Wish on White Horses: Patagonia

Showing posts with label Patagonia. Show all posts

Thursday, August 13, 2026

Once Upon a Jacket

Do you Know Where Patagonia is?

I didn’t when I bought a Patagonia jacket about 25 years ago; I only knew it was from a an exceptional company who were into recycled materials like plastic jugs.

I still have the jacket, and I know where Patagonia is.

It’s a huge part of the Southernmost region of South America, filled with a portion of the Andes Mountains, glaciers, rainforests, lakes, fjords, and deserts.

The jacket has traveled, not to Patagonia, (I wish) but from Oregon to Hawaii, to California, and back to Oregon. I wore it when I hiked the trails on Hendricks Hill in Eugene, Oregon, with Jewell, my soul-dog, and in the evenings when it got cold in Hawaii. I wore it while horseback riding in Marcola, Oregon. And I was wearing it when I painted the fifth-wheel trailer we had lived in for two years while our log house was being built. One day that jacket received a smear of what looked like vanilla ice cream on the back. So did our Rottweiler Gabe’s tail.

Neither ever washed off.

Both he and I were on the floor of the fifth wheel. I was painting: a dangerous combination: one dog, one person, one gallon of paint, but hey, only a dog’s tail and a jacket got the brunt of it.

We were living in the fifth wheel while our log home was being constructed some 200 feet away. Living in the forest as we were those 10 years were the greatest, both the two years in the fifth wheel where I oversaw construction daily, and the years that followed living in the log home. I even cooked a Thanksgiving meal while living in that fifth wheel trailer. I learned that if you load an outside grill with briquets, wait for the fire to get blazing hot, put a foil-wrapped stuffed turkey on the rack, close the lid, and go inside to your abode for a night of slumber to rest before preparing for the dinner the next day, you will awaken to a perfectly cooked turkey.

Imagine a video on hyper speed. Logs jumping one on top of one another, a crane named Sweet Marie, gently setting a roof atop those stacked log walls. Sweet Marie, sent to us by our magnificent log home designer, lifting the three skylights into place.

If you ever build a log home, hire a mountain climber; they know how to use ropes and pulleys. That climber, our superb finish carpenter, managed, by himself, to place a 12- foot header log over an open space where a bank of windows would set beneath. He put those in too.

The horses came after the house was completed, and the freshly painted interior of the fifth wheel went to an elderly couple, for fun times at the ocean about 80 miles away. And when young fillies and one elderly mare were released from their paddock to careen around the log structure we called home, the young ones would gallop up the drive, and one would do a Lipizzaner’s leap, kicking out her heels in mid-air, while flying off the retaining wall.

All this came to me because I read about the company Patagonia this morning. (Anything that takes me back to the forest.)

You know, in turbulent times we need a reprieve from the chaos. And remembering good times allows our poor little nervous systems to calm themselves. People who are into “vibes” say that our remembering puts us back in the same “vibe” where we were when the event occurred. It reminds us that life goes in cycles, and while it appears that the earth and its people are sad, this is one way we can find hope.

All this over a jacket that now has a broken zipper.

Suddenly that jacket has become an icon for me.

And Patagonia, the company, is one reason I have hope for the future.

Here is Yvon Chouinard’s letter from the Patagonia website. Written on September 14, 2022:

“If we have any hope of a thriving planet—much less a business—it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have.

“I never wanted to be a businessman. I started as a craftsman, making climbing gear for my friends and myself, then got into apparel. As we began to witness the extent of global warming and ecological destruction, and our own contribution to it, Patagonia committed to using our company to change the way business was done. If we could do the right thing while making enough to pay the bills, we could influence customers and other businesses, and maybe change the system along the way.

We started with our products, using materials that caused less harm to the environment. We gave away 1% of sales each year. We became a certified B Corp and a California benefit corporation, writing our values into our corporate charter so they would be preserved. More recently, in 201 we changed the company’s purpose to: We’re in business to save our home planet.

