Reaching the Top by Doing the Right Thing

[Richard <saint@cheerful.com>]

Time Magazine
OCTOBER 11, 1999

Heroes of the Planet

Reaching the Top by Doing the Right Thing 

BY ROGER ROSENBLATT/JACKSON HOLE 

Country like this could bring out anything in a man--ecstasy, murder,
grace. I grow aware of this as I follow Yvon Chouinard along the rocks
down an offshoot of the Snake River, in Wyoming's Jackson Hole, in the
Grand Tetons. Chouinard, 60, the president and founder of Patagonia, the
outdoor-clothing and -gear company based in Ventura, Calif., that seems
more interested in protecting the environment than its profits, is about
to teach me fly-fishing. Ahead of us, the quicksilver water burbles and
shushes. Across the river, the cold mountains, patched with snowfields
and dark bruises, poke into a hot, dry sky more white than blue. 

All this is new to me. Even the Rockies look different here, more
brooding and stuck up. The only fishing I've ever done is the kind
Chouinard dismisses as too easy for words--"with live worms!" At the
local store, where we got our one-day licenses, I noted the names of the
flies on sale: Ausable Wulff, Hare's Ear, Goofus Bug, Wild Muddler. Wild
Muddler appealed to me. Chouinard--who is small and tightly built, with
the forearms of the blacksmith he once was--wears green canvas sneakers
with holes, a pair of yellowed sweat socks, denim shorts, a beaten cap,
a Patagonia vest, of course, and a T shirt bearing the words CUTTHROAT
BUSINESSMAN. It is a reference to the cutthroat trout he would like to
catch (named for the red slash across its throat) and to the antithesis
of the sort of businessman he is. He glides from rock to rock like the
champion mountain climber he also once was, while I muddle wildly,
tottering like a top at the end of its spin, tangling my fishing line
and attempting to heed my instructor. 

"It's all about process," he says, "fly-fishing and everything else. To
fish with a fly is to imitate the fly at its various stages of
development. As the fly is born and grows, it changes at different times
of the day and year. Sometimes the fish go for the nymph, the youngest
stage, at the bottom of the river. Sometimes they wait for the flies
when they are emerging upward, attached to a self-created gas bubble.
When the fly matures, it lies helpless on the top of the water until the
bubble explodes and frees its wings. The fish will try for it then too,
and you imitate that stage with a dry fly on the surface. It's a matter
of educating yourself--about the insects, fish and water. It's all about
process." 

He begins my education by showing me dry-fly casting on a path above the
river. Move the arm, not the wrist; keep the arc of the cast between 2
and 10 o'clock. But today the fish we are going for, whitefish and
cutthroats, are loitering on the bottom. So we will wet cast and roll
cast instead, with little weights on the line and flies that look like
nymphs. Roll casting requires less arm movement. You swing out the line
upriver and let it drift down in a natural motion. I find I'm not half
bad at this, thanks wholly to Chouinard, who is as aware of the process
in teaching as in everything else. 

He has no use for the sort of fishing guide who takes you to the fish,
points out the fish, tells you to keep your rod pointed down and when to
"strip"--tug the line. All that baby-sitting will produce, he says, is a
caught fish. What Chouinard wants to produce is an act of understanding.
He teaches me about the different water speeds at three different
depths. He shows me how to "mend the line," to slow up the motion of the
fly. After 20 minutes of correcting and watching me, he suddenly leaves,
and I do not notice his leaving. 

Now I am alone standing on a flat gray rock in the Snake River, roll
casting, as if I had walked there by myself. Out goes the line, like a
river winding on a river. The fly whips and curls. I strip the line. I
am beginning to see what he means by process. It is far more satisfying
to cast for a fish than to have one on your hook. The consequence
completes the process, so it is necessary to the process. But it also
carries a kind of disappointment in completion. 

Ah. I catch four whitefish, one after the other, and throw them back. 

"Four's a good number," he tells me. "We'll say you caught a few. It'll
sound like more." We watch an air show: an osprey scares off a bald
eagle that has probably come too close to its nest.

I ask him if the joy he takes in fishing relates to operations at
Patagonia. He says that from the outset in the early 1970s, the entire
goal of the company was to do the right thing. At first it meant making
the most useful and durable products, the best. Chouinard's company
produced aluminum chocks instead of the old steel pitons for climbing so
that rocks would not be scarred. It was also the first outdoors company
to introduce modern synthetic fleece. In 1984 Chouinard directed his
operation to tithe 1% of sales, which reached $180 million last year,
for activist environmental groups. In 1996 Patagonia decided to use only
organic cotton (grown without artificial pesticides or fertilizers) in
its clothing.

