Black Friday's Silver Lining

From my vantage point behind register 7 at the Utica, New York Bass Pro Shops Outpost at 6:45 a.m., I could not see the end of the line of customers I was catering to. The line snaked around the beef jerky bin, past the coffee fixture, around the edge of the apparel section, and down one of two main drive aisles in the store. The line of customers had been moving at a steady clip since 5 a.m. when the store opened, and it hadn’t slowed or abated in the least. Families hid gifts from prying eyes right beside them in line. Husbands glanced over their shoulders for wives while they asked for gift receipts. Bull mastiffs, golden retrievers and French bulldogs waited patiently in-between toddlers, strollers and teenagers. I had cashed out dozens of customers, some with multiple carts, for thousands of dollars of merchandise and behind me, the sun hadn’t even come up yet.

Three hours earlier, I was exhaustedly trying to decide whether it was worth it to continue my frantic rush to get ready, to get out the door 7 minutes earlier than I otherwise might so as to have that time to put enough gas in my Jeep so that it was ready to immediately hit the stream once my shift ended at 2 p.m.
 
The immediacy, the rush, the pressure, wasn’t anything to do with one-day sales or limited items, but a simple product of the fact that at 4:30 p.m. in Upstate New York in late November, you run out of sunlight. In order to maximize my time on the water between my 2 p.m. shift end and the 4:30 sunset, with a 45-minute drive in-between, I’d need to fill up the tank before arriving at Bass Pro Shops at 4:45 a.m., which meant leaving at 4, instead of 4:15.
I looked at the forecast for the foreseeable future and all the highs were in the 30s, which is typical for December in Upstate New York. Trout fishing when it’s 30-something degrees isn’t impossible, but iced-up guides, numb hands and frozen, kinking braided line make it decidedly more challenging. The difference between fishing when it’s 41 degrees and fishing when it’s 34 can be enormous.

With the threat of a long dry spell looming I sucked it up and rushed out the door. After student loan payments, back taxes and groceries, I had twenty-eight dollars left to my name, and I put it all in the gas tank, leaving my bank account exactly at 0.18.
                     Everything I had to my name was in my Jeep and it’s tank, with only nine hours and 15 minutes of Black Friday mayhem between me and the last comfortable day of fishing in Upstate New York.

I am sure that participating in Black Friday craziness as a shopper is chaotic, but it can’t compare to witnessing it play out from behind the counter. Because, in retail you see the never-ending stream of people and gifts for hours, and hours and hours….

When I arrived at the store at 4:30 in the morning, there was a line that started at the front door and wrapped 200 yards around the sidewalk and down through the parking lot. These people, if they didn’t come right from the dinner table on Thanksgiving, couldn’t have slept long in-between family celebrations and shopping plans.

I always jog through the parking lot toward the store. Some time ago I discovered that while many of us wait to feel positivity, hope or energy on the inside before we can manifest it externally, sometimes it can work just as effectively in reverse. What I mean to say is… smile if you’re seeking happiness and run if you want energy. It doesn’t always work but it does always trump the alternative.

We had our typical morning meeting of associates going over procedure and protocol and attempting to ready the store team, some newly hired and some steeped in retail experience, for the oncoming frantic rush of customers and then we opened the doors.

For nine straight hours there was never a moment where the lines at customer service abated. Some customers brought multiple carts of merchandise, some spent thousands of dollars. There were carts full of hangars from clothing purchased that had to be re-stocked every hour, there were boxes and boxes of paper bags that seemed to empty like a water bottle with a leak. There were demands about prices, damaged items, missing tags, misleading ads. Multiple times the batteries on our communicators died so that we couldn’t contact other departments. The drawer I ran up to at customer service, in an attempt to help keep the crowd moving smoothly, kept running out of cash, so that I had to scramble to make change with other drawers because for a time, our cash machine wasn’t functioning. Crying toddlers, barking dogs, and irritated adults rounded out the mix.

