Sprummertime and easy livin' on the coast.

Byline: Bob Welch The Register-Guard

YACHATS - Looking up from David Crosby's "Long Time Gone," I see my Iowa friends heading down to the beach with their dog. That's why I know it's sprummer, a homemade term that rhymes with bummer and speaks of Oregon's sputtering segue from spring to summer.

The weather - 56 degrees, drizzle and 10 mph winds - says January. But I know that even if it looks or feels like winter on the coast, it's not, because the masochistic Iowans spend winters in the Midwest.

Years ago, when our vacations included two on-the-go boys, sprummers bothered me; cooped-up kids can be less fun than poison oak. Now, I've made peace with the brooding coastal climate.

The weather here is a bit player in a much larger drama. Winter, spring, summer or fall, I come not for cloudless skies but for the discoveries: the sudden appearance of 200 pelicans rising and falling atop the waves; the "Word Menu," a compilation of 65,000 words into specific categories, found, like an unbroken sand dollar, at a St. Vincent dePaul in Florence; and the moments of pause that I can't seem to find in my fast-forward life back home.

Like not just glancing at a Boston Red Sox box score, but immersing myself in one. Examining what it all means, like an archaeologist trying to understand a hidden culture. Baseball, like life, can be unfair, one box score suggests: The Sox's Josh Beckett pitches six innings, gives up only four hits and strikes out 10 but Mike Timlin - one inning, two walks - gets credit for the win. (As whale watchers will attest, timing is everything.)

Such disparity plays out, too, on my used-bookstore searches, from Florence to Lincoln City: all hardbacks $2.50 in one store, but "Swoosh: The Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There," inexplicably, $8.50. (But how could I say no?)

It becomes one of 19 purchases during the week, from "The Best Loved Poems of the American People" (I'd forgotten how macabre Longfellow's "Wreck of the Hesperus" really is) to Jerry Jenkins' "Writing for the Soul" (in which he says the late Ruth Graham told him she never considered divorcing Billy. Murdering him, yes. Divorcing him, no.)

And, of course, the disparity plays out in the natural world beyond the cabin's windows: three crows hounding a squirrel like enemy helicopters in a Tom Clancy novel. Seagulls dive-bombing a crab. A weasel slipping across the road with a mouse in its jaws.

As rain tatters a west window, I'm lost in the kind of discovery that I'd feel guilty pursuing when not on vacation: flipping through almanacs such as Stephen Glazier's 977-page "Word Menu,"a steal at $7- part dictionary, part glossary and part logophile's delight. (Glazier, after spending seven years compiling it, died of a brain tumor the year it was published.)

Later, I'm deep in musician Crosby's downward spiral into drug addiction ("Long Time Gone," $2.50). He sells his last tangible possession, a piano, to provide money for a fix as he prepares to flee the country and elude arrest.

Reading his book is like looking at the ingredients breakdown for a hot dog; I love the guy's music but I'd be better off just enjoying the bites instead of trying to understand what's inside.

But, then, that's the price of discovery, right? Understanding that not everything we find will be uplifting.

Weasels eat mice, word lovers die, the Red Sox - I'm listening to games now by satellite radio, the ocean roaring from centerfield - don't win them all.

For now, I reach for the binoculars: Five cedar waxwings, as if showing up for an audition, land on a wire right in front of me.

I add them to my "Coast Bird List," then, with the rain still falling, decide to discover some long-lost zzzs before dinner.

At the beach, it's sprummertime, and the livin' is easy.