These days he is leading a fight to dismantle some of the nation's
hydroelectric dams, once essential for people, now destructive of
spawning salmon. Chouinard was instrumental in the taking down of the
Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine. Today, at the other end of
the Snake, in the State of Washington, the government, egged on by
Chouinard, is looking for ways to put such dams as the Little Goose out
of service.

"Could you have made a lot more money if you hadn't gone in these
directions?" I ask him. 

"Absolutely," he says. "To get organically grown cotton, I have to deal
directly with the farmers. And there's only one cotton crop a year. In
some cases, I've had to cosign loans to keep them in business. When we
started doing this, we lost about 20% of our sales. Now the stuff sells
better than before, and I'll tell you why. A designer who begins with a
bale of cotton takes his task seriously. He makes something more
worthwhile." As a private company, Patagonia doesn't report profits, but
it has expanded nicely for more than two decades. 

"The dams were just something we had to get done," Chouinard continues.
"In a few years, all the salmon will be gone. As for the 1% we give
away, we do get complaints because the groups we help are often radical,
like Earth First! But we're committed to give to groups working with
causes, not symptoms." 

He admits it's not easy for a business to be green. "But part of the
process of life is to question how you live it. Nobody takes the time to
do things right. Look at those guys." He indicates three boats that have
appeared on the river. Two fishermen sit on raised chairs at the bow and
stern of each boat. A guide sits in the middle and rows. "They won't
catch a thing," says Chouinard, "because they're dry casting. Besides,
you don't need a boat to fish this goddamn river. All summer I haven't
seen one other person walking the river." Chouinard is dead on; the men
don't catch a single fish among them. 

"Same with mountain climbing," he says. Chouinard, who has climbed El
Capitan and every other seemingly impossible mountain, was caught in an
avalanche on Gongga Shan in China in 1980. He and three companions rode
the avalanche down 1,500 ft.; one of the others broke his neck and died.
"Nowadays, people are interested only in reaching the top so they can
tell others they did it," says Chouinard. "So they climb Everest with a
Sherpa tied to them by a 3-ft. rope, one behind and one in front. Their
beds are made when they reach camp. Someone has put a chocolate mint on
the sheets. They don't tough out their problems, and they say they
climbed Everest. They start out assholes, and they end up assholes.

"And it's the same with business. If you focus on the goal and not the
process, you inevitably compromise." He spits out the word. "Businessmen
who focus on profits wind up in the hole. For me, profit is what happens
when you do everything else right. A good cast will catch a fish. It's
like Zen archery"--he believes in a brand of philosophical Buddhism, a
surprising pursuit for a French-Canadian Catholic raised in Maine.
"Success has nothing to do with sticking an arrow into the bull's-eye,"
he says. "It's all about practice--practicing taking the arrow out of
the quiver, practicing notching the string. When you have worked at the
process for years, the arrow hits the target naturally. Fishing,
climbing, selling, it's all the same."

Chouinard can work himself into a lather of pessimism and rage at
environmental abuses, yet he is personally content, and he has good
reason. His Wyoming house, about a mile from where we are fishing, is
one of his three residences. The other two are on the California coast.
On a whim, he can board a plane to British Columbia in search of brown
trout and steelheads. Having accumulated a fortune, "I do what I want to
do," he says. He wishes the same for his employees, who often refer to
his "Let my people go surfing" speech, in which he told them to live in
the moment, "as long as the work gets done," and if the surf is up,
surf.

Virtually free of company duties, he spends time with his wife Malinda
and their two children. Malinda, a small and glowing woman imbued with
cheer and curiosity, was his partner when they started out living under
benches in their shop to save on rent. And she is his partner today in
the good life, which is expensive but not lavish. The house at Jackson
Hole is small, done in comfortable rustic sloppy. Chouinard seems a
little ashamed of having so much, though he has less than he could have.
He has no stocks, only a checking account. He admires the Native
American potlatch ceremony, in which the host would give away everything
he owned. 

Failing to tough out my own problems, I hand him my fishing line, which
I now have tangled into the shape of a bird's nest, a condor's. He
begins to work at it with saintly patience, then to my great relief,
shows normal human frustration by letting out an expletive that has to
do with maternity and copulation. 

I tell him, "I was beginning to worry about you--too serene." 

"Nah," he laughs, "I'm just another dirtbag. But a rich dirtbag." 

At day's end, I watch him walk to the river and begin casting with so
deft a motion it seems he is drawing currents in the air. His back is to
me; I study the latticework creases in his neck. After a few casts, he
hooks a female cutthroat that shimmers gold and silver as it resists and
bends his rod into a bow, like the Zen archer's. When he pulls in the
fish, it wriggles under the arc of the bow before he moves it toward his
hand. The trout looks up at him in desperate wonder. He reaches for its
mouth and sets it free.