Half an hour north of the Golden Gate Bridge, the road climbs above Fairfax into a tranquil valley of Mount Tamalpais, and the city simply falls away. There are no houses here and no noise, only nature, oaks on the mountainsides, and the Bon Meadow property, wide enough to hold a golf course without crowding it. This is Meadow Club, where Alister MacKenzie began his American work. It deserves to be spoken of with the same reverence as the famous names that came after it, and it rarely is. The commission might have gone elsewhere. A couple of years before MacKenzie arrived, Herbert Fowler and Vernon Macan were both approached about designing a course in this rolling landscape above San Francisco. Then came Robert Hunter, a millionaire socialist who served as MacKenzie's agent, publicist and West Coast associate, and he secured his client's first job in the United States. Together the two men built the greens, and seventeen of those eighteen originals survive. It is a strange and lovely thing to putt on surfaces that MacKenzie and Hunter first shaped. The bunkers tell a story of their own. Anyone who knows MacKenzie's other work in Northern California will notice that these shapes are different. On other projects, cloud formations usually served as the reference point. Here the team looked to the oak trees on the surrounding mountainsides and let them guide the sand. The course was drawn from the land around it, and you feel that kinship walking from hole to hole. Over the decades, trees were planted, the greens lost their original size, and the bunkers strayed from the style their designer intended. Then, with the new millennium, Mike DeVries took on a restoration that ran from 1999 to 2005. Over those six years he expanded the greens back to their original size, reworked the bunkers to the style MacKenzie intended, and managed the many trees. DeVries called it a true restoration of MacKenzie's first American design. While lifting sod, he could see where the original greensmix had been. That detail moves me. It suggests the old course was never lost, only waiting beneath the surface for someone patient enough to find it. The lone exception is the 3rd green, reworked after World War II and more recently renovated by DeVries, who gave it a central contour and three distinct tiers. So the one green that is not original sits among seventeen that are, a small, honest seam in the fabric. At 6,611 yards the course is modest, and it doesn't need to be anything more. The 7th doglegs left over 420 yards. The 9th stretches to 450. The waters of the Bon Tempe creek come into play from time to time. Late in the round, the 13th, at 544 yards, and the 15th, at 508, run parallel and share the same fairway bunkers, so hazards you studied once greet you again. Between them sits the 14th, a picturesque par three played across a pond, a pause of stillness set between two long journeys. The care has continued. DeVries has since added green tees even further forward than the forward tees, realigned cart paths, done drainage and creek work, and improved the practice facilities. Tree management goes on, restricted by local ordinances, a gentle tug-of-war between the course MacKenzie drew and the woods around it. Pack shorts, because Marin escapes the famous summer chill of San Francisco. Afterward, don't hurry back to the city. Stay in Fairfax, Marin County's last remaining hippie outpost, where Peri's Tavern has live music every night, and let the day settle.