It was a day as full of stimulus overload as I can imagine on a continual basis. Most of us experience some degree of chaos at points in our lives, but to be standing in a stream of it for nine straight hours is something else entirely. You become so overloaded with lights, sounds, questions, and demands that you go into a robotic repetition of what needs to get done, repeating the same words that you hope make sense: “Find everything alright,” “Happy Holidays,” and “Thanks for coming in,” until it’s on to the next cart, next dog toy, next pile of sweatshirts, pair of boots, and the next and the next.

It is not, I am careful to add, comparable to anything really stressful. We are not saving lives or taking them, defusing bombs or putting out fires. In a society that tends toward hyperbole, I think it’s important we reserve the strongest descriptions of anxiety, stress and difficulty for those occupations and situations that truly warrant them.

The night prior I had made a point to call a friend of mine, Jacob Jonza, who was a private in the 81st Airborne Division of the United States Army for three years, who was deployed to Iraq and who watched friends die in close proximity to him. While I was working, a cousin came through the line and patted me on the back, a cousin that worked as an E.M.T. in an ambulance struggling to keep people alive to get them to Urgent Care (Thank you Don Healey). Another cousin’s wife, who was a nurse that had gone through the Coronavirus pandemic at her local hospital (Thank you Sue Crittelli) with grace and grit in the midst of hardship I can’t even imagine tapped me on the shoulder as she moved through with her cart of gifts for family and friends.

Jacob, Donnie and Sue knew was stress was about and they knew that retail frustration and anxiety, while not ideal or serene, couldn’t really compare.

But nine hours of non-stop cartloads of shoes, sweaters, air rifles, fishing rods, waders and toys isn’t exactly relaxing either.

Nine times out of ten, if I am leaving before the store closes and I have not hit the 40-hour mark beyond which no manager in his or her right mind will keep you (for fear of the dreaded overtime expenditure), I will ask if my staying longer would be helpful. I can always use the extra hours and many times the store needs the help.

At 2 p.m., I shut off the light that indicated my register was open, politely excused myself and directed customers to another open register, and walked toward the back of the store where I’d punch out to leave.

I considered for the entire walk my empty bank account, the stack of bills that required attention ranging from back taxes to student loans. Was it irresponsible of me, or worse yet, indifferent, to walk away when there was work to be had?

All I kept thinking about was the notion that unless you become incredibly wealthy, in today’s economy, for most of us, bills, payments and debts are going to be an ever-present reality, albeit to varying degrees. They are a forest fire we can seemingly gain an upper hand on momentarily until we rest for a moment and another stand of spruce ignites. My working a 16-hour shift for what would amount to an extra $175 would feel good for a brief moment in time. With that paycheck I’d chip away at a few daunting bills and get the temporary sensation of relief, but it would fade just as soon as the next round of e-mails flooded in and paper bills piled up in the mailbox. It was a temporary fix in a scramble most of us stay uber-focused on for the brief moments where it feels like we’re winning something.

If, on the other hand, I watched over my shoulder as the last light of the final day in Upstate New York where it was going to be above 40 degrees faded from the sky while I rang out customer after customer frantically attempting to accumulate stuff…

Watching the sun sink beneath the clouds in a brilliant display of color for what might be the last time for an extended period… watching a blue heron or a white egret soar over a marsh, or the light hit the water as it faded from the sky, knowing this could be the final time for a little while…
 
We have come to see the world in such a way that we like assigning value to things because it’s easy. A vacation costs this much, a house costs that much. A car, an education, a new television, we can assign values and prices to all of these things. Then we figure those evaluations in with how our time relates to that cost. “Well, it would take me two years to save this much money, so to buy that house it would cost two years of my time…”

It’s far from the most effective means of figuring out our lives, but it is relatively easy, in the sense that it only requires knowledge of time and math and we can arrive at an answer. There should be something itching at us even after we’ve arrived at that answer, because not all moments, not all hours or days or experiences are comparable.

But we can ignore the itching, because the math is simple and we can justify decisions without too much deep thought or self-discovery and it allows us to move forward without debilitating doubt, fear or anxiety.

