Sausage-Log Eaters Still Shop At Emporium

Dave Elliott says the big difference is fish. Personally, I think it's meat. Specifically, sausage logs, which you can make using a kit he sells in the front of the store.

We were talking about the chief differences between his outdoor equipment store and his giant new competitor, the REI intergalactic mothership a couple of blocks away.

Elliott is the manager and part-owner of Outdoor Emporium, which has squatted anonymously at the corner of Republican and Pontius in the Cascade neighborhood for 17 years.

The Outdoor Emporium, which began life as a mail-order house for the Fishing and Hunting News, concentrates on what was once the mainstream of the outdoor market - fishing, hunting and camping supplies. Waders, hip boots and fishing tackle are the staples.

REI concentrates on being wholesome and cool. It sells lots of neat stuff people might use in exciting television commercials, or highly evolved clothing designed for climbing Everest, but mostly used to go to the mall. REI customers do not eat sausage logs.

I went to an REI event a while back at which very earnest and fit people cooked very weird and tasteless camp food on gas burners and fed it to passers-by who said, Yum.

One booth sold gel food in tubes. The guy ahead of me in line rhapsodized about it. Myself, I think fitness is a wonderful thing, but you shouldn't have to suffer to get it.

I'm more at home among the omnivores at the Outdoor Emporium.

Now is about the time of year, Elliott says, when the women arrive. These are good women, without ego in their gift-giving. They carry highly specific lists naming brand names and model numbers and sizes.

They bring the lists to the counter, where a clerk takes them in hand and leads them through the store and back to the counter, where without discussion or hesitation they buy everything the clerk has found.

"That was easy," they say with a nervous laugh, crossing Willie from their Christmas list. They breathe deep sighs of relief, like adventurers who have just passed through dangerous lands, and head back toward civilization, otherwise known as The Bon.

I went to visit the store yesterday to see what the Christmas shopping season was like in REI's colossal shadow, which I imagined might have wiped out profits.

It turns out to be the opposite.

People looking for REI, or REI parking, have bumbled into the Emporium often enough since REI opened this fall to boost business a good 5 percent.

In every aspect but location, the Emporium is about as far removed from its new neighbor as it can get.

REI looks like it landed from outer space; the Emporium looks like it emerged from the Earth and might return there any day. It's a very humble building. The back half of it spent its first several decades as a stable for horses that pulled laundry carts through town.

Up until a few weeks ago when they put up an awning with a sign on it, it was hard to tell there was even a store where Outdoor Emporium is. They had to paint the word entrance in bright red block letters next to the front door just to let people know how to get inside.

The place is so unassuming that from time to time someone who has worked up the street for years will stick his head in the door and say something like:

"You sell stuff in here?"

The stuff is largely rugged outdoor gear for people who intend to eat what they find when they go in the woods or the water. There is some overlap of merchandise - especially clothing - at the two stores, but Outdoor Emporium established its basic clientele in the long-lost years before clothing became a system.

The Outdoor Emporium is not immune from the onslaught of technology. A rod and reel can fetch $1,000. Elliott guesses the average Puget Sound salmon costs $100 in gear to catch and he's quite happy about it.

There is something incongruous about the amount of technology you apparently have to own to enjoy nature these days, but, cool or rugged, conquering nature is expensive work.

Gear unites us in the task.

Terry McDermott's column appears Tuesday and Thursday. His phone message number is 515-5055. His e-mail address is: tmcd-new@seatimes.com