Edition: U.S. / Global

The Maverick Who Sent America Outdoors

Published: March 11, 1998

EL NINO visited Ventura, Calif., one evening recently, turning the legendary Pacific surf the color of cappuccino. The Ventura River had washed over and claimed Highway 101. Rain and gravity had their way with chunks of the coastal range. A wild air had enveloped Surfers' Point, known for its waist-high swells, transforming the beach into a chaotic tangle of driftwood beneath which displaced rattlesnakes lurked.

The next morning, over homemade pineapple muffins in the company cafeteria of Patagonia, the outdoor gear and clothing empire two blocks from the coast, the question everyone was asking was, ''Where is Yvon?'' Soon, a compact man in a wool sweater and muddy organic-cotton jeans emerged, clearly invigorated from having spent the night on the office floor in a sleeping bag raided from the emergency stash in the company's ''disaster box'' (only at Patagonia).

''You have to be a dirt bag, camping out,'' Chouinard explained cheerfully, evoking his mythic days as an itinerant mountain climber and blacksmith en route to becoming a millionaire ecobaron. ''Now I'm a rich dirt bag, I guess.''

Crisis agrees with Yvon Chouinard.

Even now, as he nears 60, past the storm years of his strength when he tested his youthful powers on numerous first ascents and revolutionized the world of climbing gear, it is difficult to separate Chouinard the myth from Chouinard the man. The mythic Chouinard is the one pictured young and bare-chested in front of his anvil on the tags of his clothes, embodied in dusty pitons since enshrined behind glass. His spirit resides in the ramshackle, corrugated-tin shed where the company started, which still stands in wobbly, heroic splendor, the dirt-bag equivalent of Lincoln's birthplace. He is the shamanistic figure whose real-life adventures have spawned a hundred catalogues and umpteen fleece pullovers promising to ''wick nervous sweat away from your skin.''

Famously restless and elusive, like the wild sea-run brown trout and steelhead he cherishes, Chouinard the man is curiously warm and without bravado. He is a survivor, highly adept at solving difficult problems. He's a man who has made it a point to drink from every stream he has ever fished, no matter how germ-ridden, having decided early on that ''I'd be outside the rest of my life, so I had to adapt. I've gotten sick a lot, but each time I got stronger and less sick.''

He measures his words carefully. To reach the stories hidden beneath the surface -- of being buried under an avalanche in southwestern China that killed a close friend, of being stranded in Antarctica in 100 mile-an-hour winds, of scaling granite canyon walls in the Russian Arctic with the butt of a fly rod in the back of his pants -- requires persistence and long, steady casts.

Though he still spiritually oversees the company he founded beside the surf in the early 70's, Chouinard spends at least half the year in the earth's most remote reaches, ostensibly dreaming up new ideas, surfing in the Maldives in the Indian Ocean or bonefishing off Christmas Island in the South Pacific. A maverick entrepreneur who donates 1 percent of the company's gross annual sales to grass-roots environmental causes, Chouinard travels with fellow gallivanters who can afford exorbitant plane tickets, friends like the NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and the writer Thomas McGuane.

''I look forward to these bursts of male bonding; we get to eat dinner in our long underwear,'' McGuane said.

A VETERAN risk-taker, Chouinard plays the endorphin to their adrenaline. ''Yvon's idea of comfort is spending the night halfway up a mountain sharing half a submarine sandwich while wrapped in a nylon shroud when a cold front comes in,'' Brokaw said.

''We call ourselves the do-boys,'' he added. ''We go do things.''

Two do-boys -- Chouinard and McGuane -- recently returned from Tierra del Fuego, or T.D.F., as it is known among jet-setting anglers.

During that trip Chouinard reached what he called an apogee. On a windless, rainy day on the Rio Grande using mostly dry flies, they had caught around 20 deluxe sea-run brown trout, which, as always, they returned to the river. McGuane caught a 25 pounder. ''We figured out that we have had 100 years of fly fishing between us, and this was singularly the greatest day of our lives,'' Chouinard said, demonstrating with a blacksmith's precision the graceful, egg-shaped arc made by a double-handed rod.

Thinking about it, ''the whole rhythm and smoothness of the effort that makes you forget about time,'' brings Chouinard perilously close to a Zen calm. It runs counter to his rather infamous reputation as a ranting, cantankerous pessimist, a particularly annoying trait in someone with a post-Hemingway fantasy life style. This gloom, friends say, is the frustration of a man accustomed to fixing things who cannot fix the ultimate equipment failure -- the earth. But on this day, his attitude is tempered by the thought of the Rio Grande itself, ''the only thing I can think of that's getting better,'' he said. Perhaps he is mellowing. Or perhaps it was the trout.