We locked eyes, I swear. I was standing on the 16th hole at the Bandon Dunes golf course, along the Oregon Coast, just north of the California border. Beyond the 100-foot gorse-covered drop at my feet, which fell to the sand and surf below, the view of land and water meeting in sublime harmony was the same for miles to the north and the south. To the west, straight out to sea, was nothing.

Except for him.

I had never seen a parasurfer before. And though I happened to be standing on a golf course that since opening six years ago has drawn nothing but rapturous praise (“perhaps the last great meeting of sand and sea on American soil,” said Ron Whitten, the architecture editor of Golf Digest), it was the parasurfer who momentarily elicited my shock and awe. Roped to a parachute and toes clutching a surfboard, he let the wind grab him, shoot him along, drive him into the surf and hoist him into the sky, all at a speed that looked pretty damn terrifying to a guy whose only real physical risk of the day had been to wait four holes before applying sunscreen.

I looked out and he looked ashore, and in one of those strange instances of unexpected human connection, our eyes met. During those few seconds, I know we shared the same perplexed fascination, perhaps even the same thought, as in, “You must be crazy to be doing that?”

Our shared instant passed, and I sensed we were each happy to return to the risks of our respective sports. I can’t speak for the rest of his day, but Bandon Dunes – with its tilt-a-whirl greens, penal rough, plentiful gorse and gorgeously evil bunkering – held peril enough for me.

My wife and I had arrived at Bandon the evening before, just in time to see the golf courses in the misty dusk light. Every piece of the perfect holiday puzzle seemed to be fitting together: excellent accommodations, inventive local cuisine and great golf (at Bandon Dunes and its sister course, Pacific Dunes). The only variable beyond our control was the weather, and so, naturally, dawn broke the next day to hugely disappointing conditions. I cursed as I stuck my head out our balcony window.

The early sun was shining brightly. It was already getting hot. There was hardly a whiff of wind. I felt ripped off.

Let me explain. When you golf often in the U.K., you tend to seek out the more historic links courses, which are always seaside. In the U.K., the term “seaside” is code for “you’ll return with fingers colder than Popsicles.” You not only expect grim conditions, you thrive in them and even come to see that links golf isn’t the same without them. A few years ago, during a category 3 typhoon, I asked a course marshal in North Berwick, Scotland, if the course was open. “Och, aye,” he spat out. “This is nowt but a light breeze and a heavy dew.”

In truth, my heart sank a little, before heading to Bandon, when I read in one of its brochures that the courses were “born in the spirit of Scotland’s ancient links tradition.” The word “links” is both a lure and an alarm since golf course developers the world over want to convince players their new course is somehow mystically connected to the Holy Land. But the term “links” refers very specifically to golf played seaside on sandy and hard-packed land, a high-salinity soil not fit for agriculture, and which ancient Scots therefore dubbed the land that “linked” the sea to the arable land. There is almost no true links land left in North America, which doesn’t stop local nine-hole prairie dog tracks from adopting names like Royal Links.

But Bandon has perfect links land – with its topography, sand, fescue grasses, sound design principles and ocean – and there is nowhere else like it in North America. It also has that intangible thing we might call “mystique,” which is often based on a great golf course paired with a sense of remoteness. Bandon is certainly not easy to get to, which helps explain why there is already an air of pilgrimage to this place, even though it hasn’t been open that long. Since Bandon Dunes opened in 1999 and Pacific Dunes in 2001, they have annually been ranked in the Top 5 modern courses in the world by such publications as Golfweek, Golf Digest and Golf Magazine.