MUD

RECENT NEWS ITEM:The National Park Service gave its highest award to a ranger who developed a computer program to help children "interact" with the Chesapeake Bay.Though it was innovative and no doubt deserving of the honor, it made me wonder:Is there anything worth learning about the outdoors anymore that one cannot experience indoors?With the world increasingly cabled, satellited, 'netted, IMAX'd and CD'd into homes and workplaces, all of nature seems electronically available.Except for mud. I cannot sing its praises enough.

For years, visitors to Patapsco Valley State Park have sensed the presence of a stealthy resident: a cougar. Dozens -- including a well-known and well-respected naturalist -- swear they have seen the animal. Others say they have seen tracks in the mud by the river.The cougar rumors have traveled far and wide -- as far and wide, perhaps, as a cougar would have to travel to get to the park in the first place."People always see the animal stalking something, and they always see it from a car," said Richard McIntire, a state Department of Natural Resources spokesman, adding that reports of cougar sightings have come "at least annually" for the past 10 to 12 years.

IF YOU'RE looking forward to spending some time during the holidays lounging on the sofa, here's a hint: Close your eyes. If you don't, they're likely to roam over the room, and you're pretty much guaranteed to see something that needs to be done like that crack in the ceiling. Where did that come from?Here are some tips that will help you figure out what to do:Let's start with plaster. The first thing you should determine is if the existing plaster is secure enough to repair or if it's so damaged it should be replaced.

Oysters and eighth-graders don't seem to mind getting wet. So as raindrops dripped from noses and dampened sweat shirts, Canton Middle School students gently planted hundreds of baby oysters yesterday in the Inner Harbor."

TOLCHESTER BEACH -- A Baltimore company headed by two former state Cabinet members has dropped plans for dumping millions of cubic yards of Chesapeake Bay dredge spoil on 500 acres of Kent County farmland.Instead, the company, hoping to allay the fears of opponents, plans to create a smaller test site this summer to demonstrate that crops can be grown on mud dredged from the state's shipping channels, said its president, Dr. Torrey C. Brown.Brown is a former secretary of the state Department of Natural Resources.

DAVIDSONVILLE -- For eight months, Sam and Romey Droege have spent weekends with friends toting bales and slinging mud to build a studio on their suburban farm.Located off a wooded road between sprawling Washington and Annapolis, the octagonal building features walls made of straw bales, stacked like bricks and plastered with mud.The Droeges are part of a small but noticeable movement of Americans who are choosing these natural materials for their housing needs.In Ashton, another suburban couple - Robert True and Deborah Boggs - are building a four-bedroom, 1840s-style house with a conventional two-story garage on a planned blueberry farm.

NEW YORK - Sometime this week, after years of delays, a floating dredge is scheduled to begin scooping thousands of tons of accumulated mud from one of the main channels plied by the container ships that carry televisions, orange juice, furniture and almost every other imported or exported product into and out of New York Harbor.Within weeks other dredges will similarly attack mud that has clogged several other important channels and berths.Last week, a variety of federal officials and New Jersey politicians, including Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and Democratic Sen. Robert G. Torricelli, made much of the impending dredging, proclaiming an end to a four-year environmental battle over how to clear slightly contaminated mud from the dominant seaport on the East Coast without threatening public health or marine life.

The Boy Scouts' annual Klondike Derby left its mark on Piney Run Park on Saturday, but the grounds staff promises that the look is temporary.Nearly 2,000 Boy Scouts and their parents participated in the winter test of skills that includes sledding, racing and obstacle courses.Frequently the ground is frozen and snow-covered for the derby, but a downpour Friday softened the grassy hills, introducing a muddy element to the daylong event.'Damage is superficial'"There is mud every place and the turf looks like one giant mudhole," said JoAnn Hunter, manager of the Eldersburg park.

ABOARD THE JOIDES RESOLUTION - The helicopter flew north past the garish gambling hotels that line the Atlantic City shore, then made a sharp right turn out to sea in search of a different kind of gambling operation. An hour later, some 108 nautical miles east of Atlantic City, a tall derrick suddenly pierced the enveloping cocoon of summer haze, and the helicopter set down a group of reporters on the deck of the Joides Resolution.Named after HMS Resolution, in which Capt. James Cook roamed the southern seas in the 1770s, the modern vessel explores the remotest of all frontiers, the regions beneath the ocean floor.

Mike Hoff has been around drag racing since he was 13. He began going to the races with his uncle, Larry Hoff of Westminster. Like so many other young drivers, in getting started, Mike also received a lot of assistance from his uncle.When Mike Hoff turned 16, he purchased from his uncle a 1965 Ford Mustang that he has raced now, at 35, for almost 20 years. Only once did he race another car, when he was running for points and borrowed Chuck Taylor's Mustang while the motor in his own car was being repaired.

It is said that political campaigns spend big money to put lies and distortions on television because they work. We say we don't like it, but the political pros just smile. Watching the mud fly has become a kind of guilty pleasure. In the latter stages of a close race, it's the sideshow posing as the main event. Let's face it, until the financial meltdown, we were not all that interested in the "issues." We wonder if anyone has the answer to anything. We embrace our cynicism. According to the professional politicians, we take a NASCAR approach to choosing the man or woman who might be the leader of the Free World.

