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.

To see more features from our Heroes for the Planet series, or to nominate your own environmental heroes, visit www.time.com/heroes