GringoX

…Some dreams are made for children
But most grow old with us
And when the air can hope to hold on
And to the ground to dust and rust
Burning lights in the desert
Such a sign only you would know
Your running tyres, they’re out of pressure
Such a sign only you would know…
—“Burning Lights,” Joe Strummer

Gringo X was not going to go quietly. He piled furniture against the front door of the two-story house and barricaded the other entrances. Within the rooms, he paced frantically while he dialed his lawyer on a cell phone. Out front, the Chilean police, now numbering almost a dozen, were quickly losing their patience.
A helicopter hovered overhead in the blazing Chilean sun, scanning the exits. 

Gringo X had come to the property to claim what he felt was rightfully his: a home overlooking several slabbing reef breaks, which he had purchased and furnished with antique artifacts over the prior decade. 

In the wake of a nasty divorce, however, it was all in dispute. His Chilean ex-wife screamed at him from the street to open the door and turn himself in. This only served to further fuel his defiance. Eventually, the GOPE—the Chilean equivalent of the SWAT team—arrived in a heavily armored car, and he realized things were getting serious. Officers in full body armor scrambled out of the vehicle and took up positions. 

Gringo X knew he didn’t have much time. He furiously stuffed a series of legal documents, including the deed to the house, into his backpack. Then, moments before the team took a battering ram to the front gate and stormed his home, he deftly hopped over the outside fence, down to the sidewalk, leaving the entire house still locked. 

The officers threw him down roughly, face first, onto the pavement and cuffed his hands behind his back. Just like that, the standoff was over. While he would spend a long night in the local jail, in an overcrowded cement cell, there was a distinct satisfaction that in the end, he hadn’t let the police into the house. Never give in.

It wasn’t always like this for Gringo X. As a young Southern Californian surfer, he had come to Chile in the early 90s to chase empty, left-hand pointbreaks and wide-open spaces. The country and culture were worlds away from the crowds and materialism of his hometown of Dana Point in Orange County, California. It was inexpensive, the women were pretty, and he and a handful of traveling surfers were stumbling upon empty lineup after empty lineup. Perhaps best of all, he was far away from the shadow of his strict family upbringing, and his conservative parents who longed to see their son become an attorney—not a vagabond surfer. 

It was the halcyon days of Chilean surf exploration and he was at the frontier. Stories of his early discoveries trickled back to California as he spent months upon months scouring the coast for new waves. Eventually, however, even the pristine pointbreaks of central Chile felt too mainstream for his liking. He had always been drawn to unusual places—areas others didn’t want to go to. That led him to venture further north, deep into the Atacama Desert, to a city called Iquique.

•

As my plane touched down at the Iquique airport, nearly 25 years later, I wondered what I’d find. I had first heard about Gringo X from friends, who grew up with him in Dana Point and had shared some early Chilean surfing adventures. According to them, Gringo X had cut off most communication decades ago, save for the occasional cryptic email. My initial inquiries had gone unanswered, and when he finally did surface, his responses were limited to a few one-sentence messages. 

All I knew was that he was supposed to meet me at the terminal, but when I arrived he was nowhere to be seen. About 30 minutes later, a battered Dodge pickup with surfboards in the bed screeched up to the sidewalk. Gringo X hopped out of the truck enthusiastically and greeted me with a large green smile, his mouth overflowing with coca leaves. He wore a shirt emblazoned with the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (the one that prohibits unreasonable search and seizures, never mind that we were in Chile). 

An hour later we were parked at a remote pointbreak outside of town as he pondered desert life. “I like it out here,” he said simply, staring out at the ocean. “There’s nothing really to see so it’s all kind of relaxing to me. The good thing is you’ll see no other gringo surfers for the next three days.” 

The city of Iquique lies in the heart of the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile, the driest spot on Earth. With mountainous sand dunes rising almost directly from the water’s edge, it’s truly a land where the desert meets the sea. A port town, and also one of the largest duty-free zones in South America, Iquique serves as a bustling trade center, in addition to a hub for copper mining companies due to nearby extraction operations. The region was originally Peruvian territory prior to the War of the Pacific in the late 1800s, during which Chile claimed it. Today, the city is a bizarre mix of scattered high rises and cement dwellings running along a strikingly beautiful, turquoise-blue sea.

The surf in Iquique is generally not for the faint of heart. Without the more gradual continental shelf, which is present in the south, the waves in northern Chile approach with added velocity and power. Most break over extremely shallow rock reef. The town itself is home to a series of reef breaks that range from advanced to death defying. For this reason, bodyboards have traditionally been the preferred surf vehicles—at least at certain breaks—enabling later drops and more protection from the urchin-infested reefs. 

