FWIW, it's not at all uncommon nor considered "un-Lispish" by the Lisp community (at least the Common Lisp community; I don't presume to speak for the Schemers) to do things like use variables, setf them, use loop, etc. (In fact, that's why those sorts of things are in the language.) Spend some time reading code that some very good Lisp programmers post to comp.lang.lisp and this will be clear. :-)