Sea of Dreams

Around here, the fields unravel in typical prairie patchwork, marked by cattle and barbed-wire fencing.

But this is no flat-state mirage.

Atop his wakeboard, Earl Ball skims the water at an exhilarating 18 miles an hour. Obstacles shoot up from the water around him -- ramps and rails and colored buoys. Wearing a pair of saggy board shorts, a helmet and a life vest, Ball zooms forward, carving a path through the supersized flotsam, hitting ramps and flying more than 15 feet in the air, pirouetting in 360-degree spins across the water.

His hands grip a rope tethered to a pulley 30 feet above him, like a ski lift dragging him around the lake.

When the sky-high carousel revolves around to the dock, two more boarders join him, each grabbing his own rope to be flung across the water. As the riders circle, the lake remains placid; it was engineered that way, with a center island that absorbs annoying wakes.

Tanned and pierced spectators have gathered dockside, munching nachos and speaking in coastal dialect. They know the riders by their helmets: Earl Ball in baby blue, Carter Collins in pink, Jason Bleich in black.

Ball and Collins work here, at Kansas City Watersports. Bleich, as usual, just showed up. The trio is here practically every day. This morning, a crane dropped a new obstacle in the lake: a series of ramps forming a Cadillac-sized speed bump and a thin, raised ledge painted with "No Fear" emblems.

Today's dockside analysis: These dudes are sick. Gonna straight kill it out there, brah.

However improbable it may seem, surf culture has come to Kansas.

The pasture 30 miles south of Kansas City existed in the standard backcountry time warp, far removed and years behind anything happening on the West Coast.

There wasn't an ocean, so Mike Olson decided to build one.

People thought it was his midlife crisis. In 2002, Olson was nearly 40 and had just sold his shallow-well company, Continental Exploration, which had ranked as the largest crude-oil producer in Missouri and Kansas back in the mid-'90s. The former fuel baron traded his business for a wad of cash.

Then, like he'd done as an oilman, Olson went prospecting. Olson had a vision. He believed that a place's destiny should not be bound by its geography. He wanted to conquer the perception that cultural shifts start at the coasts and wash inland. He wanted to create a Midwest surfing oasis.

He checked zoning ordinances and land values and average rainfall at plots around Kansas City. He traveled blacktop roads to survey fields filled with livestock. In March 2003, he drove past a giant crater on the eastern side of U.S. Highway 169 near Spring Hill; the land had been excavated a few years earlier to help level an interstate expansion. The oversized dust bowl was just a few miles from Hillsdale State Park. Olson had done his research and figured it was situated perfectly. Second to Cabela's, the park was the No. 2 statewide tourist stop, having drawn more than 1.6 million people in 2002, says Ed Gray, senior research analyst at the Kansas Department of Commerce.

Olson bought it.

There, he would construct a cable park, a trick heaven for landlocked and motorboatless wakeboarders.

The first such parks sprouted in Germany in the 1960s. The overhead cables pulled water-skiers and knee-boarders in circular laps, and the phenomenon has since boomed in gas-conserving European countries. At least 135 of the parks exist around the world (more than 60 of them in Germany). The concept arrived in the United States in the early 1980s, though skiers, who were used to the maneuverability of motorboats, weren't thrilled by the monotonous circle jerk.

But the idea gained popularity after a riding revolution in the mid 1980s. That's when California surfers attached foot straps to their surfboards so they could be towed behind lake boats or, more daringly, far out into the ocean and directly into monster waves. Their boards evolved into a thinner, less buoyant and more durable design similar to a snowboard. The new sport was expensive, though; wakeboarding required, at the very least, access to a motorboat and a large body of water. It was a late bloomer in the extreme-sports family, finally added to the X Games lineup in 1996. Now, even in Kansas City, wakeboards outsell slalom skis by more than 20 to one, says Jen Walton, a buyer at Sitzmark, the metro's pre-eminent board shop, located near 105th Street and Metcalf in Overland Park.

Mike Olson, who had boarded in his youth, had joined his brother-in-law's oil business in high school, eventually buying him out -- and working straight though the sport's emergence. After unloading his company, he wasted little time re-creating the feeling of childhood freedom. "I got distracted and woke up one day and realized life was passing me by, and went out and bought a wakeboard," he says. "It definitely changed my lifestyle and brought it back to where it should have been."

In late 2002, he took his family to Walt Disney World but ditched the Magic Kingdom and headed to Orlando Watersports Complex, one of the nation's three cable parks. (There's another in southern Florida and one in Texas.) OWC had brought the gentrified sport back to basics, offering on-site gear rentals and pay-by-the-hour ride times to make wakeboarding as accessible as, say, bowling.