Cobble Beach

I played golf for a few years in my youth. At one time or another I played most of the courses around the Guelph area, but my go-to place was Victoria Road West, owned by the DeCorso family. One of the DeCorso kids actually played some minor pro golf for a few years; I played a round with him when he was about thirteen. He beat me handily.

I drive out Victoria Road from time to time to this day. Victoria Road East appears to yet be in business, but the West course has long been subdivided into residential development. That's kinda what's happened to the sport of golf; it's become the plaything of real estate developers.

Had breakfast today with my old pal Kipling at the Teviotdale Truck Stop. As usual, we traded notes on what it's like getting old. We are in agreement that it ain't fucking great.

But what can you do?

Kipling is an accomplished herbalist, and at the conclusion of our get-together we transferred a couple of plants from his van into my Toyota. Although the back windows of my car are heavily tinted, when you looked in the back you could see the unmistakable profile of the weed 'o wisdom. Although the shit is allegedly legal now, I figured that profile was just asking for a hassle in the event that an OPP cruiser happened to pull up behind me.

So we rigged up a little curtain out of my lumberjack shirt, and I stuck to the back roads as much as I could on the drive home.

Once you get up into the Grey-Bruce area, it's home turf for me. It's an interesting part of the country. We have a lot of poverty, but we also have reasonable real estate prices and a lot of interesting folks living on those back roads.

There's a guy on the 24th Concession who recently put up a home shop big enough to park a Greyhound bus in. While he doesn't seem to have one, he does have a vintage AMC AMX parked in there, as well as a couple of Harleys. I owned a AMC Rebel Machine once in one of my past lives, so eventually I'm gonna have to stop in and get the downlow on what makes this guy bother with an AMC hi-performance car. That's a pretty small club.

A concession north of that lives a guy who used to be an economist at a big-shot US university. He packed it all in to live up here with his aging mother. He rides a bicycle into Wiarton to pick up his necessities. That's got to be a good seven or eight miles, but its gotta seem a lot farther when he's riding his bike into town in the winter. That's another character I'll have to get acquainted with.

My journey passed through a goodly swath of Amish country, and it being Sunday, I passed a lot of Amish folks in their Sunday best and their black buggies. Seems the young lads in that cult get to ride their bicycles to the Sunday meeting, so the shoulder of the road had a whole lotta guys who looked like they were pedalling to a Blues Brothers reunion. Black fedoras, white shirts, ties... and dark glasses of course.

Don't laugh. That's a culture that'll survive after the assholes who run the planet succeed in destroying what we think of as "civilization." I'm keen on staying on good terms with them.

Nearly home, I thought I'd take a meander through Cobble Beach. I drive by it all the time, but I don't often drive through it. Cobble Beach is a high-end golf resort/ real estate play by the McLeese family.

The McLeese family have extraordinarily deep pockets, but you never hear a thing about them. I suspect that's because they're the opposite of the kind of people who lobby Forbes to get put on the Forbes "rich list." These folks are more likely to threaten Forbes with legal action if they were to be put on it.

As near as I can tell, and it's really hard to get solid info, McLeese the elder was an engineer who specialised in coal-plant construction. He at some point branched out into financial engineering, and made a fortune selling turn-key coal-fired electricity generating plants to American cities on a no-money-down basis. No money down, but you can pay for this with municipal bonds for the next hundred years, etc.

Cobble Beach became a retirement project for McLeese the elder, may he rest in peace. He got all the approvals for a high end golf course, designed by Doug Carrick, and a couple of thousand housing units around it. He spent a fortune putting in the infrastructure and building the clubhouse and the golf course, and then the 2007 recession hit.

By my estimation, at least $50 million had been dropped into this project by that time.

From what I surmise, and I've got some pretty good feelers into the business, aside from jettisoning some peripheral properties, McLeese never ever offered discounts or had fire sales for any Cobble Beach properties. They went years without having more than one or two new homes built on the development.

It takes very deep pockets to sustain that.

Now the place has exploded. Cobble Beach is a thing. They host by far the best car show in all of Canada every September. Where else have you ever seen an authentic, first edition Bugatti?

They've had more new builds this year than in the last ten combined. And prices are going up. A 1200 foot townhouse clocks in at $400k plus, and things only go up from there.

As much as I applaud McLeese and his deep pockets, here's what bothers me. I drive through the place in the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon, and nowhere in this very pretty community do I see a single soul sitting on their porch with a drink in their hand.

What is wrong with those people? Is this a place I'd want to live?

NO!!!

Then again, maybe the reason I'm not seeing them on the front porch is because they're all on their back decks. Either way, having a front porch and/or a back deck is rapidly becoming something of an unattainable dream for a lot of our next generation.


Best moment of the day; I'm barrelling down Wellington Road 6 on my way to Teviotdale at a good turn of speed. There's a Amish black buggy on the shoulder with an Amish family aboard on their way to their Sunday meeting. I veer wide to give them lots of room, and just as I'm passing, a little girl about three years old sticks herself out the back window and waves at me.


There is hope for humanity.