Jones Falls provides a city retreat for B'more

It was the heart of one of our unseasonably balmy Saturdays. As usual, Jay was running late. It was the damn bum leg again, he claimed. Then he whistled through his teeth, rubbed his leathery hands on his sweatshirt, and said, "I'll take the shortcut."

He would have liked to stick around and chat, but he was due to meet a drinking buddy. The limp vanished when he scampered down the hillside. You could see his head bobbing beside his pal as they passed a beer between them and stared out over the river.

A few minutes passed, and a family of four pedaled by. A scrawny young kid pumped his legs furiously and tucked his head down, mock bike racer, to catch up to the loping moves of his father. A yard or two away, a couple sat near the gurgling stream and swapped romantic glances. It was every city planner's dream, a bucolic slice of sun-dappled water, a happy family jangling about on bikes; even Jay and his fellow homeless had their place in the sun.

Of course, there was the graffiti-decorated concrete pylon that straddled the river, the overturned shopping cart on the opposite bank, the cargo trains rumbling past coughing up metal clouds, the styrofoam packing peanuts swirling in little trash eddies as they made their way down the river. But this is the Jones Falls, after all, and no amount of planning, pruning, hedging and paving can take the industry out of the industrial river.

The Jones Falls has been labeled both a stream and a river, but until recently, most knew it as just a meandering waterway shooting soupy, grayish liquid down from places unknown like a muddy artery from a trash-clogged heart. The river-stream made news only when summer rains caused it to flood and swamp low-lying industrial parks, or by serving as the blueprint for the Jones Falls Expressway (JFX), which runs in its tracks in all its 1970s superhighway, city-spanning glory.

Television viewers also know the Falls for having the Salt Dome sit on its banks. This perennial favorite of winter TV reporters is brought out every Christmas season for a bundled, ear-muffed news personality to stand in front of as city deicing trucks load up on salt. With this came the end of the Jones Falls' notoriety.

Yet a curious thing happened early last year. There was talk growing in City Hall, talk that spread into the local newspapers, and then into barbershops and fried seafood places, that the JFX might be seeing its last days.

And with this talk, perhaps, came a renewed interest in what lay, quietly burbling, beneath the highway. What was this little river-stream that had been neglected for so long?

As it turned out, the gossip coincided with the opening of the Jones Falls Trail, the brainchild of local planners and the Jones Falls Watershed Association, which had been looking after the lovable loser of local rivers since 1997. With some support from Representative Ben Cardin and funding from city government, the trail opened in September of 2004, a 1.5 mile long asphalt biking and running path that follows Falls Road, just east of the JFX.

With a year under its belt, the Trail still proudly displays trailhead signs and markers and the pavement looks new. A zigzag path leads from the main trail to Druid Hill Park, Baltimore's largest, which includes its own biking and running paths, a swimming pool, tennis courts, and, on certain Saturdays, women's rugby games (as though you would visit for any other reason). The trail also connects with a path that leads from the tree-lined Falls to the taxi-strewn lots of Penn Station, which lets bikers who live in the area take a convenient ride to their morning commuter trains.

On the Saturday I visited, there was a kayaker in full wetsuit gear making his way down the Falls, which were moving at enough of a pace to make paddling optional. The Falls makes it way through the edges of North and East Baltimore, empties into the Inner Harbor and stays mostly secluded and shaded by old growth trees even when it passes through the busiest areas.

While there is no guarantee that you won't find floating tires, candy wrappers and mannequins, and while some stretches of the river are probably impassable thanks to tunnels or dams, long stretches of virgin water await the paddler who is willing to overlook outward appearance in favor of a good ride.

If Thoreau-esque reflection by your very own Walden Pond is your aim, there are a series of riverside docks along the Trail, including the James W. Rouse Memorial Deck which sits less than three minutes away from the administrative offices of the Whiting School of Engineering. Which begs the question: why turn in that paper on warp vectors or multi-variable structural integrity when you could make eyes at the partner of your choice while sitting riverside?

After only a ten minute stroll down 29th Street (with perhaps a stop in Sterling's Crab & Oyster House for Baltimore's best artery-clogging seafood sandwich) you've reached one of many trailheads for the Jones Falls Trail. A bit rough around the edges though it may be, the Jones Falls has a character all its own; thanks to its new digs, it just might be receiving some long-overdue respect.