It was before 8 a.m. at NLand Surf Park just outside of Austin, Texas, and wispy clouds of steam rose from the warm surface of the water, condensing in the still-cool spring air. Without a breath of wind, the water mirrored the slate-gray sky and the chain-link-wrapped pier pilings that cut through the center of the pool.
Suddenly, loudspeakers surrounding the pool crackled to life with the rhythmic drum-and-clap intro to Johnny Cash's moody classic "God's Gonna Cut You Down." Just as Cash's deep, haunting drawl came through the sound system, another noise rose above it — a high-pitched whir like the sound of a spacecraft from a sci-fi movie getting ready to push its engines past light speed. Under the pier, steel cables and wheels began to move at a blurring pace.
Out of flat water, a solitary lump of liquid about the size of a basketball began to take shape on the surface near the end of the pool. Over the course of 20 or so yards, it grew taller and spread wider, only beginning to take the familiar shape of an ocean wave in the last few feet as it reached a takeoff zone marked by banners on the pier.
In most wave pools, the first wave of the day is always the best because of the absence of turbulence from prior waves, and by the time this first pulse of the morning reached visiting Hawaiian pro surfer Torrey Meister, it had become an absolutely flawless shoulder-high left-hander. It looked more like a computer-generated image of a wave than the real thing, which, I guess, isn't too far from the truth. Meister hopped to his feet, bottom turned and threw a tight, arcing turn at the lip. With wide eyes, he stared down the line at the surreal wall of pristine glass that kept peeling ahead, completely section-less. The wave continued breaking in uniformity down the length of the 1,000-foot-long pool, never changing size, shape or speed until it finally fizzled in the last 20 or so yards from the shallows, on the opposite end.
"Riding that first wave was so weird because there's no beach, no other waves and you have no idea where the thing is gonna come from," said Meister. "You're just sitting in flat water and then all of a sudden a wave appears. It's such a trip."
Meister, fellow Hawaiian pro Albee Layer and I had come to ride the man-made waves at NLand Surf Park not because of the quality of the surf (as hypnotic as they may be, they aren't the best man-made waves in the world, nor do they stack up against any world-class naturally occurring waves on a good swell), but because of where these waves are located. On the outskirts of Austin, roughly 150 miles as the crow flies from any naturally occurring beach, we were surfing undeniably fun, albeit challenging, waves.
Even if you've spent your entire life surfing ocean waves, their artificial counterparts at NLand take some getting used to. First off, you're surfing toward a pier covered in chain link, which feels vaguely threatening until you realize that a deep underwater trench prevents you from ever actually reaching it. Second, the energy of the wave pushes out toward the side of the pool as much as it does toward the end, meaning you need to work harder to maintain down-the-line speed or you get quickly swept into the whitewater. For the same reason, you want to avoid the kind of committed, full-wrap cutbacks that reverse your momentum. If it sounds difficult, that's because it is. But it's also incredibly fun once you accept that you're not in the ocean and different rules apply.
By the time we finished our morning session and got out of the water, the park had just opened to the public and was filling up with people: some born-and-bred Texas locals; others from Australia's Gold Coast; Santa Barbara, California; and even as far as Tel Aviv, Israel. They'd all come for the same reason: to experience something completely novel — a rippable wave in the last place you'd expect to find one. But with recent advancements in wave-pool technology, and the growing potential for artificial-wave proliferation around the globe, NLand may not be a novelty for long. If artificial-wave quality continues to improve, it's possible that, in the future, the most consistent high-performance waves in the world will be hundreds of miles from any coastline, built adjacent to large population centers.
The biggest question regarding artificial waves is no longer whether or not quality surf can exist away from the beach; it's how surfing may transform once it's no longer tethered to a coastline, and whether or not inland surf communities will rise to sustain these technological breakthroughs.