"Driving through Myrtle Beach felt like looking from a three-dimensional universe into Plato’s two-dimensional cave."

Thanks to reader Stephen for Jacques Leslie's Salon story from Myrtle Beach, where the war correspondent traveled with photographer Robert Dawson to look at what is happening at some of Myrtle's abandoned golf courses. You'll have to work through a couple of ridiculous characterizations of golf courses as nothing short of chemical waste dumps, but it's worth it to hear what he says about places like Deer Track, Bay Tree and Marsh Harbour.

On Bay Tree...

In three-and-a-half decades of operation, its two biggest claims to prominence were that it once hosted the final stage of a qualifying tournament for one of the US golf tour’s four “grand slam” events, and that Dan Quayle once played there. I can’t imagine faint praise more damning than that. When the course closed in 2006, homeless people took up residence in its clubhouse, so the clubhouse was torn down a year later.

I spent much of our stroll through Bay Tree trying to decide whether the realtor really meant his warning. True enough, the place was enormously overgrown, forbidding, with a haunted feeling. Its ponds were brown and murky and rimmed with six-foot-high foliage. The hole markers had long since disappeared, but we could still make out fairways by the trees that lined them and tees and greens by the mounds they usually topped. Now that the greens’ once carefully nurtured Bermuda grass had died off, their sand foundation, installed to promote drainage, was exposed: Seeing these brown-gray expanses felt like looking at skeletons. Instead of snakes, or the feral pigs that were chased off the property two years ago, we ran into bunnies, which froze in their tracks as if they thought that made them invisible. Next to the third hole, we found a crumbling bathroom, bathed in spray-painted slogans like “THUG SPOT.”

Thugs indeed: Only two weeks earlier police made arrests after finding a meth lab deep in the course’s interior. Bay Tree had become a dystopia.