Can you remember the last time you discovered a book by total chance and it totally reoriented your thinking about a subject?

I can. This summer, I stayed in a cabin overlooking Falcon Cove near Manzanita and inspected the owner’s small, excellent library. One title intrigued me and I pulled the book from the shelf. Four hours later, I finished it, and knew I would never look at the ocean and beaches the same way again.

That’s saying a lot, because I visit the beach two or three times a day with my husky and derive 100 percent of my spiritual life from the experience. I also knew I would have to totally rewrite a 50,000-word manuscript about Oregon’s ocean beaches that I thought for sure was ready for prime time.

“Waves and Beaches: The Dynamics of the Ocean Surface,” by Willard Bascom, is a classic of natural science. I own the 1980s revised and updated edition, but the book first came out in 1964. Today it is, sadly, out of print.

Luckily, many libraries still retain copies and I’ve seen the book for sale at many used bookstores and garage sales, where invariably I buy it and then give it away to someone who loves the beach as much as I do.

“Waves and Beaches” begins with a beautifully crafted question: “Is there anyone who can watch without fascination the struggle for supremacy between sea and land?” Well, no, not if a person is even remotely sentient and actually manages to hit the beach every now and then and notice I mean a person who really looks hard at what is all around us. And turns off the phone and leaves the iPod in the car. Until reading this book, I thought I was noticing everything at the ocean’s edge. As it turns out, there is substantially more to understand about the sand I walk upon and the waves that hypnotize me. For starters, I had no idea mathematics played such an interesting and elementary role in the motion of waves or the slope of beaches.

Limited space here prevents me from a complete summary of Bascom’s 365-page book, but he basically examines everything related to waves and beaches and explains them right down to their tiniest tumble or, literally, a grain of sand.

One of the utterly fascinating benefits of reading this book is learning the names of features I’ve seen a million times but didn’t even know had names. Take for example, the various marks on the beach made by retreating tides: swash, backwash, rills, cusps, domes, pinholes, ripples. I can’t say I’m now obsessed with identifying everything I see at the beach, but a bit more knowledge of the natural world isn’t such a bad thing in life. In fact, a lot more might save the planet.

In “Waves and Beaches,” Bascom writes simple yet beautiful and informative sentences such as: “Waves are undulating forms that move along the surface of the sea.” Or try this one: “A beach is an accumulation of rock fragments subject to movement by ordinary wave action.” And my favorite: “Beaches are ever-changing, restless armies of sand particles, always on the move.” Bascom might have considered himself more of a scientist than a writer, but he knew how to construct metaphors in nature and slyly present them to readers:

“A wonderful time to observe … is early in the morning, especially after a high tide. Often the air is still and pleasant light fills the sky. The beach is clean and virginal, the night’s waves erased the human marks of the previous day.”

Bascom was obviously a gifted man of science who saw a beauty and assurance in the formulas and equations of the waves. Without reading his book, I would have never known such precise things do exist. When I ramble the beach, I think of love, loss, rebirth, a little evolution. I also smell and touch. In other words, poetry not math! But math is good too, at least the way Bascom presents and explains it in his masterpiece that every serious beachcomber has got to read. It might take some effort to track down, but seek this book out, read it closely, and then go examine the waves and beaches around us.