Retail

Working in retail, organizing the shelves, piles of books, loners, last copies.
I had been thinking recently of hunting down Emerson. Irony: Retail was my entryway to living with nature, and Emerson the authority on nature-living. I never really liked Emerson. Tried it in high school – a bad trip. But powerful, inexplicable forces in my life (namely, a college roommate) had re-awakened my interest, though it remained tainted. So, with an Emerson/no-Emerson conflict ever bubbling in the back of my mind, this title caught my eye:

The Clam Lake Papers: A Winter in the North Woods (Edward Lueders)

Woods – Emerson. Papers – Essays.  Clam Lake – Walden Pond. Winter – a long time.

Hmmm… could this be an alternative to Emerson? Writings about nature that I’d find less arduous? I asked around the other employees; none of them had ever heard of the book, let alone noticed it. “Well, never judge a book by its cover…” I thought to myself.

So I bought it.

The book turned out to be nothing less than I could ever have hoped.
An anonymous author breaks into a summer cottage on Clam Lake, and stays there through the winter, musing, writing, and existing, leaving behind just enough traces of the goings-on for the owner to suspect a disturbance – and all of the papers on which he wrote. The owner, Lueders, also a professor, collects, reads and compiles the work into a book which, as revealed upon further investigation, was published in the tiny town of Ellison Bay,WI – not 5 miles from my retail-experience location (sometimes called a store) – by an excentric friend of my grandmother’s, book-store owner and publisher. Was it meant to be? Coincidences – they’re not always meaningful. But I think it was.

Anyway, I tell you this because I plan to make a number of references to the book in the coming posts. And if you happen to hate Emerson, The Clam Lake Papers (now dubbed “CLP”) might be a good alternative for you, too.

Below is an excerpt:

Dear Professor Lueders,
It is obvious that you don’t use your cabin in the winter, and it seems well suited to my current needs, so I am going to assume your indulgence. I am going to use your cabin for a while, while you are not using it. It is not a matter of money. Nothing, eventually, is a matter of money. I don’t have much money at the moment, but that isn’t it. It is just a matter of trying it alone somewhere for a while. I suppose I am breaking a law. I am trespassing. But I am also following a law, one printed on the genes and the nervous system rather than in books.
I have some conscience about using your property, but I have owned things too, and I have let people use them. I have let people use me too, as I must have used them. There are balances, I can assure you.
Anyway, by the time you read this I will be gone. You will see that it is not in me to abuse your cabin or your belongings. It took great ingenuity to get in here, by the way, without doing some violence to your property. But I enjoyed the challenge–you went to such lengths to keep the elements and the likes of me out. Ingenuity I have plenty of. Too much. That’s part of my trouble. it may take more than ingenuity, though, for you to figure out how I got in. I hope you won’t even bother to try. Better just to take me for granted.
I mean no harm. I will use your place, not abuse it. I do not want to thank you for its use, but I thank you all the same. What I mean is, I do not wish to be forgiven. I don’t think I need to be forgiven, but I won’t go into that. If I am right in my motives, I have some business here or, rather, a need to be apart from business anywhere else–to balance out an account or two. If nothing else, I should have myself to myself for a spell, with insulation. The season seems right.
I know already that I will not get rid of you during my stay unless I take over your property rather than just using it, and I won’t do that. Since I will have to accept you this way, maybe it will be easier for you to accept my having been here. No matter. The thing will have been accomplished, and then it won’t make much difference, will it?