River

A West Virginia company has been fined $500 by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources for improperly cutting trees along the Youghiogheny River, the state's only wild and scenic waterway in Garrett County.DNR's Forest and Park Service cited Tri County Hardwoods Inc., of Bruceton Mills, W.Va., for violating the terms of its permit to remove trees in the state-regulated river corridor, said department spokesman John Surrick.The company had been granted permission to log about 300 acres of a forested slope on the western side of the river.

DUNSMUIR, Calif. -- How do you celebrate a catastrophe?Last weekend in this upper Sacramento River town, folks gathered to fry out-of-town fish because you can't catch the good-eating ones in what used to be one of the best fishing rivers in America.At a picnic commemorating toxic disaster, residents complained of lingering maladies. The mayor blamed her impending recall vote on the fallout. And the debate over lawsuit settlements was silenced only by the noise of passing freight trains.One year after a railroad car plunged into the river and dumped enough pesticide to kill water life for 40 miles, this rustic mountain community and its once-crystalline river are struggling to make comebacks.

A derailed Southern Pacific tanker car spilled as much as 19,000 gallons of a poisonous weedkiller into the Sacramento River in Northern California, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents, killing tens of thousands of fish and devastating the ecosystem along a 40-mile stretch of the stream, officials said yesterday.The spill in southern Siskiyou County on Sunday night also forced the temporary closure of a 50-mile stretch of Interstate 5 and briefly engulfed the small city of Dunsmuir in a noxious cloud of gas.At least two dozen people sought treatment at local hospitals, mostly for headaches, dizziness, nausea and eye irritation.

McHenry -- Garrett County has some of the prettiest rivers you'll see anywhere: the Youghiogheny, the Savage, the North Branch of the Potomac and the Casselman. They are well known to paddlers, to people who like to fish for trout and to people who just like to look at rivers and allow themselves to be mesmerized by them. Now they're installing a fifth river up on 3,000-foot Marsh Mountain, if you can believe it, and while it won't ever be stocked with trout, the place should see a steady flow of kayakers starting next spring.

BLOOMINGTON -- At the base of the massive dam that backs the North Branch of the Potomac River into 1,000-acre Jennings-Randolph Reservoir, an outdoor laboratory a half acre in size may lead to the accelerated rebirth of 35 miles of waterway that had been virtually dead for 100 years.That a waterway may be cleansed and reborn is not unusual -- but the manner in which the North Branch above this Garrett County town is being repopulated with brown trout is. In fact, the men who run the project say that it is unique in the United States and perhaps the world.

WESTERNPORT - On Monday, I floated over a Fortune 500 company's effluent - a brownish-green industrial ooze gushing from underwater vents that looked like they'd been planted in the streambed by fiendish aquatic trolls of Middle Earth. But this was not Tolkien fiction. This was 21st-century pulp reality. And it occurred in broad daylight - as it has for decades, with our government's permission - in the North Branch of the Potomac River, just off the banks of this town. Here, MeadWestvaco, one of the world's largest producers of fancy, polished paper - the kind on which magazines and catalogues are published - "clarifies" and dumps its waste.

Belatedly, there comes now from Tasmania a novel of consummate artistry and towering humanity. It is "Death of a River Guide" by Richard Flanagan (Grove, 336 pages, $24). This is Flanagan's first novel. It appeared in 1994 in Australia and is now being published in the United States for the first time. His second book, "The Sound of One Hand Clapping," published last year, was hugely celebrated not only in Australia, but also in Britain and the United States. Flanagan lives with his wife and three children in Tasmania, the island province of Australia just south of the mainland - an expanse that includes vast rain forests that are still significantly wild and uncharted.

The hunt for river tuna begins at 5:15 in the cool morning darkness, with Richard Gick's 18-year-old Chevy pickup coughing and half-gagging along some back road in Howard County.Gick, a decoy carver and outdoorsman, is all beard and baseball cap behind the steering wheel, kicking the clutch, pulling at the stick shift, talking to his truck, pretty much telling it to giddyap. We're headed for Triadelphia Reservoir, an impoundment of the Patuxent River along the Howard-Montgomery County line, to harvest some protein for the people who go to Bea Gaddy's emergency food center in East Baltimore.

CHADDS FORD, Pa. -- More than 40 years ago, M. Gordon "Reds" Wolman trudged along the banks of the Brandywine here pretty much by himself, earning his doctorate in geology from Harvard.Yesterday, the 70-year-old Baltimorean, who has taught at the Johns Hopkins University for more than four decades, hiked onto the river's flood plain trailed by a mob of perhaps 100 admiring colleagues.They showed up here, at Hopkins and at the American Geophysical Union's spring meeting at the Baltimore Convention Center to pay homage to Dr. Wolman, an internationally-recognized authority on the forces that shape rivers, and to his work on environmental issues.

Gabler's, 2200 Perryman Road, Aberdeen. (410) 272-0626. Open Tuesdays to Sundays, closed Mondays except holidays. No credit cards. No-smoking area: no. Prices vary according to availability. *** When Gabler's (pronounced Gay-bler's) turned up on a rival publication's list of the 40 best restaurants in the area, I was amazed. After 20 years off and on doing this job, I haven't been to all the good restaurants around Baltimore; but I thought I had at least heard of them.With all the crab houses we have -- some of them quite famous -- how did Gabler's make the final cut?