A Lucky Break environment / Community
Text and images by: Kurtyss Kasten
Like all happy surf stories, this one starts with me stepping away from a job that had been weighing on me heavily. It was my second year as a night shift nurse in the Children’s hospital in a small city on the East coast of the US mainland. This was 3 years before the pandemic, and my first job that offered health insurance. I was the proud owner of a $50,000 dollar salary and felt fairly fancy about it. I had learned how to place IVs in squirming toddlers, how to change burn dressings, how to transfuse blood properly and how to distract kids in Sickle Cell crisis from their pain with card tricks. But my eyes were heavy with sleep, my shoulders were tight from the stress of the call lights, cardiac monitors, and seizure alarms, and my soul was weary from an acute awareness of all of the small imperfections of my work in a high stress, high risk work environment.
As is true for many men in Nursing, I didn’t come to the field due to a calling, and I didn’t know when I was a kid that in the most intimate moments of my mid-twenties, I’d be taking care of the most vulnerable people at some of their worst times. But showing love to people in that setting suited me. Moreso, working 3 days and having 4 days off, making a wage that covered rent, burritos for lunch on my days off, steak once a week, and left enough over for short surf trips to Latin America certainly suited me.
I have been a fan of the budget surf trip since my teens. A quick trip down the North Florida coast, a Costa Rica study abroad, a month in Peru, a week in Morocco, a rented pool house in Playa Colorado, a cheeky week in Cuba on a community service visa to teach CPR to the Surfistas Cubano. Flying with nice boards never seemed worth the risk, and I never had nice boards in the first place, so buying second hand and trying to resell before leaving, packing FCS 1’s, and a leash with the leg rope replaced with paracord for easier packing were all standard practice. Some people travel to try new foods, some would like a picture with a monument, but folks like me find it hard to plan a trip anywhere without a decent swell window, and everything else comes after.
In July of 2017, when I asked my manager to speak privately, I suspect she may have thought I was taking another nursing job, or asking for a recommendation for one. Instead, I made a request for 5 weeks off in November so that my girlfriend and I could disappear to Chile in search of chilly waves, empanadas, camping on the beach, and a break from the stress of the hospital. “No one’s ever asked for that much time off before,” she said, “But it’s not a “no.”” I was hopeful and she told me she would look at staffing. A few weeks later, she gave me the green light, and Arden and I began planning for a drive south along the Chilean coast.
I got my first credit card to rent a car for the trip, which was the smallest, and therefore most affordable, car available. It was a white, low set hatchback, clearly designed for city streets, but we had plans to test its capabilities elsewhere. My internet investigations revealed long sandy left points down the longest Pacific coast in South America, and the farther south, the less crowded. The plan, like most of our trips together from before and after this trip, was to figure out the first two days, then wing it from there. So we would fly into Santiago, drive immediately to Pichilemu , and more or less proceed south from there until the month was over.
In those days, Arden surfed in fair weather, but when it was big or cold, she stayed on the shore. Nowadays she will paddle out in just about anything that I will, and it’s a reassuring presence to be out in the water anywhere with her. Our days in Pichilemu consisted of surfing chubby waves from La Puntilla, and the claim to fame of our time there was missing Jack Johnson by just a day, as he was in town with Save the Waves and Patagonia, dedicating the headland of Punta de Lobos as a world surfing reserve. Like most surfers who went to high school in the first decade of the 2000’s, I had strummed “Better Together” and “Breakdown,” enough times, so missing him by just a day in a strange land hit me a little harder than it hit Arden.
Our joyous trip headed south from Pichilemu and the next few days consisted of beach camping in an old tent, gathering firewood, and wearing our jackets to protect ourselves from the winds of Southern Hemisphere Spring. Those nights were beans and rice in a pan by the fire, reading until sunset, and sleeping close while the wind shouted around our tent. They were not spent checking IV infusions for infiltration every hour, on the hour, or cold yerba maté in a can at 2 AM to keep my flushed face and bugged out eyes awake to hang the next bag of antibiotics. And that was fine with me.
From Pichilemu we headed to the viñeras of Palmilla, touring the ones that would let us pitch our tent for the night. We were introduced to Carmenérè, a wine that was originally French, but nearly lost to extinction there during a plague, and primarily grown in Chile now. We liked Carmenérè quite a bit, and it helped us fall asleep more than once.
Continuing south, Playa Vega de los Patos was gray and cool. It was speckled with haystack rocks like you see on the Oregon coast, scattered on the beach and just offshore, like medieval ruins of castles standing 4 or 5 stories high. Fishing people inexplicably found their way out onto some of these boulder mounds, no boat in sight, presumably wading in the frigid beachbreak with their long fishing poles held overhead. The lobos marinos, fat, calm, whiskered, rested confidently on the damp sand. We sat looking on, each eating 2 empanadas, trying not to crack our teeth on the olive pits hidden in the pino variety.