While it is relatively easy to arrive at a conclusion about what we will earn when we, say, work an extra few hours or save for an extended period, it is decidedly more difficult to decide what it will cost us to do something, or more aptly, to decide not to do something.

When you sleep in, turn down the invitation, leave the stream or the beach or the woods early, what does it cost you?

That’s harder to figure out because there are not certainties when it comes to conjecture. You could very well have, and often we’d like to think that you did, avoid or cut short an exercise in futility or failure or at the very least boredom.

But this brings up an important question. If, as we head out to the stream, or into the woods, we are telling ourselves that anything is possible, that this day, and this hour, might provide a fish, deer or turkey that we remember forever, that might provide a story we share we friends and family, a photo we take that we look back on with gratitude and excitement, then that makes sense. But if when we forego an opportunity to fish or hunt, or cut one short, we cannot with the same mind tell ourselves, or at least tell and believe ourselves, if we say we are now cutting short a waste of time or saving ourselves unnecessarily exerted energy.

Every hour on the water can be a chance at the memory of a lifetime or it can be time idly spent that might have been better allocated elsewhere, but it can’t be both.

So the difference, then, between an angler arriving at the water with nothing but possibility and potential in front of him, and the angler leaving the water so as to get home early, get back to work, or relax elsewhere is and can only be one thing, really: Frame of mind. The angler on his way to the water must see the future with inherent optimism, whereas the angler leaving must view it as time better spent elsewhere. The lens through which you view the unforeseeable future is what inherently defines your present.

It can sound trite, naïve or cliché to maintain that state of mind, or how you look at things, invariably dictates direction and progress, but cliches get that way for a reason. Every action starts in the mind, and nothing exerts so much influence over our decisions as how we perceive our situation.

For example, you could easily view a day in which you were working until 2 p.m., with a sunset time of 4:42, and a forecasted high of 43 degrees as a grey fall day best spent inside.

Or you could see that two hours of sunlight and warmer-than-freezing temperatures as as good an invitation as any to get on a stream.

I sat in my Jeep for a moment considering a short drive and collapsing on a couch versus pulling on base layers and waders and climbing into a stream, and chose the latter. The wondering would have nagged at me incessantly.

My father was my hero and one of my closest friends. He was a man of remarkable drive and determination who rarely made time to relax. The closest he came was a rapid 2.5.mile walk throughout our neighborhood on a Sunday morning with our golden retriever. I’d accompany him and he always made note of the geese flying north or south with the seasonal change, reminding me that spring was coming, or winter, depending on their direction.

He was a man tied to his work by ambition and uncertainty, so the notion of flight undoubtedly seemed appealing. As an attorney who ran his own legal practice, the concept of being able to predict what might happen next with any degree of accuracy probably seemed alluring in its own right as well. So he always made a note of the geese, those free-flying birds that still maintained a precise V as they pointed toward an impending seasonal change.

Ten years after he lost his battle with cancer, the geese still remind me of him, and a V of them had briefly accompanied me overhead on the thruway.

My grandmother on my mother’s side was another hero we’d said goodbye to just five years prior. A woman of 83 who was remarkably intelligent, creative and kind, she took special delight in natural beauty. She loved the ocean and the sky, and sunsets especially.

She maintained that no two were alike and never tired of visiting a hilltop we’d found when exploring one day where the sunsets were particularly stunning. She’d take photo after photo in awe and be every bit as enthusiastic about returning the very next night.

Viewed through the lens of modern culture and popular priorities it might seem strange to return to a given location to photograph the sky. But if I lined up the images of the gold and violet and amber and rose spread out against the clouds all in a row from years of returning it might seem strange that you would have been doing anything else at that particular moment aside from capturing that scene.

When I arrived at the kayak launch by the stream where I’d become accustomed to parking, it was a relief that I was the only vehicle there. The stream was closer to a metropolis than most trout streams, and I’d seen cars and trucks use the dirt pull-off and kayak launch as a spot to relax, I’d seen duck hunters, other anglers, you just never knew.

