FOREVER YOUNG.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

The sun's been down for hours, but knots of tanned vacationers still linger outdoors in the balmy desert air. Some sip drinks at poolside tables, their faces lit by the aqua glow of the underwater lights.

Across a wrought-iron fence, floodlights illuminate two crowded, sand volleyball courts. The sound of their bumps, shouts and spikes are swallowed up by live music spilling out of an open door to the packed dance floor of a nearby ballroom.

Fun-loving University of Oregon students on spring break at a resort in Florida, California or Mexico?

Nah - just a typical February evening for the 1,700 winter residents of Westwind RV and Golf Resort in Yuma, Ariz.

Most of the volleyball players are white-haired - as are competitors lined up on an adjacent shuffleboard court. As are the couples square-dancing inside the recreation center ballroom.

"Look!" Corvallis homemaker Donna Sapp gestures toward the rec center window at a twirling couple on the dance floor. "That woman is dancing with an oxygen tank strapped to her back. That's what I love about this place!"

Something happens to snowbirds once they reach their sunny, winter roosts in the desert Southwest. Grandparents who would never dream of riding bikes up north pedal around down here. Older adults dutifully mired in work, home maintenance or volunteer responsibilities back in Oregon "just hang out and have fun" in the desert.

"It's a nonstop party," declared Bev Tillery, 64, who leaves her Newport antique shop in the hands of her daughter while she flees south each winter. "People act younger down here."

"No schedules, no responsibilities - there'll be 40 people playing sand volleyball at 8 in the morning," marveled Beryl Roberts, 62, a retired Eugene lumber saleswoman.

"It's like a six-month vacation!" agreed Casey Gardner, 53, of Springfield.

That's right - six months.

Gardner and her husband, Jack, typically flee Oregon in November for their single-wide "park model" manufactured winter home in Yuma's 1,200-unit Sun Vista RV Resort.

And they aren't the earliest birds to fly south.

With each passing decade, winter visitors arrive earlier in the desert Southwest, said Dunbar Norton, a 1950 University of Oregon graduate who has lived year-round in Yuma since retiring from the Army in 1978.

"The first birds now flutter in about August," Norton said. "I think they're stark raving mad - its still 110 degrees here then!"

They also are departing later and later.

"The last ones fly north about June," he said.

In fact, Arizona snowbirds (whose nickname is borrowed from the Western finch) now stay so long, the Arizona Office of Tourism considers them residents and no longer tracks them.

For 25 years, however, Norton's consulting firm has studied the migratory patterns of Yuma County snowbirds.

These days, winter residents nearly double Yuma's year-round population of 92,000. The biggest percentage - 43 percent - hail from Oregon and Washington, Norton added. Some 17,000 Oregonians call Yuma home during the winter months.

The snowbirds each drop an average of $1,500 a month in Yuma, boosting Arizona sales tax coffers and creating an additional 6,000 seasonal jobs.

Their presence also strains resources. Don't expect to make a quick trip to a Yuma grocery store this time of year, said Norton, a 1944 graduate of Eugene's University High School.

"And locals complain all the time that snowbirds tie up the public library Internet terminals," he said.

Increasingly, however, winter residents are paying year-round property taxes in Arizona to cover such services - and not just on trailers. According to the 2000 census, 35 percent of Yuma area brick-and-mortar houses are now "seasonally occupied."

Eugene residents Jan Sprecher, 76, and Harry Wilson, 80, are among such homeowners. After 10 years of wintering in a Yuma mobile home park, they moved this year to a four-bedroom house, which will stand empty once they return to Oregon.

One reason they purchased the large house was to provide space for visiting family: he has five children, she has three. But it also was a good investment. The 2,600-square-foot home, which overlooks the Colorado River, cost only $173,000.

Even after their move into a more conventional neighborhood, the pair still participate in RV park social events, such as round dancing.

Carefree lifestyle

The average stay may be longer and the average winter home may be bigger, but the essential ingredient of snowbird life, "carefree living," has not changed, said retired Junction City school cook Blanche Miller.

`People are not in their busy, `life-go-round' here, so they are ready to share their lives,' she said from her single-wide home at Yuma's Fortuna de Oro RV Resort.

For 23 years, Miller had a driver's-seat view of that lifestyle: She was such a gregarious booster of it, Junction City RV manufacturer Country Coach outfitted her in a new rig each winter and made her its unofficial ambassador to snowbird destinations from Quartzite, Ariz., to Palm Beach, Fla.

At 81, she decided this year to hang up her keys and sit out Oregon's entire rainy season in Yuma, long her winter home base.

Miller's friend, Terry Lesser of Medford, believes snowbirds are particularly neighborly.

"People behave differently here," the retired corporate security director said. "The closeness has a lot to do with it - as close as these homes are, you have to know your neighbors, basically!"

Sapp, the Corvallis resident, agreed. She and Roberts, the Eugene retiree, recently threw a party for fellow Oregonians at their park. Though all they did was distribute fliers, 102 people showed up.

"It's like a small town," noted Sapp, 67. "You feel totally safe here."

So much so that many snowbirds store their unlocked bicycles and golf clubs outside.

Bonnie Drummond, a retired Eugene school counselor, has spent 14 winters at Yuma's Cactus Gardens RV Park.

