PLAYING OUT OF THE SNOW.(golf courses)

I own a pair of snowshoes that I bought for golf. I have a photograph of myself wearing them on the first tee of the little nine-hole club that I belong to, in northwestern Connecticut, after a huge blizzard in 1996. Two of my regular golf buddies, also in snowshoes, are standing with me. This past December, we took up a new postseason activity: bowling.

Bowling is a surprisingly fun game, but it isn't golf. To be perfectly frank, snow golf isn't, either. No matter how merry my friends and I seem to be as we tromp around our buried course in our snowshoes, our deepest thoughts are always far away, among the verdant fairways, tees, and greens of summers past and summers future. Sometimes our longing becomes more than we can bear. When it does, we pack up our clubs, say goodbye to our wives and children, and head south for a while, to a place where golf can be played on real grass even in the middle of the winter. Which is to say, we go to the Bronx.

Many people don't realize that there is a golf course inside the New York City limits, but there are more than a dozen, and almost all of them are public courses that are open year-round. The Bronx has three full-sized eighteen-hole courses, Brooklyn has two, and Queens and Staten Island have four each. The Bronx also has a nine-hole course, Queens has two eighteen-hole par-three courses, and there is a country club that straddles the border between Queens and Nassau County. Eventually, the Bronx will have one more eighteen-hole course, a high-end daily-fee facility designed by Jack Nicklaus; it's under construction in Ferry Point Park, near the northern end of the Bronx Whitestone Bridge, on top of the old Ferry Point landfill. Of all the currently operating courses contained entirely within the city, all but one--Richmond County Country Club, on Staten Island--are owned by the City of New York. They charge modest greens fees, they give discounts to senior citizens, youngsters, and city residents, and they are open for play pretty much every day of the year except when the ground is covered with snow.

When my friends and I first travelled to the city for golf, our expectations were very low. Over the years, though, we have come to think of New York as an appealing winter golf destination, like Hilton Head or Myrtle Beach but easier to get to. As we cruise down I-684 on a frigid Sunday morning, heading for Pelham Bay or Marine Park or Dyker Beach--city courses whose names alone make winter seem less of a problem--we sometimes fantasize about a golf trip that we hope to take some January or February, a trip during which we'll play every one of the city's courses at least once. We'll probably stay in Manhattan, ideally at a hotel near Chelsea Piers, which has a driving range, and we'll carry our golf bags in travel covers that have wheels on them, to simplify getting on and off subways and buses. On our last night in town, after a blowout steak dinner at Smith & Wollensky, we'll get front-row seats for "The Lion King," and the next morning we'll roll our clubs up Eighth Avenue to Port Authority, for the two-hour bus ride home.

Ten years ago, I had to fly overnight from Phoenix to Newark by way of Las Vegas. The crowd that boarded the plane in Las Vegas consisted mainly of guys with beards and leather jackets who hadn't brought anything to read and women with arm tattoos trying to jam bottles into the mouths of crying babies. The plane smelled like cigarettes, even though no one was smoking. These passengers, I decided, represented three filtrations of human desperation: they had elected to use family vacation time to travel more than two thousand miles to lose money playing slot machines; they had decided to fly home after midnight so that they could get in as much money-losing as possible without having to pay for one more night in a hotel; and they lived in or near Newark. I had a similar experience this past New Year's Day, when five of my friends and I drove from Connecticut to Pelham Bay Park to play our first golf round of 2005. The people on the course that ...