A lawyer from Grand Rapids named Benjamin Merrick stood on the hill where the clubhouse now sits and saw England. The rolling ground below reminded him of the chalk downland of the south, and so he gave the place a name that still sounds like a promise: Crystal Downs. It is a strange thing to borrow from southern England for a headland in northern Michigan, but stand there long enough and the comparison stops seeming strange. The land is a narrow sand ridge, a hundred feet high, wedged between Lake Michigan on one side and Crystal Lake on the other. The wind comes off the big lake and never seems to leave. Golf arrived modestly. In 1927 a rudimentary nine holes went into play, laid out by Walkley Ewing after reading Robert Hunter's book "The Links." Then Ewing hired Alister MacKenzie, who was crossing America on his way home to Scotland, with Meadow Club, Cypress Point and Pasatiempo behind him and Augusta National not far ahead. MacKenzie was talked into a trip to the wilds of northern Michigan, and he brought Perry Maxwell. While MacKenzie drew the holes, it was Maxwell who supervised construction. He came back every summer to live in a farmhouse beside what is now the 8th fairway, until the back nine was finished in 1933. There is something tender in that image, a man waking each summer morning beside the work. The routing was no gift. A road once ran across the middle of the 6th and 7th fairways, and MacKenzie had to look across it and imagine holes on the other side. Tom Doak believes the hole that made it all work is the 5th, a short par 4 that plays "over and around" a hill rather than up and over it. "You can look at a map all day and not think there's a hole right there," he said, calling it arguably the most interesting of them all. Its donut bunkers only deepen the puzzle. From the 1st tee, high on the ridge, the whole front nine unfolds below you at once, a spread of fairways staggered, undulating and angled across the dunes. Then come the famous ones: that improbable 5th, the 7th with its kidney-shaped boomerang green, and the 8th, a par 5 with no bunkers at all, left to defend itself with the land alone. After that the course turns inward. Holes 11 through 17 wander through woods before the course returns to the open dunescape, a quieter, less famous back nine. For decades almost nobody knew. Jack Nicklaus had played it as a young teenager on a summer trip with his parents. When Doak came north as a college student in 1982, even golfers in Detroit could only say they'd heard it was very good. He fell in love with the course and the region, and today he belongs to the club. Then in 1986 Ben Crenshaw skipped a practice round at the Buick Open to see MacKenzie's work, went on to win that week, and spoke of the course he had seen. The secret began to slip out. The greens remain the wildest part of the story. When Doak and Brian Schneider rebuilt the par-3 11th, its middle and back tiers each sloped at 6 percent, separated by a tier at 9. They lowered the back of the green by more than two feet, and Doak suspects people are right on the cusp of thinking they didn't do enough. For a long time Doak served as consulting architect; now Mike DeVries, who grew up working on the grounds crew, mans the post. Still, it stays unhurried, a summer vacation club with a private beach below the bluff. Each October, Benzie County residents can enter a lottery to play for ten dollars, the money going to local scholarships. The downs, it turns out, are shared.