Experimenting听on new technology听deep in the desert听is practically an American institution. Trinity, Edwards Air Force Base, Area 51, and the NSA鈥檚 massive data collection center in Utah are evidence that it鈥檚 easier to test and deploy oddities of human endeavor where no one else is watching. Even Kelly Slater specifically cited privacy as one of the main factors that led him and his partners to choose their 11-acre wave pool鈥檚 location in Lemoore, California. Rumor has it听they also hired a requisite guard detail, populated by ex-military operators听to keep prying eyes away from the experiment.

The yield from that years-long prototype phase听is known, in its current incarnation, as the Surf Ranch.听Co-owned and operated by the and the (WSL), the 700-yard-long pool鈥攁nd its attendant outbuildings and mechanical apparatuses鈥攕its roughly 100 miles straight inland from the Pacific Ocean and is听capable of churning out flawless, mechanical waves at the rate of about one every three minutes.

To find it, I drove along Highway 41 through 60 miles of desert, occasionally听interrupted by听gas stations, Denny鈥檚 food chains, and other oases鈥攔eminders of how far one might have to crawl for help should the radiator blow a gasket. At intervals, banners hung听from derelict trailers, specifically referencing听the distribution of water stocks:

California is Running on Empty.

Vote to #Build more DAMstorage.

Vote to Make California Great Again!

Ask Congress if Growing Food is a Waste of Resources.

Eventually, I turned onto a side road听lined with doublewide trailers and a concrete-recycling yard. From my research (and social media aggregation), I鈥檇 gathered that the wave is generated by a train-like conveyance, which sits on rails above the surface and makes passes, back and forth, across the length of the watercourse. A foil, fixed at each end of the train, runs through the water to generate 鈥渟well,鈥� which then breaks over a series of bottom contours that were modeled by Slater and a Ph.D. in geophysical fluid dynamics named Adam Fincham, among others, to produce ideal surf conditions.

Because of its superiority to other wave pools, and its ability to more or less mirror a level of perfection that, until now, was only found in nature (and only given a rare confluence of hydrology and geology), the place has been a major source of speculation and among surfers and the surf media.听

I was there for听the WSL Founders鈥� Cup, an exhibition contest designed as part pre-run for the coming听Surf Ranch Open, a scheduled for September, and part pitch aimed at selling the tech to the 2020 Olympics in Japan, the first Games scheduled to include surfing. The latter was especially apparent given the team format, which seemed to be deliberately catering to Olympic organizers, pitting groups of five surfers (three male and two female)听against each other in a bracket system. There were听teams representing the U.S., Australia, Brazil, and Europe, plus an all-encompassing World team, made up of surfers from South Africa, Japan, and French Polynesia.听Slater also openly discussed the Olympics in Friday鈥檚听pre-event press conference, dropping hints that he might view a chance to compete in Japan as the swan song to a 40-year career in competitive surfing. By then he鈥檇 be 48 years old.听

The event was being promoted听as the 鈥渂irth of stadium surfing鈥� through听coverage on CNN, CBS, and other networks around the world,听replete with co-branding from WSL sponsoring partner Michelob Ultra Pure Gold, a low-calorie beer听targeting consumers with an 鈥�.鈥� I had to see what had risen in the desert from these disparate parts of tech, Americana, and surf culture.

My impression of the pool as a technological marvel, however, was decidedly underwhelming at first glance. When I arrived, the engineers and the event staff were between waves and, aside from a slight ultramarine tint (from bottom-paint and chlorine) the pool looked a lot like the irrigation canals I鈥檇 passed on the drive in to Lemoore, aberrations themselves: stagnant tracts of open water to the horizon, their banks lined with egrets and other birds typically associated with听 coastal environs.

I watched the sunlight on the surface for a few minutes听until a disembodied voice announced听over the PA system that a wave was about to be generated. 鈥淭hirty seconds,鈥� it said without inflection. Then the whir of the electric train cut through the air and a flawless right-hander formed and ran for two-fifths听of a mile through a variety of sections, alternating and changing pace from a thin-lipped tube听to open face.

