The Walk

01The design direction

Almost every course in this library is somewhere you play. May River is somewhere you walk: a caddie is required with every round, and the club asks you to walk it — in its own words, to best appreciate the native landscape.

That single verified fact is the best course-to-system fit in the whole series, and the site is built entirely on it. The 24/8 anchor is 112 BPM, and 112 sits inside the 85–120 BPM band where spontaneous human tempo — tapping, and walking — naturally clusters. On a course you are asked to walk, the anthem stops being accompaniment and becomes roughly the rate you are already moving.

The claim is made carefully, because the temptation to overreach here is obvious. What is sourced is the preferred-tempo band and the caddie requirement. What is not sourced is any measured step cadence for golfers, on this course or any other — so the page says 112 BPM is a walking tempo, and never says anyone measured the walkers at May River. The footnote on method card 2.2 states that limit in the same breath as the claim.

Per the brand system a course site may add exactly one support colour, and this one takes that literally: tidewater does all the work — the river band, the marsh, the oaks, the section wash, the figures in 05. The bone is warmed a step toward oyster shell because Lowcountry light is warmer than the coastal grey of Spyglass. Signal Lime remains the only system signal; Accent Orange appears once, on the pending-audio note.

0204 The Walk — the signature

One continuous line stands for the round, meandering from the river down through the oaks. Across it, short ticks mark steps — and the whole point is that they are placed at a constant arc-length interval along the real path geometry, measured with getTotalLength() and getPointAtLength(), each one drawn perpendicular to the local tangent. Wherever the line bends, the spacing doesn't. Every eighth tick is lime, echoing the 8 of 24/8. The ground changes; the cadence doesn't. That is the argument of the page in one drawing.

When audio plays, a lime pace-line travels the same path with a dash pattern matched to the step interval, so the beat literally walks the course.

03The facts rule

Atmosphere may be invented. Facts may not. Everything factual traces to docs/facts/may-river.md: Nicklaus, 2004, par 72, 7,171 yards, the three rated tee sets, paspalum with imported bunker sand, the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary certification with the Palmetto Bluff Conservancy, the 2005 Best New Course award, and the 20,000-acre property with water on three sides.

Two places where the record is untidy, and the page shows the untidiness rather than smoothing it:

• Rating and slope. Databases disagree on the championship figures — one gives 75.4 / 140, another 75.6 / 141. The tee table prints the range and the caveat block explains why, instead of picking a number and sounding certain.
• “Walking only” is wrong. It is the better line and the page refuses it: a cart with a forecaddie is expressly permitted. What May River requires is the caddie. Section 4.5 is a short block titled “Not walking only” that says so, because the accurate version — the walk is the invitation, not the rule — is the version the whole concept actually rests on.

Land history is stated plainly in the 05 timeline and not styled: the tracts sold from 1757 became roughly fifteen plantations, worked by enslaved people. That line is written as record, carries no graphic, and is not used as atmosphere.

04The audio

May River has no anthem yet. The repo manifest carries may-river-anthem with status: "pending" and no file behind it; the deployed host does not carry the id at all, so in production the player filters it out and the queue falls through to Anthem Lab — How It Works, a real streaming track, with the full library browsable behind it. The page says so above the player, before you can press anything. No invented duration, no placeholder waveform, and above all no substitute music standing in for a May River anthem.

If one of the masters still waiting to be synced turns out to be May River, the flip is one edit: add its filename to sourceCandidates and set status to ready. The page needs no other change.

05How it was built

• Hand-written static HTML/CSS/JS — no framework, no authoring build step. ES modules only.
• All internal references are relative, so the site works from a domain root or under a subpath unchanged.
• Every graphic is generated SVG; no raster media anywhere. The marsh grass and oak canopies come from a seeded PRNG (seed 2004 — the opening year), so they are deterministic rather than random decoration.
• Fonts are self-hosted woff2 (latin subsets) from @fontsource packages; build.mjs restores them from npm at deploy time via deployAssets, so deploy uploads stay text-only.
• The ratio stripe is 32 real units — 24 graphite, 8 lime — and in the player panel it encodes actual playback progress.
• Accessibility: skip link, visible focus rings, semantic landmarks, a real table for the tee sets with proper scoped headers, a descriptive aria-label on the diagram, and a reduced-motion path in which the line is drawn complete and static with all step ticks visible.

06Iteration passes