Retirement Speech: The North Face C.O.O.

Looking around here tonight, I see a lot of people who I know will be a part of me for the rest of my days. And I’ll bet that if I polled each of you about your time working with me, there would be one common refrain: “He doesn’t like surprises.”

No, I do not like surprises. I like things squared away and ship-shape. I like plans and deadlines and accountability. But as I think back to where this all started, during my days as a cadet at West Point, I seem to remember that the element of surprise was a tactic practiced by all the great military leaders. On the football field at Army, the element of surprise was often the difference between winning and losing a game. So I’ll be damned if I can remember when I became so averse to surprises. And I’m going to do my best to insert the element of surprise into this speech. 

I’ll start by telling you something I’ve never told anybody. 

When I retired from the military and joined this company 20 years ago, I had to relocate from New York to San Francisco. The transition to civilian life and the impending cross-country move didn’t help my marriage, which, truth be told, had been on shaky ground for a while. My wife had a full life in New York, a life that she built as a strong, independent woman during all those years of my deployments, and she elected to stay behind. I was not proud of the fact that I was beginning the next phase of my life without her. 

The company graciously offered to put me up in a swanky hotel on Nob Hill for as long as I needed to get squared away, but the military man in me saw that as wasteful and unnecessary, so the second day I was in town I signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment and had all my belongings moved in by sunset.

I still had five days before I was to report to duty as the vice-president of West Coast operations, so I asked myself what the VP of Ops for an outdoor apparel company would do with time to kill in the big city. I logged on to our company website and found a link to one of our partner organizations, the Sierra Club, and discovered that the local branch was planning to do an urban hike, right here in San Francisco, on that very Saturday. 

I joined the Sierra Club and I signed up for the hike. I then took BART and a bus to our warehouse in Berkeley and used my new employee account out pick out some hiking boots, a backpack and a few pairs of shorts.

Here I was just a couple of days in California, and I already had an outrageously overpriced apartment, a Sierra Club membership, some snazzy hiking gear, a mastery of the public transportation system and plans to make some new friends as I traversed the hills of the City by the Bay. I had arrived!

My daughter, upon hearing of all this, accused me of “overcompensating.”

They say that when it rains it pours, and the day before the hike, my elderly mother died. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it was still a shock to the system. I called around to a bunch of airlines, but after a few hours haranguing one poor agent after another, it became apparent that I wasn’t going to be able to catch a direct flight to New York until Sunday. The frustration of those calls was the last straw for me, considering all the upheaval in my life. 

Suddenly, it all just seemed too much. I remember lying on my half-constructed IKEA couch that night and crying like a baby, sobbing so hard that my ribs ached. I'd seen guys on the field of battle cry like that, and that was a sure sign that it was over for them. That night, it really did feel like it was all over for me, as well.

I woke up on that same couch early on Saturday when my daughter called from back East. We’ve always been tight and she worries about me, and I must have sounded like hell, because I could hear a real fear in her voice. I told her about the flight and she asked what I was going to do to fill my Saturday. I told her I was going on a city hike with my new group, the Sierra Club. 

That was just b.s. to make her feel better since I no longer had any intention of following through, but it seemed to give her some peace. After hanging up, I thought, 'why not?' Slogging through a hike with strangers couldn’t be any worse than bouncing around my own skull my all day, with those IKEA furniture instructions threatening to push me into the abyss.

That day’s hike was a good workout, just what the doctor ordered, and the city was stunning. I met a lot of first-rate people. Like a lot of folks with military backgrounds, I’m not a big sharer where my personal life is concerned; that's probably the biggest reason why so many career vets and cops have divorce lawyers in their futures. But a couple of the women in the group, who were very kind and very persistent, eventually got me to cough up some of the details. They would have made excellent Army interrogators.

I was in a mental fog and unfortunately didn’t retain a lot of names that day, but I recall that one of them had a son in Afghanistan, so I told her some lies about my tour there to make her feel better, and it seemed to cheer her up, which actually cheered me up. I remember laughing about something to do with Army food, and I recalled thinking that I couldn’t remember the last time I had laughed.

Later that day, after enjoying a post-hike celebration with my new comrades at a bar near Fisherman’s Wharf, the two ladies with whom I was talking earlier picked up my tab. I had to fight back tears for the gesture.

But I actually did lose my composure the next day on the flight home. Being ex-military, I travel light and was using the only backpack I owned, the same one I used for the hike, to make the trip. My suits were still at my soon-to-be ex-wife’s house in New York and she was going to bring one to the funeral home for me, so I just jammed a pair of jeans and a few shirts into the backpack the morning after the hike and drove to the airport.

In mid-flight, I reached into the side pocket to find a pen so I could do the crossword puzzle in the in-flight magazine. I felt something that I hadn’t put in there. I pulled a paperback book that I didn’t recognize. Then it all came flooding back to me. One of the women from the hike mentioned it to me as a book that gave her great comfort through her own divorce and her son getting deployed to Afghanistan.

Still, I couldn't figure out how it got in my backpack. Then I remembered that the bar where we did the after-hike thing in San Francisco was next door to a bookstore. I only remembered that detail because I was planning on picking up that book myself on her recommendation, but got caught up in the beers and fun and forgot. But she obviously didn’t.

I never saw either of those wonderful women again. But in the two decades since, I have met an awful lot of people in this company that embodied their spirit, folks who embrace the healing properties of the great outdoors and let that spirit flow to others -- some of whom, I can assure you from experience, are in desperate need of that brand of salvation. 

As I mark my retirement and hand the torch to my successor, I vow not to go gently into that good night. I will continue to spread the gospel of John Muir. And I will look for every opportunity to pay the spirit of those women forward.

I urge you to inspire each other every day. I urge you to define yourselves, at least in part, by movement. Finally, I thank each of you for the role you played in saving me. Go forth and shout your truth from the mountains -- and be sure you're wearing North Face gear on the journey!