Veteran surf journalist Steve Hawk has described the wave itself as the actualization of every surfer鈥檚 sketchbook fantasies. At least voyeuristically, I鈥檇 have to say this assessment is accurate. I鈥檝e traveled for 48 hours straight, through the bowels of all manner of air, land, and seaport, to reach natural setups that have half the surf potential of this mechanism. In those cases, though, I also took solace in the eventuality that I鈥檇 find the ocean at the end of whatever terrestrial embattlements I encountered.

I鈥檓 not sure exactly how other surfers view the natural world versus the artifices of mankind, but I do know that听one of the main reasons I鈥檝e always surfed is because I have a healthy suspicion of human structure and endeavor.

Tom Blake, an early 20th century wave rider, who served as a prototype for much of the iconoclasm that runs through modern surf culture, once famously carved the words 鈥淣ature = God鈥� into a sandstone bluff to articulate his worldview. Later, he wrote a treatise, Voice of the Atom, and a book, Voice of the Wave, built around that formula. Mostly, he seemed to be trying to articulate what most surfers know鈥攖hat riding waves is a way to be subject only to the laws of natural physics and to your own abilities to sync听with them.

Philosophically, of course, surfing doesn鈥檛 need to be anything more听than fun, a novel sensation provided by speed and gravity. But I have always thought that there鈥檚 some room in the conversation for these man/nature allusions.听So, as an observer, you could say I was predisposed to conclude that the wave in Lemoore would be the antithesis of my understanding of 鈥渟urfing,鈥� before I even laid eyes on it.听

Despite this, after watching Mick Fanning, and then Steph Gilmore, ride a few waves, I actually found myself in awe of the pool鈥檚 reproducible perfection, available on demand, again and again, especially given the ephemerality of that kind of surf in nature. I inarguably wanted to ride it, and I was even entertained, for a while, by the contest, notwithstanding the logical conclusion that, if nature equals god, any surf contest, even one held in the ocean, is generally an edifice foisted onto something that seems to be best appreciated without clocks, machines, competitors, or other external interferences.听

Obviously, however, this scene skewed to the far side of that experiential spectrum. A drone hovered over the water, documenting every ride, as analysis from the WSL commentary team, anchored by Joe Turpel and Martin Potter, was broadcast throughout the arena. The surfers, more or less, did the same turns on the same sections, and pulled into the tube for similar lengths of time, making it easy for knowledgeable spectators to telegraph their performances.

During lulls between 鈥渞uns,鈥澨齧usic was piped in for the fan base, who held placards preprinted by sponsoring shareholders with supportive, nationally-focused messaging. The mix in the crowd seemed to vacillate between curious surfers from as far south as San Diego, to local farmers听speculating about who might invest and buy out the acreage next door as a real estate venture. Well-heeled听onlookers were able to buy five-figure ringside cabinas, which assured them the rare patch of uncontested shade and, reportedly, a chance听to surf the wave after festivities closed.

Ultimately, it only took about an hour for me to feel dried out in the desert light, and then a little bored, a familiar instinct to sneak off rising inside me. The event was still underway when I left and I wasn鈥檛 particularly interested in who would win听(the World team, it turned out, led by captain Jordy Smith), or whether the conditions in the pool might change or get better, because I knew they wouldn鈥檛. The wave would stay the same, more or less, unchanging, identical, regardless of tidal phase, the alluvial shift of sand, or swell forecast.

Somewhere along the 41, I passed a hotel with a derelict pool that had been filled in with sand and planted with cacti. Across the same intersection, a gleaming Tesla recharge station sat amid a sea of gas pumps, and a cherry orchard lay alongside a field of solar lenses. The push and pull of human progress, to harness or command natural power, seemed to be the only thing in abundance in this environment. The drive back to the coast felt a lot longer than the drive inland, which is always the case when you leave a strange place and return to wherever you came from.

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For the bulk of the 2,000 years of surf history, water temperatures placed strict limits on where surfers could go and how long they could surf. That meant the sport was largely confined to Hawaii and Polynesia, where it鈥檚 warm year-round. But for the past 60 years surfers have been expanding into the farthest and coldest reaches of the globe, due in large part to wetsuit manufacturing pioneer Jack O鈥橬eill, who died in his home in Santa Cruz, California, on Friday at the age of 94.