It was always the pulling on waders and tying boots and getting the waterproof zipper on the neoprene jacket to cooperate that was the most vexing part. Once you were back in the still-wet waders and the jacket was zipped the laces were double-knotted then it was just a matter of making the most of the remaining daylight, calculating where to cast and how many times and the next move.

I fished my way back upstream to a sizeable beaver dam that always drew me back. I’d caught tiger muskie on the upstream side, landed browns both above and below, and it provided that section of the stream’s most prominent structure.

Just three days prior I’d hooked a brown on the downcurrent side of the dam that had run across the current, jumped and thrown the hook.

As late in the season as it was, the fish just stayed with me. You try not to consider the prospect of a long stretch of winter days where it’s so cold that fishing is unenjoyable and you are constantly remembering the last fish you’d hooked that you couldn’t land, but you couldn’t exactly dismiss the entire scene in your head either.

If we love to fish because the moments stay with us, then we can’t get upset when… the moments stay with us.

What, I thought to myself, were the odds in hell that a fish that had secured a feeding lane on one side of a beaver dam, after being hooked, fought, jumped, and lost, would return right to that same exact feeding lane within a 72-hour period?

I calculated the likelihood the be decidedly in the fish’s favor, but cast there anyway, because that’s what we do.

The stream flowed through a densely wooded area and looked, if you viewed it from the center facing west, like a runway leading into the sky. By the time I’d waded the couple hundred yards to the dam the sun was sinking and painting the sky a variety of memorable shades of amber and the kind of cold metallic blue that only comes in the autumn.

I cast around the side of the dam where the brown had been the night before because you did not expect the brown to be there again, but casting anywhere else in light of what you’d experienced so recently didn’t exactly make more sense, now did it?

And the fish took.

As I fought him down through the current and brought him back up toward me, I coaxed him in as carefully as possible. I knelt down with the trout at about five yards and unclipped the net off my back, gently easing him toward me.

I paused for a moment, net in hand, fish a few turns of the handle out of arm’s reach. This was the moment, if something were to go awry, when it would likely happen. At that landing stage is when we exert the most pressure at the least favorable angle, and if a hook is going to pop or shake, often it’s then. I didn’t rush the fish in, I just knelt there with him two arms’ lengths away for a moment. I was still connected to a decent brown on a beautiful night in one of my favorite streams at the perfect time of day.

Forcing any quick change of circumstance seemed ill-advised.

But nothing gold can stay.

​

So I coaxed the brown into the net and there were no dramatic last-minute acrobatics, no sudden rod straightening, heart-breaking slack to reel in. Just a gorgeous brown trout, submerged beneath ice-cold clear stream water in a rubber net, gills slowly rising and falling. I popped the hook and took a photo.

There are some moments where you can feel the entire domino effect of moments that lead to this one falling just the way they did and I thought simultaneously about losing, likely that same fish just days prior, and how one moment can change the lens through which you see something entirely. I thought about sitting in the Bass Pro parking lot, thoroughly worn out, and how much it would have cost me to give in to that exhaustion. I thought about how much we were potentially sacrificing any time we chose to forego a trip, an adventure, a last-light expedition.

How many perfect moments had we just foregone for some temporary respite or immediate gratification? On any given day, with even the choice to travel and fish, did we ever really realize what we were turning away from.

I watched the trout slowly swim away. The bigger ones seem to take their time, as if to say, I knew you’d let me go.

Two of the hooks on the tiny treble on the Phoebe were bent when I looked at the lure more closely. They’d been so well stuck in the brown’s jaw that pulling them out had bent the thin wire. That fish was not coming off before the net, that much was certain.

At that given moment I don’t know that I could have been more grateful to be where I was, to be a fisherman, and for a near-perfect fall afternoon.

It was a series of small decisions that might easily have gone either way that lead to a moment I’ll never forget.

If we’re lucky, we’ll stack those moments on top of one another in our mind’s eye, and lean them against the weight of trepidation or uncertainty or doubt or discouragement to push the door open for more just like them on the future streams and beaches, rivers and creeks that we’ll have at least the option of walking along in the days that have been given to us.