Nonprofit Invites Youngsters to Discover the Great Outdoors

How many hundreds of thousands of kids have grown up around Washington and never set foot in, on or even alongside the Potomac River? It's impossible to know, but the simple answer is: far too many.

Living Classrooms, the Baltimore-based nonprofit that's branched into the D.C. area on a mission to put youngsters in touch with nature, did its bit to amend that last week. With help from 10 corporate and government sponsors, the organization dragged 330 kids down to National Harbor on a bright spring morning to cast a line, tickle a fish, eyeball a turtle and learn about bobbers and worms, underwater grasses, snakeheads and other peculiarities that make life not just interesting but irresistible when you're 10 or 12 or even 17, before complications of adulthood set in.

"We need more belly botanists," said LC's Mary Lou Livingood, quoting former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall. "We need more kids crawling on their bellies looking at bugs, rolling around in the grass, looking up at the sky."

Or catching fish, like the two-pound largemouth Maurice Holton of Camp Springs boated, with help from Potomac bass guide Bo Curry, a few hundred feet from traffic roaring over Wilson Bridge. Or the 5 pound 5 ounce lunker 15-year-old Brennan Mayes of Upper Marlboro hoisted aboard guide Ken Miller's shiny bass boat in Piscataway Creek.

The kids were wide-eyed at their fortune, as was 17-year-old MaryEllen Spooner of West Springfield High School when she and guide John Sisson hooked largemouths simultaneously, twitching plastic worms along the bottom in the bass-rich cove across from Alexandria known to Potomac anglers as "The Spoils," where if you look hard to the north you'll see the Washington Monument bathed in sunlight.

"We see eagles here all the time," Sisson said of The Spoils, and before the morning was over a mature one flapped past obligingly, heading south. Then there were cormorants, ospreys, Canada geese, mallards, turtles sunning on logs -- all manner of life blossoming amid man's detritus. (The Spoils got its name after construction crews dumped leftovers from a previous Wilson Bridge project there, which turned out all right because it made for great bass habitat.)

On the Potomac, time and tide march at their own stately pace, oblivious to the hectic schedules of generals and admirals buzzing by in helicopters to urgent Pentagon meetings or commuters fuming in traffic on the bridge. Ah, to be a turkle (as they're known on the Eastern Shore), baking in the morning sun. . . .

Living Classrooms started in Baltimore in 1985 as a way of getting students hands-on experiences with things they were studying. The trend since has not been promising. "The Fish and Wildlife Service did a study recently that found kids spend an average of six hours a day in front of a TV or computer screen," said Livingood, a longtime local outdoors advocate.

"We want to use nature as a hook to help kids learn more about math, science, economics, history," said John Dillow, executive director of Living Classroom's national capital region. Last year, 18,000 students went through one program or another at the organization's five sites around Washington, he said.

Dillow and Livingood are pinning new hopes for their cause on "No Child Left Inside," a national initiative that would require every youngster to have some out-of-classroom experience as part of the public school curriculum. Among backers are Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin and Rep. John Sarbanes of Maryland and Rep. James P. Moran Jr. of Virginia.

Meantime, they're tapping the support of local businesses and government agencies to put on events like Wednesday's Potomac Bass Tournament, which picked 30 lucky youngsters by lottery to go out in sparkly bass boats and catch lunkers while 300 others put their talents to a tougher test trying to catch something from the concrete docks at National Harbor.

Any luck inshore?