Bridging the Gap on the L.A. River : With a Song in His Heart and a Yolk on His Shoe

FLORENCE AVENUE

BRIDGE,BELL, TO 1ST STREETBRIDGE, LOS ANGELES

If you’ve ever been in solitary, you know how far a song can go.

First you hum it, to clear the nasal passages. Then you whistle, kissy-lipped if you’re missing your moll or through your teeth if you feel a mean coming on (for best results, use “Big Noise From Winnetka”). Finally, a full-throated warble, adding all those ruffles and flourishes the composer would have written into the ditty had he been as clever as you.

Like a stretch in stir, a walk up the Los Angeles River is conducive to song. For long miles, there is nobody to talk to. Even when there is, conversation is hard to come by. An unaccompanied stalker tramping up the riverbed can be an object of uncertainty, if not scorn. “Round the bend,” they say to themselves, and curious stares follow until he is.

Humming helps, then, or whistling, or outright singing.

The Best Tunes

River songs are the best. They keep you in the mood, con you into imagining that this moribund millrace bisecting a wide concrete causeway is really a sluice of life. Is “Old Man River” in drag? Is the “Beautiful Blue Danube” in a mudpack? Is the River Kwai, to be defended at all costs (peps you up, that one)? The sun poaches the brain:

“Fifteen Miles on the Eerie Canal.”

“The River of No Deposit, No Return . . . “

The Explorer parks his car near a batting cage in Bell and swings into his fourth leg up the channel.

Over the fence this time (no holes here) and up a putative bicycle path to Gage Avenue. Across the river, tiny square stucco houses, a trailer park, the Bicycle Club casino. Time for matins.

Under the Gage Avenue Bridge, a thin layer of mud on the flats already has baked hard, light brown, like pottery glaze. An engrossing haul of debris here: half of an old-fashioned Jiggs and Maggie rolling pin; the top of a garbage can; blue shoelaces, tied together; a cheerleader’s pom-pon, red and gold; a broken mousetrap (rusty); assorted bean cans (squashed); a single snowshoe (!), and four empty boxes of Milk Duds--from long observation the Official Candy of the Los Angeles River.

For the Birds

Assorted stereo components, too, tweeters outnumbered by a posse of pigeons roosting under the bridge. It’s a regular bush-league bird sanctuary down here, or was: A black-brown wing, 18 inches in length, has been torn off in what must have been a furious and fatal fight, and half a dozen tiny egg shells seem to have cracked open on their own, in a renewal of life.

Overhead, something’s loose on the superstructure of the bridge. Passing cars go “pee-dee pee-DUH, pee-dee pee-DUH,” like the mesmerizing monotone of a railroad journey. (In olden days, another explorer had likened the sounds of the tracks to the name of a favorite baseball player: Heinie MaNUSH, Heinie MaNUSH. Just thinking about it, he hadn’t got a wink of sleep before 3 a.m )

There’s a bilgy froth fizzing beside the channel here, a lethal-looking foam that is to extend for two or three miles up the river. The Explorer gags and scrambles up the dike on the west side.

A boy of about 13 is lugging his little brother’s tricycle up the Gage Street steps to a ramp on the bike path. In the best big-brother tradition, though, he exacts his toll: first ride down the ramp.

“I don’t know what the thing is called,” the bigger boy says in answer to a question. “To us, it’s just ‘the river.’ ”

The boy says his name is Chuck. “No it’s not,” the little guy volunteers. “It’s Carlos.”

“Only at home,” Carlos says. “Out here, it’s Chuck.”

Below the dike, the gas company has sent a two-man crew to River Drive. A hole has been excavated spang in the middle of the road.

From deep in the hole comes a colorful concerto of curses con brio, impartially bilingual. Above the hole, Mr. Outside has settled himself for the duration in a director’s chair rigged with a beach umbrella, and enjoys a little reggae on his Sony Walkman, tapping his foot to the beat.

Mr. Outside stretches out his legs and tilts a Coors. “Nasty job,” he says to a bystander, “but somebody’s got to do it.”

Industrial Barren

For a four-mile reach now, through Maywood and almost to the northern border of Vernon, the river takes a wide turn--to the east, and for the worse. On the north, all the way up to the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, is an industrial barren broken only by a Bandini Avenue cross street some irredeemable optimist has named “Bonnie Beach Place.”

To the south, the Junction Railroad line follows the river bank, screening the current against the grim spectacle--if not the effluents--of gas tanks, steel-fabrication factories, waste-disposal plants. Nothing-colored buildings are marked “Shipping” or “Receiving.” Here, obviously, is where the serious work of Los Angeles is done. Yet it is a stretch not without its rewards.

The bike path, such as it is, has long since petered out, and access to the river could tax the ingenuity, if not the mettle, of the Artful Dodger:

Around (sometimes between; once right through) box cars; out of the path of lumbering locomotives whose drivers are as nonplussed as their quarry; across mazes of tracks (let’s see now: Is the dreaded “third rail” the one in the middle or the one on the side? Is rigor mortis truly the end?). For those of you watching, do not try this at home.

Once at the bank, though, the Explorer has delusions of Hillary, of being the only human being ever to lay eyes on the river primeval at this particular point. The only human being, that is, besides Benjy and Jose.

