April 28, 2000

REI'S NEW STORE BRINGS BACK MEMORIES

The first time my husband Arthur and I planned a camping trip, we weren't sure it was something we'd do often, so we bought only an absolute minimum of camping gear. A couple of cheap sleeping bags, a Coleman lantern and stove, some cookware, and we were off to the Black Hills. It was 1967.

The trip was memorable, especially the morning I woke early with the stars paling overheard, and a warm furry body nestled between the two of us in our sleeping bags.

Nothing unusual about that, until I remembered we hadn't brought the cat.

As the day brightened, I could see that our sleeping visitor was a sociable skunk.

As Arthur and I discussed our options, very quietly, our voices woke the skunk. It stood up, stretched, and ambled away without a backward glance.

The next summer, we thought we should buy a tent. As it happened, there was one at hand. John Lewis, one of Arthur's colleagues, and his wife Franny had just ordered a tent from Recreational Equipment Inc. They'd been in graduate school in Berkeley, Calif., so they knew about hip places like REI that hadn't yet made it as far as Minnesota from its roots in Seattle.

But John and Franny's tent, when it came, had a run in the blue ripstop nylon. They were going to return it, but we thought perhaps REI would sell it to us at a discount because it was damaged. John and Franny wrote a letter to REI, and we signed it, explaining about the tent. I don't recall that any of us stopped to consider how preposterous this proposal would appear from a retailer's point of view. But REI, which is a membership cooperative, is not an ordinary retailer. They wrote back that we could keep the tent for 25 percent off, and thoughtfully enclosed a six-inch strip of blue repair tape.

It matched. And that is how I became REI member 149050. This week, as REI celebrates the opening Friday of its flagship Denver store in the historic tramway building that until recently was home to the Forney Transportation Museum, they're handing out membership numbers in the 5,900,000 range.

I found that out from a helpful person named Kim, on the staff of the interactive help line on their Web page.

When REI opened its first Minnesota store in the Twin Cities, we took it as quite a compliment that REI thought our state outdoorsy enough to support its kind of store.

The first time we were there - I think we were replacing those sleeping bags - the clerk was at first reluctant to accept our check, because we lived outside the metro area. Then he spotted the co-op number, and cheered up.

"With a membership number that low, I'm sure you're all right," he said.

When I moved to Colorado from California in 1997, I needed new winter gloves. Of course I know they sell winter gloves in lots of places. Department stores. Supermarkets, for that matter. But I looked up REI in the phone book and bought my gloves there.

That's what people mean when they say REI is a "destination store." I still have that little blue-and-yellow tent, although every decade or so the nylon patch falls off and has to be replaced, and one of the poles went missing once during a move. I found a different kind, at the REI store in Northridge, Calif., that works well enough.

A few weeks after I moved to Colorado, I went camping with friends.

A stranger strolled over from down the road a ways and asked if I needed help with my tent. He must have figured that out because I was trying to pound the pegs into hard ground with the heel of my shoe, having forgotten to bring a hammer.

"I am an Indian," he announced. "I know about tents."

And he set it up for me.

A neighborly place, Colorado. A good place for a neighborly store like REI.

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