Cataclysmic comparisons came quick and easy yesterday for business owners recovering from a torrent of water and mud that descended on a Lutherville shopping center. "At its worst, it was like Niagara Falls," said Sheila Landers, manager of the Maytag Store in Yorkridge Shopping Center, part of which was slimed Saturday by a wall of cascading mud churned up by a broken water main on York Road. Landers - who described the water as "nasty muddy" - and other business people on the shopping center's eastern perimeter were forced to plug their rear doorways with trash bags and whatever else came to hand in an effort to stop the treacly mess from seeping in. Some succeeded, some did not. Yesterday, the task turned toward cleaning up, both inside some of the stores and in a parking lot behind them, where a Baltimore County Bureau of Utilities crew used bulldozers, excavators and a huge vacuum-cleaner truck to get rid of the mud, much of it now dried, caked and almost impenetrable in the heat.

In the debate of Democratic presidential candidates in Nevada, Sen. Hillary Clinton rebuked John Edwards for his charge that she was "part of a corrupt political class." She said, "I don't mind taking hits on my record on issues, but when somebody starts throwing mud, at least we can hope that it's both accurate and out of the Republican playbook." Ahh, mud. Where would this nation without it? No one knows. We have never not had it. Dirty politics is more American than your mother's apple pie and booing the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Fallston softball coach Spike Updegrove has seen more than his share of bad luck during his team's 12-8 season. "I've seen line drives in center field hit a rock and go over my center fielder's head," said Updegrove, who guided C. Milton Wright to four state titles in 10 years before taking over the Fallston program two years ago. "I'd say, `What in the world was that?' and we'd go out and there was a rock. We had a mud game which nobody would ever believe." A mud game? "We let Rising Sun get four runs in the mud, and then we didn't get up in the bottom of the second, so we couldn't use the mud as an offensive weapon," he said.

RISING SUN -- Sis, the Siberian tiger, paced back and forth, stalking the stretch of chain link fence between her and the sunken pool where a zookeeper was dropping bucket-size chunks of ice into the water. Released back into her main pen, the majestic feline circled the pool, dipped one huge paw as if to test the temperature and then took a long, lapping drink of newly cooled water. "She's very perky and excited when it's going to snow," Nancy Sepulvado, director of the Plumpton Park Zoo in Cecil County, explained yesterday.

People who live in mud huts should not throw mud, especially if it comes from their own roofs. As Scripture says, don't point to the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a piece of kindling in your own. I see by the papers that the Republicans want to make an issue of Nancy Pelosi in the congressional races this fall: Would you want a San Francisco woman to be speaker of the House? Will the podium be repainted in lavender stripes with a disco ball overhead? Will she be borne into the chamber by male dancers with glistening torsos and wearing pink tutus?

Ah Day came flying out of the fog yesterday evening, spraying mud and not holding back. It was a sight trainer King Leatherbury wasn't expecting but was happy to see. "I wasn't that confident today," Leatherbury said after Ah Day had won by 5 1/2 lengths over Vegas Play in the $150,000 Federico Tesio Stakes at Pimlico Race Course. "He was coming off a big effort 10 days ago, running in the mud and going a mile and an eighth for the first time. I was criticizing myself for running him in that allowance race [April 12]

GUINSAUGON, Philippines -- Buoyed by the sound of repeated tapping from deep beneath the mud, rescue crews continued to dig their way through more than 20 feet of mud to a buried school in hope of finding survivors three days after a landslide crushed this remote village. But rescuers working into the evening, including U.S. Marines, found only more dead bodies, dashing hope yesterday of finding the first survivors since 20 people were pulled from the mud Friday. The village of Guinsaugon on Leyte Island, home to more than 1,800 people, was obliterated by millions of tons of mud that poured down Friday from a mountainside soaked by more than 24 inches of rain since Feb. 1. Authorities are uncertain how many people were crushed by the mud, but estimates of the missing range from 900 to 1,400.

LILOAN, Philippines --Rescuers struggling through soft, thick mud found bodies yesterday but no more survivors of the mountain collapse that buried a southern Philippines town the day before, apparently killing almost all of its 1,800 residents. Witnesses in Guinsaugon, about 14 miles from this small town and 400 miles south of Manila, said there was no longer any sign of the town - only what looked like a newly plowed field, with bits and pieces of roofing and debris from 375 destroyed homes sticking up through the mud. Rescuers were having difficulty reaching Guinsaugon, on the island of Leyte, and when they arrived they found their every effort hampered by the mud, which was at least 30 feet deep in some spots.

MANILA, Philippines -- As many as 1,800 villagers were missing today after a sea of mud crushed a remote mountain village on the Philippine island of Leyte, authorities said. The mud was as deep as 30 feet in some areas, covering houses and an elementary school in the village of Guinsaugon. Rescuers who dug with their hands in the soft mud yesterday rescued about 80 people, many with broken limbs. "There are no signs of life, no rooftops, no nothing," Rosette Lerias, governor of Southern Leyte province, said after visiting the scene.