Born in Denver in 1923 and raised in Southern California and Oregon, O鈥橬eill began bodysurfing in the Pacific as a teenager. After moving to San Francisco in 1949 to pursue a liberal arts degree at San Francisco State, he continued, like others of his ilk, to adhere to established cold-water coping strategies. In the pre-wetsuit age, surfers were still essentially Stone Age technologists. They rode crafts hewn from timber, returned to shore frequently to huddle over driftwood fires, and, when not bare chested, wore wool sweaters into the water for some semblance of warmth.

But with synthetic rubber products widely available in the late 1940s and 50s, O鈥橬eill saw an opportunity to upgrade to 20th century technology. His first forays into insulation began with a hand-sewn vest made from rubber and a two-piece, Navy surplus dry suit. Both were found lacking and by the early 1950s O鈥橬eill began experimenting with neoprene, which had been developed by DuPont in 1930 for industrial applications. Far more flexible and supple than many other rubbers, neoprene proved to be a breakthrough material.

O鈥橬eill refined his designs, developing a line of wetsuits that evolved though variations of cuts and zip entries. By the mid 1960s, his wetsuits, and those being sold by his rivals (most notably Bev Morgan, then Billy and Bob Meistrell of Body Glove Wetsuits), were a lynchpin of the nascent surf manufacturing industry, outselling even surfboards.

It was SCUBA divers, however, who seemed to be the earliest adopters. Ever image conscious, surfers initially considered wetsuits to be an affront to various codes of style and comportment. 鈥淲hen they were first introduced,鈥� says Steve Pezman, founder and owner of The Surfer鈥檚 Journal, 鈥淚 didn鈥檛 wear one for years as an act of purity.鈥�

O鈥橬eill, however, was an exuberant and crafty salesman and managed to gain traction with his target consumer. At expos, he would dress his adolescent children in his wetsuits and variously dunk them in a water tank, or send them scurrying across an ice block. As a pilot (he served in the Navy Air Corps after college) he was known to fly a hot air balloon emblazoned with his brand鈥檚 logo over crowds at surf contests.

Hugh Bradner, a physicist for the University of California, Berkeley, is officially credited as the wetsuit鈥檚 inventor, but O鈥橬eill was the product鈥檚 most colorful and memorable purveyor. He lost his left eye while testing a surf leash prototype during the 1970s and wore an eye patch for the rest of his life. With a thick beard and a slew of swashbuckling proclivities (including stints as a long shore fisherman and a biplane pilot), he literally became the face of his products. For years, his countenance served as the logo on his merchandise.

鈥淗e was kind of this affable pirate,鈥� says surf historian and听Encyclopedia of Surfing听author Matt Warshaw. 鈥淗e made the wetsuit cool, just through pure force of his own charisma. The eye patch and beard took it next level鈥攈is face became fascinating, and the brand got even stronger.鈥�

O鈥橬eill鈥檚 relocation from San Francisco to Santa Cruz in 1959 was an additional factor in the success of his products. With its frigid waters, and dedicated surf community, he found both a base of operations and a population eager to adopt his product. O鈥橬eill鈥檚 wetsuits allowed locals to maximize their water-time and access the best surf, which typically arrives in winter. Eventually, as the wetsuit spread south, even counterculture dogmatists like Malibu鈥檚 rebel icon, Miki Dora, began embracing the technology. 鈥淥ne by one,鈥� says Pezman, 鈥渨e came to our senses.鈥�

Today, O鈥橬eill鈥檚 wetsuit company remains a hub of the wider surf industry, while Santa Cruz has risen from a 1950s backwater to a global hotbed of surf talent. Beyond Northern California, millions of surfers around the world wear a variation of the wetsuit on a daily basis. As such, O鈥橬eill鈥檚 contributions to that crucial and insulating piece of technology have played an incalculable role in the pollination of wave riding.

鈥淔ew people have more directly affected the lives of everyday surfers than Jack O鈥橬eill,鈥� says Surfer magazine editor, Todd Prodanovich. 鈥淭o think that so many waves around the world were off limits, or only surfable during warmer seasons, seems quaint now. But through his relentless wetsuit innovations, O鈥橬eill opened up the colder corners of the globe to the surfing world, and allowed us to seek waves and adventure along wilder coastlines.鈥�

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