My friend Henny enjoys nature outings. She once went canoeing on the Brazos River. The canoeing was great, but what really made the trip, she told me later, was finding fifty-two golf balls, which she duly rounded up and took home.

Fifty-two.

Just what fifty-two golf balls were doing on the banks of the Brazos River, I’m in no position to say. I’ve never been canoeing on the Brazos River. I’ve driven over the Brazos River, on U.S. 59, now known as U.S. 69, otherwise known as Senator Bentsen Highway. From the highway — whether 59, 69, or Senator Bentsen, it’s all the same — I can’t tell what people might be doing on the banks of the river. Since Henny’s adventure, I have to assume it involves golf.

Fifty-two. Mind you, I’m no golfer, but I think that’s an extraordinary number of golf balls to be lying on the banks of the Brazos River. Or the banks of any river, for that matter. Henny didn’t question how they got there (that’s not her style). She simply delighted in finding them and taking them home, like lost pets.

I wondered what I would do if I chanced upon fifty-two stray golf balls. It’s never happened. Not to me. Not yet. I’ve visited and camped at Brazos Bend State Park (which, as the name suggests, is not far from the Brazos River), but still I’ve never seen a single golf ball there, let alone fifty-two of them. How would I react? Would I feign surprise? Would I be disappointed if I unearthed only fifty-one? Smug if I turned up fifty-three? And if I did stumble upon golf balls — fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three, what does it matter? — if I did encounter any wayward golf balls and didn’t pick them up and take them home but instead left them there in all their implausible waywardness, misplaced and displaced and forsaken on the banks of the Brazos, what would that say about me? As a person?

I don’t have the answer. I wish I understood the game of golf better.