When Gringo X first came to Iquique in 1992, the small number of local surfers consisted almost entirely of bodyboarders. Still, there were certain waves that were rarely surfed on any craft. One of those was a large, intense right-hander called El Colegio, which only begins breaking at double overhead.

“The drop at Colegio is a ledge,” he explained to me. “It’s super heavy and provides plenty of excitement. To catch the wave you have to put yourself in the impact zone, and it’s really easy to get caught inside. To surf it, you need to accept that you’re going to take gas. But when you do make a wave, it’s an adrenaline rush.”

Local surfers were perplexed by the mysterious foreigner who had arrived in their town. “We would see this unknown gringo riding his bike to the surf with a big board under his arm,” says Morris Taps, a surfer from Iquique who now lives at Punta de Lobos. “He would lock up his bike down by the water and surf huge El Colegio all by himself. We would just watch from shore. He was like some kind of ghost.”

“I met him in the 90s,” adds Roddy Alvarez, a local surf school owner. “He was surfing El Colegio, La Intendencia, and Punta Dos—really slabby waves. That inspired a lot of us here to surf those waves. We used to think those waves were only for bodyboarding, not surfing.”

Gringo X’s equipment of choice for large Colegio was a 7’8″ Pat Rawson pintail, a broken-and-repaired board that arrived in Iquique with an Argentine surfer via Puerto Escondido. It was originally shaped for professional surfer Jeff Booth for riding Sunset Beach in Hawaii. Gringo X still has the board, a quintessential late 80s shape, thick and gunny with a day-glow red and yellow airbrush design.

Back home, Gringo X’s friends wondered what had happened to him after he dropped out of communication. As it turns out, he married a local girl and started a family. And when El Colegio came alive, for the better part of two decades, he rode it. He had occasional visitors, traveling surfers who would pass through town. 

In 1996, Kohl Christensen, then just 19 years old, came to Iquique and stayed for a month. Gringo X and Christensen surfed together regularly, the Hawaiian enjoying the power of the waves, which share similarities to the North Shore. 

“I met [Gringo X] one day checking Colegio,” says Christensen. “Back then he was the only gringo in town. I had never seen anyone chew coca leaves before, and when he smiled his mouth was just completely green. It was freaky. He used to carry it in a film canister, and he would use a matchstick and stir in baking soda to increase the effect.” 

The two would trade waves out at big Colegio. “He would ride this bright red board, wear a white helmet, and chew green coca leaves out in the water. It was pretty classic.”

Gringo X was never the most savvy when it came to women. With a sweet but quirky personality, he didn’t date a lot while growing up in California. When he arrived in Chile, not only was he taken by the exotic nature of the local women and the extra attention he received, but he also approached them with a certain amount of innocence. 

He met his now ex-wife, Salange, at a local pizzeria in Iquique. They became a couple almost immediately. The first few years of their relationship were intermittent, as Gringo X bounced between Iquique, Santiago, and occasionally California. But that would soon change. “Subconsciously, I think I was looking for a reason to stay,” he says. “Then I got Salange pregnant—so there you go.” The two were married in a civil ceremony, with a church wedding coming about a year later. 

It was a tumultuous relationship at best, and fights were common. “We never were really happy. I’m a Horse and she’s a Rat in Chinese astrology. Our energy was always different, so we were basically incompatible. Also, I think she was always looking to use me. Her friends used to say that she told them that she was going to marry a rich guy.”

Early on in their marriage, they attempted a move back to Orange County, to be near his parents, but it didn’t stick. His wife hated California, and Gringo X felt his soul withering as he drove the freeways selling industrial air cleaners. At one point, he had to take his car in to get the body repaired because he had put multiple dents in the roof from repeatedly pounding his fist against the car ceiling while sitting in traffic.

Back in Iquique, the couple would go on to have three daughters, but their relationship continued to unravel. The fights grew worse, and eventually they separated and then, finally, divorced. “I always figured if men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then that means women are aliens—and you should ignore alien orders!” he told me, clearly still wounded from the entire experience. He has the mantra posted on his wall, lest he forget.

Chileans have an astute way of landing on nicknames, or apodos, that are surprisingly perceptive. While no one is quite sure who came up with Gringo X, he was most certainly a mystery when he first arrived in Iquique—the only gringo in town, and one of the few surfers who would tackle Colegio and other breaks. And while he wasn’t necessarily unfriendly, he wasn’t the most social, so a mystique developed.

