It truly is a feat of engineering. Photo: Casey Acaster
It’s not true what they say about Texas. Everything is not bigger. Certain things are–the sky, those vast, rolling hills, the piles of meat slopped onto wax paper under a haze of oak wood smoke–but not everything. Perhaps, outside of Austin (which I suspect is not the place that made Texas into the silver-starred, ten-gallon hat state that outsiders think of it as) it is, but certainly not in that wonderful, bustling city. We were there on a surf trip, which felt odd.
Austin is an interesting place. The feel of Texas is ever-present, but the city itself feels like a tendril of progression reaching out from a place steeped in tradition; it’s still the Lone Star State, to be sure, but as the tendril grows thicker and longer, the place where it originated from feels farther away. It’s a place far removed from the television version of Texas. Instead, there’s a bustling music scene, brightly colored graffiti adorns the brick walls of coffee houses, and instead of pickups, there are electric cars. But when one leaves the city limits, Texas is there in all its glory. Just outside of the airport, in fact, a traveling surfer can find the rolling hills and wheat fields, the horses grazing under sleepy willows that tickle the green grass beneath them, the white porches and rocking chairs complete with mint juleps set on rickety, hob-nailed tables. The sky is endless, similar to those prairie skies of the center of the continent, its blueness deepening as the eyes move upwards from the horizon. Miles of white picket fences stretch perpendicular from the veins of cement that weave their way from the city, surrounding hay bales and ranch houses set far back from the shimmering pavement. And there, just outside Austin, amid the hay bales and white picket fences, lies NLand, North America’s first commercial wave park.
Red eye flights are the worst. Eyes filled with grit, mouths filled with sour cotton, clothes sticky with old sweat, cramped backs and sore knees. It wasn’t a long flight from Los Angeles, but it felt like it. And so, emerging from the cramped metal tube, we stumbled through the airport in the early morning light looking for our surfboards. It was exciting, but in a very different way from any other surf trip–it felt as though we were heading to an amusement park. And NLand is an amusement park–it’s still surfing, but in an odd, removed sort of way. The motions are the same, but the feeling isn’t. It’s complicated. If NLand is Disneyland’s Splash Mountain, the ocean is a real white water rapid.
Every now and then, a surf session becomes something a little more than average. More often than not, it’s not so much to do with the waves, but with a shared feeling. Some of the best surfs I’ve ever had have been in very average waves–maybe it’s the way the sun is hitting the water, maybe it’s the lack of people–it could be anything, really. But something in those sessions builds among the people sharing it, and the purity of what surfing is about is exposed. What NLand lacks in nature, it makes up for in–for lack of a better word–stoke.
Although the general public has a perception of surfing as a soulful experience, full of happy, healthy people, it’s often very far from that. Depending on where you live, many lineups have an undercurrent of bristling, barely contained hostility, only noticeable after a substantial amount of time is spent there. Even at my local spot, a place I surf nearly every day, it exists. Some of the people who I consider friends there are part of it, and hell, even I’m part of it every now and then. There’s a deep divide between how surfing is perceived and how it actually is. NLand, though, seems to exist in a fuzzy, warm place where the public’s perception becomes reality. Everyone there is happy, laughing, and incredulous. It is a feat of engineering to mirror nature’s waves so closely.
The lineup is strictly regulated, but not by some random, protective local. Lifeguards in hats with chin straps float on soft tops, occasionally blowing whistles hung around their necks, making sure that everyone is where they’re supposed to be.
There are three waves, only one of which is really worth while. When it comes to the inside wave (an offshoot of the reef wave), the lineup is literally a lineup; two orange flags on either end of the pool serve as end points of the line, and surfers spread out between them. As the wave breaks behind them, it picks them up as it moves along, creating a party wave of ridiculous proportions, full of hooting, laughing–and for the most part, brand new–surfers. The bay wave is just the wash off the other two, and made for beginners.
The reef wave is what people pay for. The rest is just icing on the cake.
The reef wave is what people open their wallets for. It runs alongside an industrial looking bridge made of steel and mesh. The bridge runs through the middle of the pool, with the take off point just a few feet away. Beneath it, something that looks like a massive anvil is hauled through the water by pulleys, displacing the water over perfectly engineered bathymetry. From under the water, the sound as the anvil pushes through it is ungodly–a horrible, unnatural, screaming sound, a high-pitched shriek not unlike a tortured animal. Above, the bright Texan sky looks down on the laughing, happy surfers.
In the ocean, Mother Nature’s pulses feel like part of something much larger–I’ve heard it described as the earth’s pulse; a natural, unforced rhythm that taps into something primal in all of us. At NLand, that feeling of connection to something larger isn’t there. Instead, it’s replaced with a howling mass of metal ramming its way through a chlorinated, man-made environment. Sure, the wave it creates is a good one–and make no mistake, it well and truly is a good wave–but there’s something about it that feels slightly wrong. There is a connection, though. It just comes in the form of the other surfers in the water with you.
I had a thought when I was sitting in the lineup regulated by the friendly lifeguards. I felt like a Native American riding in a car for the first time. Yes, it’s fast and amazing and shiny and sleek, but when one is used to riding horseback through rolling hills through the cloying sound of untamed nature, the stench, racket, and glitter of a vehicle is only impressive for so long before it becomes slightly offensive.
When the motorcar arrived, it changed things. It changed some for the better and some for the worse, but it became the norm. I don’t believe that wave pools will ever become the norm, but I do believe they’ll become a big part of surfing. I see it as a juncture of sorts; a split in a road that’s been straight since it began.
As wave pools become more prevalent, surfing will still be surfing. Much like snowboarding’s backcountry versus park, there will be two separate but similar kinds of surfing. Wave pools do lack something that only nature can provide, but they’ve got their place. You’d be hard pressed to find someone that doesn’t appreciate the majesty of what things must have been like before the vehicle showed up and forced us to gouge highways across the skin of the earth, but you’d be even harder pressed to find someone who doesn’t appreciate what vehicles have afforded us. Such is the case with the wave pool, and so many other things: while the imitation will suffice for many, you just can’t beat the real thing… and once you’ve had the real thing, anything else doesn’t cut it for long.