On the near side of a railroad bridge connected to Nowhere is the spray-painted legend “Benjy + Virgin.” (So he forgot the “IA.” So sue.) Farther out on the rickety bridge-- way farther out, accessible only by a precarious six-inch-wide ledge--”Jose Likes Barbara.” The Explorer marvels at Jose’s sang-froid but questions his ardor: Forty-five feet over the river and he only likes her?

Below, the channel gurgles along. It’s a sewer down there, and while the Explorer’s admiration for Carlos is undiminished, he recalls with nostalgia a truly classic graffito painted on a rock in the middle of the polluted river that flows through Liverpool: “The Quality of Mersey Is Not Strained.”

A Slight Mistake

Farther along the tracks, the Explorer, throughly spooked by now, looks up sharply at the toot of a locomotive. From its cab, the engineer, dressed in the striped coveralls and funny cap of yore, is waving. The Explorer waves back, then realizes sheepishly that the engineer is not waving at him but rather at a very foxy chick who is parked in a convertible beside the tracks.

Starved for company, he approaches the car, one whose fender configuration he has not seen before.

“What’s that you’re driving?” he asks, as an opener.

“A Lately,” Foxy Chick says.

“I’ll bite.”

“You never heard the commercial?” she asks. “The one that goes ‘Have you driven a Ford Lately?”

Laughing, she spins off. Gotcha!

Above Atlantic Avenue, bigger factories, or at least noisier. Inside Steel Services Inc., amid welding sparks and an incredible din, a herd of hard hats seems to be staging a forklift rodeo.

Posted on the wall of one of the indistinguishable cinder block factories is a sign: “Unlawful to Litter.” Probably coincidentally, a very fat cat eyes the message, contemplating a felony.

In the Twinkie zone along the river from Downey Road to Soto Street, the Explorer metamorphoses into an Oscar Mayer Wiener. From all sides, from above and below, comes a pervasive aroma, strong but sapid. It is as if one is in the very soul of a hot dog.

The Hot Dog Zone

This is, indeed, Frankfurt-am-Porciuncula. Farmer John sets up shop here. So does Hoffy. Just south is Vienna Sausage Mfg. Hqs. Behind the Vienna plant, two men in helmets and long yellow aprons over white surgeons’ smocks shovel something into a large bin. Don’t ask.

Relishing the moment, the Explorer reluctantly moves on. North of Frankfurt, into Los Angeles at last, is Bridge Country. The river has turned square now, sloped banks giving way to no-nonsense vertical sides. As if to compensate for whatever small charm the river has shucked, the bridges have taken up the slack.

First hint at departure from the strictly functional has come at the Soto Street Bridge, whose stone balusters are carved like bowling pins. At Washington Boulevard, though--entrance to Boyle Heights--the bridge is a minor model of forgotten craftsmanship, of form and flair, of personality.

Hurrying between two river banks--pimpled by an industrial asphalt factory, storage racks for coiled wire, a garbage-truck depot--not one in a thousand takes the time to look.

Beauty and the Bridge

The Explorer is no architect, wouldn’t know an echinus from a stylobate. What he does know is that this bridge must have been a beauty. Illuminated by lanterns--electric now; probably gas when it was built--the bridge, going to weed, still boast rows of decorative columns. Around the column capitals are terra-cotta frieze frames of workers: chiseling, hammering, surveying, pushing barrows, constructing steam engines--making money the old-fashioned way.

From here on up through the city center, the bridges, while neither majestic nor historic, are nevertheless worthy of an occasional pause. Nobody does, though. They’re too busy. The names of a series of streets on the west shore tell it all: Produce Street, Wholesale Street, Industrial Street, Factory Street, Enterprise Street. No dreamers here. No Sesame Street. And nobody, but nobody, walking the river bed.

Ignored even by the birds, the sludge seeps through Gotham on little rats’ feet, under forgotten spans marked with greening plaques: “Dedicated in Honor of Caspar de Portola”; “Seventh Street Viaduct/Geo. E. Cryer, Mayor” . . .

It may have been a glorious area once, or at least homey, but now the bridges connect freight terminals and sleazy “waterfront” bars; “Ekco Recyclers” and “Mike’s Hockey-Burger”; the world’s biggest Sears and something called Master Bias Co. (Attention ACLU).

Opposite Olympic, a street name mocks the Lord’s intention to run a decent river through the City of Angels. Rio Vista it’s called, and we can sell you some nice lots in the Everglades, too.

A Skyline Silhouette

And yet, looking across the river toward a city skyline silhouetted in the sunset, the neighborhood could be almost romantic.

In the quiet of dusk, in a freshet off the Pacific, the rivers and its bridges have a certain shabby dignity. So does the only other soul abroad on a balmy night down by the old Porciuncula.

He stands, outlined by a violet sky, at the center of the 7th Street Viaduct, looking at the water. His name, appropriately enough, is Buzz, and he knows all about the Los Angeles River.

“You think I’m a dummy?” he asks, indignant. “It’s the river that goes through the city, is what it is. The California River, that’s it. Starts way up there and ends way down here. Now let me ask you a question.”

“Shoot.”

“You got a dollar for a bottle of wine? Make it two bucks. It’s a gift.”

“For whom?”

Buzz grins, a man in command. “For me,” he says.

He shuffles off, whistling, and the Explorer, alone on the bridge, looks down the channel.

A barrier of garbage has formed, holding back the feeble tide for a moment before sorting itself out with a little “floosh”--not loud, but loud enough to shatter the mood.

“Summertime,” hums the Explorer, “and the river is queasy. . . .”