The first lesson Cape Arundel teaches comes before you have touched a club. Turn off River Road in Kennebunkport, start down the driveway, and you are suddenly in the middle of the golf course with no warning at all. To reach the clubhouse you pass in front of the 12th tee, through the 11th fairway, in front of the seventh tee, through the 10th fairway, and finally across the 18th. It is a scenic preview of the round, and a mildly alarming one. Keep your head on a swivel. The place is small, and everything here is close to everything else. That closeness is the whole story. Summer residents founded the club in 1896 as Kennebunkport Golf Club. In 1900 the Scottish professional Alexander Findlay laid out nine holes on farmland beside the Kennebunk River. He was a builder of nearly a hundred courses by the end of the century and is too rarely remembered. In 1921, under its new name, the club brought in Walter Travis, three times the US Amateur Champion, to make it eighteen. He had 88 acres, a tight parcel along the tidal branches of the river that divides Kennebunkport from Kennebunk, and somehow he fit a full course into it. What he fit there is short. From the back tees it measures 5,859 yards and plays to a par of 69. The 480-yard 9th, bending left, is the only par five. Of the ten par fours, only the 12th, doglegging right, runs past 400 yards. Anyone counting yardage will be tempted to call it a relic, and anyone who plays it may learn that length and pleasure often move in opposite directions. The ground is fairly flat, but subtle mounding hides the approaches. A short iron into one of the small, often sheltered greens becomes less a formality than a question you cannot quite see the answer to. The greens are the answer, and they are astonishing. Travis built them with false fronts, shelves, swales and spines. The result is a set of surfaces among the most audacious and memorable in American golf, found at a modest Maine club. These greens are peculiar, ingenious, and beautifully preserved. Consulting architect Bruce Hepner and superintendent Brendan Parkhurst have spent more than two decades restoring Travis's design. They have cleared trees, expanded greens, rebuilt bunkers, and put in new drainage and irrigation so the turf plays bouncier and more consistent. Renaissance Golf Design counts the club among those it advises. Over the past ten years the work has come together, and Cape Arundel now stands as perhaps the most authentic American Golden Age course the public can play. Then there is the river, which never lets the course hold still. It flows into the Atlantic two miles south, and it rises and falls with the tide. At high tide the river is full and lively. At low tide the basins nearly drain and give up thousands of lost golf balls, a quiet record of every hopeful carry. The wind tends to arrive with the tide, so a rising river usually means rising scores. The course can change from one hour to the next, and that is what gives it its sense of place. It is a river course with the heart of a seaside links. It is also a family course in the oldest sense. The Bushes have played here for generations. In 2002, beside the first tee, President George W. Bush finished a statement to the press condemning a suicide bombing in Israel, thanked them, and said, "Now watch this drive." The line outlived the moment. Stand on that first tee now and look out toward greens that have kept Travis's secrets for a century.