Vacation good for books less traveled by.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

YACHATS - Two roads diverged into my vacation (drift)wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

I am, you see, a traditionalist when it comes to vacations on the coast: I bring lots of books, books that I've been meaning to read for years but that have piled up on my nightstand as symbolic pillars of my pathetically over-busy life. Quick-read books. Books that include a good number of beach-related topics.

There's just something intriguing about reading, say, Michael Capuzzo's "Close to Shore," about the 1916 shark attacks on the Jersey shore, as waves lap at your buffet-line feet.

But deep into the vacation, I was at Marie's Book Nook in Waldport when I came across a 641-page tome, "Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-1915." Used. At $6.50, a penny-per-page steal. But a definite departure from The Routine. Dare I?

Left brain: "Hold on, partner. Long, slow read. And Frost is less beachy than a Kansas cornfield. Stay the course."

Right brain: "But Frost fascinates me. Snowy woods. Mending walls. Roads diverging into the wood ... '

Left: "Hey, the guy's name is Frost. A winter's name for a summer vacation? Move along, pal. There's nothing to see here."

Right: "Change can be good."

Left: `The book covers only the `early years.' Goodness, you'll be on page 500 by the time he's out of diapers, much less stopping by woods on a snowy evening.'

Right: "Just smell these pages. Musty. Wonderful. Copyright 1966."

Left: `Try `1,001 Questions Answered About the Seashore.' New.'

Right brain: "A beach bum's gotta do what a beach bum's gotta do."

So I did it. I bought both. But it was the Frost book into which I burrowed like a clam in wet sand.

Authors and artists can be a strange sort. Frost was no exception.

He was, at one point, a suicidal, failed farmer. He quit Dartmouth. He quit as a newspaper reporter, a millhand, a schoolteacher.

"He did prefer to loaf and invite the soul," author Lawrance Thompson writes. "In fact, he preferred just plain loafing."

He was selfish. As a teacher, he believed his first concern was himself; the second: the work being discussed; the third: the student. While struggling financially, a grandfather offered to finance him for a year. Frost blew him off.

"Most of the townspeople,"

Thompson writes, "were agreed that the Frost boy was indeed a lazy good-for-nothing and there there was not enough promise in him to justify any hope."

And yet he absolutely believed he could someday live in the New England hills and earn a living by sending poems to publishers in Boston and New York. And he overcame some huge obstacles to do so, not the least of which were childhood beatings from an unfulfilled father.

Frost would, before reading in front of an audience, melt into mental anguish. In 1912, at age 38, he opened his mail to find this rejection note: "We are sorry that we have no place in the Atlantic Monthly for your vigorous verse."

He was wracked by a sense of self-doubt. Guilt. Fear. And, yet, at times seemed too ordinary to be a poet. He loved baseball. And, besides being editor of his high school paper, was a starter on the football team.

"No one," wrote a reporter, "would think the man who played football on the right end was the same person who sits with spectacles astride his nose in the Chief Editor's Chair. Keep up the good work, Bobby."

"Bobby?" Robert Frost was once called "Bobby"?

Alone with a book on a beach, it's enough to make one smile and appreciate taking the sandy road less traveled, even if the journey remains unfinished. Indeed, how Frost wins four Pulitzer Prizes and becomes America's unofficial poet laureate is the stuff of Volumes II and III.

But that's for beach vacations to come.

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