In the mid-90s, photographer Geoff Ragatz rolled into town, and captured a pulled-back shot of Gringo X gliding across a large Colegio wall. In the accompanying article, which ran in this magazine, Ragatz references a “Gringo X” and the name was etched into Chilean surf lore.

“[Gringo X] spoke better Spanish than the rest of us and was connected in Iquique,” says Ragatz today. “He was with a local girl and was tight with the family. I just remember we were all loose. We surfed and we partied and that was it. It was pretty wild back then. I honestly don’t remember a lot from my time there.” 

•

During my stay in Iquique—at the very house of the police standoff, which was now back in Gringo X’s possession—I was roused daily by the pounding rhythms and anarchist lyrics of the Clash: “Are you taking over, or are you taking orders?” 

Gringo X’s purebred Rottweiler, Margarito, often peed freely on my boardbag. “He’s a dog,” said Gringo X simply as an explanation. Outside, the surf looked fun until I realized most of the hollow waves detonated onto dry-reef end sections. 

These days Gringo X prefers the mellower breaks just outside of town, including a couple of semi-secret spots that we surfed, which were empty. Apparently his taste for large Colegio soured after several brutal beatings, one of which stripped his wetsuit down to his ankles and pinned him to the reef until he almost drowned.

“There’s a boil that we’d line up on,” he explained. “The problem was that on bigger sets you’d get caught inside sitting there. I was lined up there, and all of a sudden this huge black wall popped up and broke right on top of me. I took the entire force of the wave on the head. The turbulence ripped my wetsuit open and it was dark and cold and I was pinned on the bottom. I finally got to the surface and got half a breath before the next wave broke on me, and I had to endure the rest of the set. I was pretty rattled after that.”

Gringo X lives a fairly simple life. While he doesn’t have a job per se, he’s constantly busy with various projects, and owns a couple of buildings in town. One of them, called Salon Longino, is a turn-of-the century edifice in downtown Iquique that he’s been slowly renovating over the past decade. 

On one side of the building, he’s built out a café, complete with an espresso machine and other equipment. To date, however, he’s never opened it. A huge Clash fan, he’s dubbed it the Strummerville Café Standup Coffee Shop. “Have a cup of Joe with Joe. One free coffee for those who know. I’ll open it one day, but I’m afraid it’ll be too much work. I still need time to surf.”

He has three daughters from his former marriage—one who goes to college in Santiago and two living in Iquique with his ex-wife, whom he sees daily. His middle daughter, Aija, is taking surf lessons at the local surf school, and has been called “fearless” by her instructor. 

When I asked him why he still lives in Iquique after all these years, he cited his daughters and his property. “Basically I’m also still here because if I was in California, I’d be in Dana Point surfing Salt Creek, and be all pissed off like everyone else,” he added when pressed.

The dream of uncrowded waves in a far off land, away from all the trappings of a modern, materialistic life, is deeply burned into the surfer psyche. But the reality is that “the dream”—and whatever that represents—remains elusive. 

Is Gringo X happy? That’s a difficult question to answer. From my visit, I can say that he does seem content, at some level satisfied that he didn’t follow a traditional path in a culture he never seemed comfortable with. But he has also sacrificed a great deal. “The price of being an expat is that you miss all
the fun parties friends have back at home,” he said wistfully. 

From the outside looking in, it seems an odd life. “My old man was always asking me, ‘What do you want to do with your life? You have to have a ten-year plan.’ So that was always in the back of my mind, and I figured why not Chile, and why not Iquique?”

Toward the end of my stay, we were perched on a row of windswept sand dunes overlooking Punta Gruesa, a large exposed point south of town. A student of history, Gringo X explained the story of how, during the War of The Pacific, Chilean Captain Carlos Condell, commander of the wooden schooner Covadonga, deceptively lured the much larger, faster, and better fortified Peruvian ironclad Independencia onto the reefs at Punta Gruesa, sinking one of the jewels of the Peruvian fleet. “The Battle of Iquique,” as it became known, is now commemorated with a national holiday on May 21st each year.

“I always figured, whatever everyone wants you to do, do the opposite,” Gringo X said, staring out at the ocean, squinting into the dipping sun, traces of coca emanating from his lips. “So I guess that’s what I did.”

[Feature image: Hard against the Atacama Desert, this coastline marks the western edge of the driest place on Earth. By comparison, Death Valley and the Gobi are veritable rain forests. Photo by Will Henry.]