Other people's golf balls

Along the edge of the road were reminders of what happens if you mess with a highway. Dead things. A young rabbit, a yellowhammer, an unidentifiable black tuft with what appeared to be a row of small sharp teeth.

Also a sachet of tomato sauce, its red gore squelched fatally, finally into the highway's soft tar.

But I wasn't there to mess; I was there to walk, from Arrowtown to Lake Hayes. A grand plan to reduce my carbon footprint by taking public transport had commuted into a defiant plan to march there in the heat after I missed the bus.

The journey took an hour and a-half. It would probably have only taken an hour, but I marched much of it in socks (still defiantly, mind) because my sneakers started to rub the sauce out of my feet.

Someone later informed me a lovely walkway traces a parallel route, distant from the road and mostly through the gently rolling pastures of the golf resort Millbrook. But I knew nothing of that, and besides, marching along a highway with little or no pedestrian concession provided just the kind of excitement that is craved by risk-deprived Westerners everywhere.

It also provided excellent roadside pickings. One of the great inedible items prized by foragers, the golf ball, was in abundance along this highway, which is hemmed for a stretch by the Millbrook and The Hills courses.

Some sort of tournament was taking place beyond the fence of the latter, but I wasn't interested in that. I was interested in what my feet were sensing.

My tootsies, trained many years ago while attached to a child traipsing after a golf-attempting dad at Dunedin's Chisholm Park, have never lost the knack of detecting a golf ball in the rough.

Underfoot, this delicacy of the sports world feels harder than wood, rounder and rollier than a stone, and smaller than a pine cone; although the ridge pattern of pine cones can deceive the untrained tootsy.

Golf balls found in the wild are valuable because if you collect enough and then sell them in bulk, you can get maybe ten bucks for your trouble. Other treasures may offer a greater rate of return on the investment of trouble, but nonetheless a stumbled-upon golf ball is not to be sneezed at.

It is to be picked up.

So it was that I plucked four balls from the grassy margins between the courses and the highway. A yellow Top Flite, two white Callaways, and a white Titleist. (Is titleist the superlative of titly or something, is it?) And then marched on.

Lake Hayes was the destination because Lake Hayes was where I was staying for a bit, in the holiday home of someone from one of those quaint old asset-having generations.

There, I was to find the ball that would round out my holiday total of five. Five!

I went snorkelling in the lake, because a grand plan to reduce my carbon footprint by taking domestic holidays had bred a defiant plan to enjoy some "murk snorkelling".

Tropical fish, schmopical fish. I figured gazing into the endless green gloom of a cold New Zealand lake would be somehow therapeutic.

You ponder nothingness, observe the occasional bubble ascending, fend off the panic arising from the thought a bloated corpse could be burped from the depths at any moment, and finally arrive at acceptance (oh well, so what, a corpse may rise) and then peace.

It was a bit like that, except the nothingness was punctuated by some visible objects: a rusty barrel, a tyre, a sunken pair of swimming goggles which I avoided in case they encircled a human head.

Also, a golf ball. I held my breath, swam down and retrieved it from the slime at the bottom. I was surprised to find a sort of "If found, please return to" notice written on it. Surely golf balls, once lost, are fair game for finders?

Perhaps not. Partially clouded by a buildup of sludge, the letters could still be easily read: PROPERTY OF MILLBROOK.