I still hadn’t picked up a board, not convinced by anything I had rented in Pichilemu. Heading south, we stopped for the best empanadas al horno in Chile, “Rata Ari”, and dreamed of growing old together running an empanada shop, smiling at foreigners passing through. Sharing 2 queso camarones, we continued down the road to Curanipe, a seaside fishing town with a walkable pier, and colorful lanchas lined up on the dry sand.
As the sun began to come out in the second week of our trip, we walked the beach at Curanipe and felt the free range sun pass through the ozone hole and blush our faces. 3 years later I would be getting the first actinic keratosis burned off the side of my nose, and the sting of the liquid nitrogen would take my mind back to these ultra-sunny days of skin damage. Even more vivid than the memory of the sunburn was the board I stumbled upon in a surf shack on the beach in Curanipe.
It was more of a treehouse, and did not look much like a store, but there was an energetic middle aged Chilean man with telltale tributaries running from the sides of the eyes that told me he had been surfing longer than I had. He had three boards available for hire: 1. A yellowed and dinged knifey 6’6 or so, a relic from the late 90s and early 2000s potato chip days. 2. An assym made for a regular footer, which I am not, around 6’0. And 3. A 5-foot-nothing hand-made well-loved blue fish, glassed on quad fin. I picked the third board up, and he told me this was called “la alfombra mágica,” a name that evoked the lightness of Alladin’s floatation, and a color not dissimilar from the Genie in the Disney movie. Maybe because I had spent the Summer on my custom 5’0 Longtoe twin fin mini simmons, or maybe because in college i preferred bombing the hills of Columbia, South Carolina on the shortest board available à la Jay Adams of Dogtown, or maybe, most practically, because this stubby board was the only one of the three that would fit sideways across the back of our rental car, I chose the Magic Carpet, paid and thanked the shop owner, and headed out with Arden to the nearest point.
The next few days were spent checking waves between Curanipe and Cobquecura, feeling out the Magic Carpet and the brisk waters. Fortunately I had picked up a used 4/3 Flashbomb in good condition from McKevilin’s Surf Shop, and with my Patagonia boots and gloves I was pretty cozy. As Kai Potter said, “A real winter suit is a beautiful thing,” and this was the closest I had come to getting comfortable below 50 degrees. Evenings were spent camping among a small stand of pines at the edge of Playa Pullay, hanging our Eno Nest as the sun set over the water, Arden reading Cannery Row and adding another layer every 20 minutes as the temperature dropped, me on my fourth or fifth trip through The Alchemist.
It was that week that we encountered the glorious marvel of Buchupureo. Parked at the top of a headland, we peaked through the trees to see peeling lefthanders inside the barranca, shielded from the strong cross shores outside, steadily rolling into the bay from the south in corduroy lines hundreds of yards long.
Preparing to paddle out, it did occur to me that at 6 feet and 20 seconds, I might have been better equipped with a little more length of board. But there we were, in the southern Chilean countryside, no shops, much less surf shops, in sight. So i slipped on my wetsuit, my boots and gloves, and walked up the point with the five foot board under my arm.
I was pleased to find 6 other people in the water, and not terribly unfriendly looking either. I paddled down the line to get in a spot to watch the takeoff and stay out of the way. There was no real sweep, saved again by the headland, but I was the only guy without a hood, and I thought twice about what an unplanned fall might feel like inside my right ear. At this point in November, Charleston surfers would be just breaking out the 3/2 reluctantly, the tougher ones staying just trunks until Thanksgiving, then shedding off the neoprene again in late April.
An aside: I’ve always been about gloves in Winter, but rarely been about hoods without a significant wind present. Maybe this comes from the old Surfer Mag segment “Borrowed Boards,” where I saw Kelly surf with gloves, no boots. Or maybe it’s my preference toward not having my ears covered in a setting so reliant on having your senses dialed in. Whatever the reason, I prefer a little less finger dexterity to relying on curved numb claws for fingers when I’m trying to paddle into a wave.
That day I gladly took off on smaller, less desirable waves while I got the feel for this long, slopey, inviting left, the “tweeners” as Ben Legare and his dad used to call those waves between the larger set waves. As I belly rode into the sandy beach I would run up the point rather than paddle around, and a local guy even instructed me to follow him further out, where we could paddle straight into the lineup without having to wear cold duck dives on the brain.
My pursuit of long left point breaks started at age 19, taking the bus to Boca Barranca from our study abroad town with one of my most inspiring friends, a tall, silly blond man called Ed. We would end that Costa Rica semester with a few days of off season stomach high waves and zero crowd in Puntarenas. On later trips, the hunt for left points led me to Huanchaco, Peru, where the water was also nice and cold, Tropicals on Sumbawa, and the delicious cobblestone peelers of Seaside, Oregon, where the vibes were famously different than Buchupureo.
