Rural

Carroll County is Melvin and Pat Baile's backyard -- a peaceful spot in Medford with a towering sycamore, a pond inhabited by Canada geese and their farm stretched out behind.Carroll County also is the crowded roads Thomas C. Myers faces on his daily commute to the Baltimore bank where he works. As he drives from his town house in Westminster to Route 140 and then to the expressways, he knows he's in a traffic jam waiting to happen.Carroll County -- cow country and bustling suburb, rural sanctuary and urban sprawl.

WESTERNPORT - If Wisha Guinn follows in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother, she'll live in rural Western Maryland her whole life, have a baby in her teens and forgo prescription medicine so she can spend the money on food instead. She might find a job, but she'll be lucky if she receives good benefits. And she will have will little or no chance to set anything aside for retirement. Six-year-old Wisha lives in rural Allegany County, where nearly 50 percent of the children, like her, qualify for free and reduced-price lunches in school.

MASSEY -- Sean Jones surveys the lush green expanse of ripening winter wheat that his dairy herd will be munching all year. Fourteen hundred acres - looking in any direction, it's pretty much all you can see. This uninterrupted vista is what convinced the Jones clan (including Sean's parents, two brothers and their families) to pull up stakes in 1995, swapping their farm near Mount Holly, N.J., to come here to Kent County, one of the remaining spots on the East Coast where farming endures as the cornerstone of a rural way of life.

George McCeney is fond of the one-lane bridge that spans the Gunpowder Falls near his house in northern Baltimore County. So much so that the retired high school teacher wrote a song about it. One of the verses goes: Pulling off the interstate at Exit 24 / Makes me forget that factory job back down in Baltimore. / I drive along the river singing songs of God and man, / And stop at that one-lane bridge to wave to Mary Ann.

C Fred Mills of Fallston made an impassioned plea last week urging the Harford County Council to let him and other farmers decide for themselves how to use their land."

Baltimore County planners estimate that 10,000 homes may still be built in the rural northern part of the county -- a number three times greater than planners previously forecast.The new county figure doesn't surprise north county preservationists, who had estimated that more than 16,000 homes could be built in the area.Still, 10,000 new homes spread over the north county will drastically change the area's rural character, said John Bernstein, director of the Valleys Planning Council, a coalition of preservationists.

The storming of Paris by farmers enraged by their government'sbending to American demands that certain French agricultural subsidies be eliminated is not so much about ''a few million tons of oilseeds'' as it is about preserving a culture and way of life.In the United States, where traces of the rural ideal can still be found in remaindered coffee table art books, there are 30 percent fewer farmers, as an average of the total population, than in France. While roughly 25 percent of all Americans and Frenchmen live in rural areas, almost all the rural French are in agricultural work as compared to only 2 percent of the rural Americans.

Two people died in an early-morning fire Friday at an apartment in rural northern Baltimore County, authorities said. Baltimore County fire crews received a report of a fire, but without an address, in Upperco. Firefighters who searched the area found the fire at a home in the 17100 block of Pleasant Meadow Road, officials said. The 105-year-old home had been divided into two apartments, and one was on fire when crews arrived about 5 a.m., authorities said. Firefighters found a man and a woman on the second floor who had died.

Baltimore County officials would sharply limit new homes in rural areas while strengthening efforts to make older, urbanized neighborhoods attractive to young families under a proposed 10-year Master Plan now available in county libraries.Calling single-family home developments "the single greatest threat to the preservation of agricultural lands," the plan suggests that owners of residentially zoned land in rural areas be required to buy development rights from farms in preservation areas before they can build.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening's Smart Growth proposal received strong support from environmentalists, municipal officials and others at a hearing yesterday but still faces a tough sell in the General Assembly.Many rural legislators, including a key House chairman, remain skeptical about the proposal, fearing it would mean the loss of state funds for projects in their areas and too much state intrusion in local land-use matters.The governor's bill, one of his priorities for the 90-day legislative session, would direct that hundreds of millions of dollars in state funds could be spent only in designated growth areas.