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/
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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.
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