be lost and some to be found. This does not, however, necessarily always result in a better boy. Third shot, bounces and hops down the fairway straight for the green, then plows into a steep walled sand trap. Buried! We may be here for awhile folks.
He had hoped to be in Zion National Park by now, but there he sat, stuck in the mud of a river bank that for all intents and purposes, may as well have been the Euphrates of Babylon. At night he dreamed of enormous hammers acrimoniously pounding on solid iron blocks the size of boxcars. Steel wheels sliced down an endless rail, lined with the faces of his ancestors stretching back to the cave painters of Altamira, their voices echoing down the corridors of all human existence. In the morning he awoke to an overcast dawn that fired red and orange across an eastern backdrop of mountains, still black with night. Water is started to boil, a stick is poked under the wire handle to lift the small pail from the fire. Fourth shot, he knows that the way the ball is laying, buried in the face of a bunker, he is going to have to really hit the sand hard, well behind the ball, to hopefully fluff it up and out.
Unfortunately, although the ball did pop up into the air, it had no forward momentum and his follow through resulted in a second ball strike. It sounded like this. First the muted THUMP of the club hitting the sand, then a distinctive little Click that, while it did get the ball moving forward and on to the green, is scored as Two strokes. His ball was 20 feet from the hole, laying Five.