While we’re doing our best to address the environmental crisis, it’s not enough. We needed to find a way to put more money into fighting the crisis while keeping the company’s values intact.

One option was to sell Patagonia and donate all the money. But we couldn’t be sure a new owner would maintain our values or keep our team of people around the world employed.

Another path was to take the company public. What a disaster that would have been. Even public companies with good intentions are under too much pressure to create short-term gain at the expense of long-term vitality and responsibility.

“Truth be told, there were no good options available. So, we created our own.

Instead of “going public,” you could say we’re “going purpose.”

“Earth is now our only shareholder.”

https://www.patagonia.com/home/

Read Yvon’s letter

Wow, would some geologist tell me how those mountains were made?

A Chilean Gaucho--a skilled horseman, said to be noble, brave and generous--and unruly.

Monday, September 26, 2022

Is This Your Lucky Day?

This morning I reached into my sock drawer and pulled out two black socks from the pile of black stockings. And by some quirk of fate, I had a pair--they matched. Now, that is as rare as a mouse who while playing on the keyboard, managed to type out a complete sentence.

Does that mean this is a lucky day?

Do you believe in synchronicity? Or the Muse or that stories are circling in the either and are determined to find a teller? Steven Pressfield tells the story of Liz Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) meeting a fellow writer and found that the story she began years ago but dismissed was picked up by this new friend who lived miles away from her.

My daughter said we should complete a story we began some time ago before someone else picks it up. I’ve heard of this before. The Red Balloon was written by two people almost simultaneously but was printed by the author who ran to the publisher first.

Sometimes the world seems magical. Other times it appears determined to pelt us with monkey wrenches.

Do you have an answer for that?

I could say it’s our mindset or our attitude, but maybe there is something else playing with us. Perhaps the Muse is as fickle as we are.

In Hawaii, there is an ongoing belief in Pele, the goddess of the volcano. They treat her as a living entity who can be appeased with gin. But, so the story goes, she has a fiery temper, and a benevolent side, such as helping drivers on the road. She burns down some people’s houses while stopping short of others, and has been known to make an abrupt turn thus saving a sacred site—of which there are many scattered around the Island. (You probably wouldn’t recognize them for often they are rocks stacked upon rocks.)

Oh, I have an explanation: There are magnetic lines in the earth called lei lines, and sacred sites are built at their junctures. Suppose--and this is a big suppose—that the lava followed those lines and turned when they turned.

Prove me wrong.

Then, there is the story of Ruth, who, years ago, saved the town of Hilo on the Big Island. When molten flowing lava threatened Hilo someone suggested calling Ruth, who had a reputation for controlling lava flows. She lived in Honolulu and was a large woman, so special arrangements needed to be made to transport her.

Once in Hilo she requested they build a straw hut for her, provide her favorite libation, and then leave her alone. Someone spied and said she just lay down in front of an advancing lava flow and meditated.

The following morning, she was alive, and the lava had stopped short of her.

Boy, that’s almost like laying down in front of a freight train and figuring it would stop before it ran over you.

I just opened my book The Frog’s Song (about our adventure in Hawaii) to see if I had written about Ruth—I didn’t find that I had, but I found the Signature Tree that I had forgotten about.

There was a tree on the property we bought called a Signature Tree by the owner who showed us the property. The tree was large, like an apple tree, but evergreen with somewhat succulent leaves. It looked like a deciduous tree, that is it didn’t lose its leaves—at least not all at once. If you wrote on a leaf, your writing would last until that leaf was displaced by another.

On one of the leaves, we found this note: “Goodbye farm,” signed by the owner’s two little girls.

When we left, we signed our names.

It’s been eleven years. Our leaves have probably dropped off by now.

P.S. I wanted to tell you that my book, The Frog’s Song by Joyce Davis, is on sale. Maybe I should have titled it The Song of Hawaii, but the frogs sang louder, so they got first billing. It was on sale a week ago, but is now back to its regular price. Sorry. I have no control over its price.

“The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.”
— George Bernard Shaw

Wish on White Horses

Pages