"It's like homecoming when we come back every fall," said Drummond, a member of the Yakama Tribe. At 76, she still teaches aerobics every morning at her park's recreation hall.

Close quarters 

Drummond insists she doesn't get claustrophobic, even after five months in a 300-square-foot travel trailer.

Ah, but is it tougher for a twosome?

Standing at her kitchen sink in the 22-foot travel trailer she and husband Jack call home this time of year, Yachats resident Ellie Ewan can touch the bed at one end of the rig and the dining table at the other.

"We live outside a lot here - that's our savior," joked Jack, 78, a retired UO journalism professor.

Actually, this trailer feels downright spacious to the couple, said Ellie, 74, a former recipient of Yachats' award for volunteer of the year.

"When our girls were growing up, we took them all the way to Guatemala in a 15-foot trailer with no bathroom," she explained.

Though he doesn't play golf because of health problems, Jack enjoys their view overlooking the golf course and mountains at Yuma's Cocopah RV and Golf Resort. Ellie likes the myriad daily activities, from water aerobics to the "Hit and Giggle League" for novice golfers to a Cocopah Players production of "Oklahoma."

For Jack Gardner, the Springfield retiree, golf is Yuma's big draw.

Like a surprising number of those interviewed for this story, Gardner was something of an accidental snowbird. The retired logging-road contractor never imagined he could be happy in a "retirement community."

He initially agreed to come down to visit a brother who wintered in Yuma. Those who knew him predicted he'd last only a week.

"I worked my whole life. Long, long hours - 3 a.m. to 9 p.m. I thought I'd go crazy doing nothing," said Gardner, 72. "But I tell you, I can just lay right down and do nothing all day."

Well, if a round of golf a day qualifies as "nothing," his wife, Casey, interjected.

This is the Gardners' eighth winter in Yuma. Now he stays even longer than Casey, a retired secretary. She flies back to Oregon in March; he stays on through April because Sun Vista RV Resort offers bargain golf in that hotter month.

Mortality knocks

There is one big downside to snowbird life, the Gardners and others agree.

It has to do with what sounded at first like a refreshing change to society's usual attitude about aging: Here, being old is not a bad thing, but a requirement.

"Country Roads is an age-55-and-up resort," warned one park's entrance sign. "Proof of age required."

But that concentration of older residents means "a lot of sirens and EMT calls," Jack Gardner said. `We joke about this place as `God's Waiting Room.' '

Because residents tend to get to know one another, each stroke, heart attack or death is upsetting, Casey Gardner added.

"Once, we were at a memorial service for one neighbor, and another man collapsed and died right there," recalled the 53-year-old, able to live at Sun Vista because her husband meets the age requirement.

Sapp, from Corvallis, recalled watching a Westwind resident collapse and die on the dance floor.

"The music ended and he went down, BAM!" she said. "He was dead when he hit the floor. "

But on the other hand, such folks would also die if they were back in their home state, sitting indoors and watching the rain or snow come down, said Roberts, the Eugene resident.

Miller, the 81-year-old Junction City snowbird, agreed.

"I was 15 years getting my brother to come down here and give it a try," Miller explained. `He kept saying, `Why do you want to park out on that dry desert and sit with old people, talking about your aches and pains?' Well, he finally came at Christmastime. After one week of seeing how active we were, he said, `How do you find time to do what you have to do, like laundry?' And I said, `Sometimes you just wear the cleanest of the dirties!' '

"This isn't old people sitting around, waiting to die," Roberts said. "That man who collapsed on the dance floor was having the time of his life when he died!"

She's certainly enjoying her retirement, spending November through April in a refurbished, 1977 8-foot-by-36-foot trailer.

With its white-painted paneling and tip-out living room, the place feels plenty spacious for Roberts and her dog, Dolly.

"You notice it has no stove," added the 63-year-old, who raised three children as a single working mother. "That sends a very important message. I don't even cook here, unless I can do it in my microwave or my George Foreman grill!

"Life's never perfect," she added, her ice-blue eyes dancing. "But this is darn close!"

Karen McCowan can be reached at 338-2422 or [e-mail].

CAPTION(S):

During a dance class and this is light text and this is more light text Jan Sprecher and Harry Wilson of Eugene dance in the rec hall ballroom during a round dancing class, one of many activities offered at Sun Vista RV Park in Yuma. Beryl Roberts of Eugene (left) and Donna Sapp of Corvallis have become good friends since both began wintering at the Westwind RV and Golf Resort in Yuma. Charles Whitehouse / For The Register-Guard Recreational vehicles, trailers and mobile homes share close quarters at Sun Vista RV Park in Yuma, Ariz. More than 90,000 snowbirds descend on the desert city each winter. Charles Whitehouse / For The Register-Guard Sitting on the porch of a park model trailer at Westwind, (from left) are Ruth Johnson of Scappoose, Beryl Roberts of Eugene, Donna Sapp of Corvallis, Carl Ysen of Albany, Ken and Bette Johnson of Coquille, and Stu Johnson. "People behave differently here. The closeness has a lot to do with it - as close as these homes are, you have to know your neighbors, basically!" TERRY LESSER ARIZONA SNOWBIRD FROM MEDFORD "No schedules, no responsibilities - there'll be 40 people playing sand volleyball at 8 in the morning." BERYL ROBERTS SNOWBIRD FROM EUGENE