The story of how I found myself here, in hopes of riding a perfect wave in a muddy lake among the rolling cow patties of Central Texas, is a straightforward one. Being a life-long, if mediocre, surfer, the notion of being able to ride a meticulously engineered, made to-order wave has always been a tantalizing fantasy, one that seemed more like a science-fiction fever dream than an actual possibility.

In May, North America's largest and first truly surfable wave pool officially opened on the outskirts of Austin, after a brief false-start in 2016 (when a lagoon leak flooded neighboring property). I knew what I had to do. I booked a direct flight from LaGuardia to Bergstrom for the following weekend.

They dug a long, narrow lagoon and filled it with water from a nearby river. The first attempt involved a tractor, a rope, and a jury-rigged foil. Dragged through the water, a wake formed no more than a few feet high, breaking predictably along the shallow sections of the lagoon bed. And so began the creation story of the world's first surfable wave powered by foil.

In the late 2000s, deep in the Basque mountains of Northern Spain, a group of freewheeling engineers led by real-life couple Josema Odriozola and Karin Frisch set out to replicate one of Mother Nature's most baffling conceptions: powerful waves that break smoothly and predictably enough to dance on. Isolated and hidden from the public at a remote location, the team mixed a DIY ethos with engineering nous. Known as Wavegarden , their early tinkering, made possible with early support from local investors and the Spanish and Basque governments, would go largely unnoticed; a handful of surf-obsessed friends semi-secretly experimenting with wave dynamics and mechanical engineering to make their delusional dreams come true.

The story of how this wave-generating technology evolved and ended up in rural Texas and helmed by an American beer scion is a more complicated one.

In 2011, Wavegarden unveiled its made-to-order wave technology to the world, and the internet immediately fell in love. The first human-engineered wave that could be a real substitute for the ocean—a total game changer. While previous wave-generating technologies had often relied on the timely release of a deluge of water, Wavegarden utilized a ski lift pulley system, a hydrodynamic blade, and carefully-designed bathymetry, a mechanically simpler and far more energy-efficient approach to designing waves.

Read more: Scientists Recreated the Elusive Rogue Wave in a Lab

For much of the proto history of terraforming surf pools, attempts at generating rideable waves could never quite seem to catch a break. In 1985, when the Association of Surfing Professionals hosted its first and only competition in a wave pool in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the dismal quality of the surf cemented wave pools as a running joke for the next several decades.