As we rode out the swell, Arden perched on the rocks above, the lifeguard on duty, my best waves were reflective gray-green double overhead shimmering slopes, which met another sandbar after about a hundred yards that steepened the wave nicely for those hunting cheeky coverups. This seems like as good a time as any to tell you that I did not utilize the swells of the Southeastern United States to the extent that Kelly or the Hobgood brothers did, which is to say I did not become that good at surfing. I am what you might call an advanced mediocre surfer; my comfort zone is grab rail cut backs and small snaps, cozy and stylish, never aggressive, never above the lip, or ripping. And even in my comfort zone of the small warm water waves of South Carolina, I was not what you would call an expert of finding and visiting the green/brown room. But those days in Buchupureo, as the soft wall outside steepened over a sandbar insight and threw it’s lip over itself, I bravely tucked my hoodless noggin into the tube, to be rewarded by a cold collapsing chandelier and the momentary vision of the sun glinting through a lip of glass.
After a few exhilarating days surfing and heavy nights of sleeping bag sleep, the swell dropped off. We spent the next week in the mountains of Pucón and Bariloche, drinking red wine and eating Argentine steak, before returning to Buchupureo for another run of waves. There was a night in the transition where we stayed at a riverside campground that looked abandoned, but the septuagenarian host kindly led us to a field by the water where we could stay.
The owner showed us how to light cottonwood on fire in the grass and how the flame would spread, then burn out. Our only neighbors were some Chilean men who spent the entire afternoon and evening stoking a fire pit and continuously cooking meats. They invited us to join them and we accepted their warm beer and hospitality. Every once in a while one of them would move some firewood this way or that way, or pour beer over the meat, a seemingly delicate art, which I admit I did not fully understand. Then at some point this piece of chicken or that sausage would be forked off the grill, ready to be passed around and eaten by all, and we would return to our beers until the next piece was ready.
When we got back to the coast, we camped at Pullay and met Lori, a gentlemanly surfer in his mid thirties from England, who kindly lent me his Fred Rubble, and a couple from New Zealand who were living out of a Four-Runner on a Panamerican trip. The couple cooked us breakfast more than once and were lovely to spend time with, apart from their interest in American politics, and their insistence on holding Arden and me accountable for everything bad our country had done and presumably would do in the future. This almost got nasty one night through red wine around the fire, but Lori insulated all parties with his English charm, and by the next morning we were sharing a tea again. The sun was out for a few more days, and I had some buddies to paddle out with at Buchupureo. It’s hard to stay mad when the waves are good.
Soon it was time to head back to Santiago, but first we had to wash down the formerly white car and cut a bit of plastic from beneath that was now dragging on the road, a keepsake from a wrong turn onto a very rocky and steep back road. It was Thanksgiving, and we were staying in some cabins in Pichilemu. We met our neighbor, a surfer and Jiu Jitsu instructor from Carpinteria, who we would meet again 2 years down the road while passing through Big Sur. That night, we decided to put together a little Thanksgiving dinner.
It would be my last night together for a while. I had to get back to work, and Arden would be heading to Bolivia to enroll in a Spanish language school. The night’s potential romances were interrupted by us apparently using the wrong water in our mashed potatoes recipe, leading me to frequent the restroom. But we lay warmly in bed, enjoying the last night we would have together until January, when we were planning to meet up in Mompiche, Ecuador, another town known for a very long, sand-bottomed left point break.
The next day she rode with me to the airport to drop off the car and see me off. My month away from the hospital and its many ringing machines had come to an end. It was time to get back home, back to night shifts and the bleary eyes of 4 A.M. rounds, slipping blood pressure cuffs on tiny calves with ninja silence, closely but silently checking IV sites for infiltration, telling a half-sleeping parent in the corner that everything was fine. But we had “scored,” the quintessential surf term for not just not getting skunked, but aligning tide, time zone, swell and wind just right, being lucky enough to surf good waves. Writing this story down years later, I realize that the real joy of the trip was the long drives listening to a playlist, pulling up to a headland to take a look over the other side, sharing a meal together in a warm restaurant, and waking up in a tent on the beach in a place where my family and friends hadn’t been, where Arden and I had been together.
The opposite of to “score” is to “get skunked,” and this trip and the spirit it allowed me to remember, the spirit of a younger man who wakes and sleeps with the rhythm of natural light and the body’s cues, were evidence that we had scored more than the wave count was. That winter I would come home to a job that I was slowly realizing was growing me up in a way I was not ready to yet. A weight returned to my shoulders little by little as I crossed the threshold of the hospital each night and clocked in for another 12 hour shift, and a particularly virulent flu virus would keep us very busy through the Winter months. But on those late nights, behind the warm breath of a face mask and the embrace of a disposable gown, widening my eyes to stay awake and alert, I would think back to dropping in at Buchupureo on the Alfombra Mágica, and think forward to the next trip in Ecuador, and the next one not yet planned, and to the next one after that. And on some nights, those warm anticipations for the next adventure were just enough to keep this advanced mediocre surfer going.
Text and images by:
Kurtyss Kasten
