Best can come when nobody is watching.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

YACHATS - I met her on the beach last Friday morning.

I was heading south, dragging a fishing-net float - how can you pass up such a find, complete with "Republic of China" stamped on it? She was heading north, carrying plastic sacks.

"Groceries from Yachats?" I asked.

"No," she said. "Garbage from the beach."

Meeting Mariann Moore, 71, was like breathing the first whiff of coast air after the stuffy drive from Eugene. Just what I needed: someone to remind me that, beyond the sordid headlines live everyday people who choose wisely - and make the world a better place because of it.

The previous night, I'd gone to sleep lulled by the waves of an outgoing tide - after reading Sports Illustrated's account of Mike Price, the coach recently swept out to sea by the Crimson Tide.

The ex-Washington State coach was fired when Alabama officials learned of a strip-joint outing that began with Price being the life of the party and ended with the bill coming due: not only $1,000 worth of hotel food charged to Price's credit card from his room by a "dancer," but his seven-year, $10 million contract.

Elsewhere, the magazine wrote of Iowa State basketball coach Larry Eustachy, a $1-million-a-year coach who parted ways with the Cyclones after photos surfaced of him partying with college-aged women.

Throw in the William Bennett revelation - the "Book of Virtues" author, it was learned last week, has gambled away nearly $8 million on slots and video poker in the past decade - and the week left me shaking my head.

No, this wasn't murder and mayhem. But to slough off such revelations with a boys-will-be-boys wink is to overlook the real victims here - wives, children and, in the case of Price and Eustachy, assistant coaches and players who suddenly find themselves shipwrecked at sea.

Suddenly, amid my contemplation, there was Mariann Moore, picking up plastic bottles, wrappers, light bulbs - the garbage left by others. She does it virtually every day, combing a stretch of sand between Yachats and Waldport with her plastic bags and dog Leo.

"I hate seeing litter," says Moore, her tan, weathered face framed with gray hair. "If it doesn't get picked up, it just stays there."

Our truest character, it's been said, isn't revealed when we're in the spotlight, when people expect us to be "on." It's revealed when nobody is watching or when we think nobody is watching - whether that place is a lonely stretch of Oregon beach or a gambling casino.

Among the selections in Bennett's "Book of Virtues" is a story called "Someone Sees You," a "folktale that reminds us that an act of dishonesty is never truly hidden."

Likewise, in a sketch called "Letter from Jim," Garrison Keillor spins a soul-searching story about a professor in a college town - ironically, it sounds like Price's old home, Pullman - who's waiting to leave for a conference in Chicago, where he expects to have an affair with a colleague.

But as he looks around at his neighborhood, "Jim" suddenly realizes - as Price did not - that a bill someday will come due. "I saw that although I thought my sins would be secret, they would be no more secret than an earthquake," he writes. "All these houses and all these families - my infidelity will somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water, it will make noxious gases come out of the ventilators in the elementary school ... a school teacher will say, "What the hell," and eliminate South America from geography ... . I just leave the story there ... except to say that we depend on each other more than we ever know ... .'

As sandpipers swooped, I bid farewell to Moore, richer for having met her. Some of us, I was reminded, leave behind garbage. Some of us pick it up. In the end, the makeup of the beach - the world where we live - rests on the sum of such choices.

Bob Welch can be reached at 338-2354 or at [e-mail].