Of Goats, Pans, Poetry and an ‘Airwolf’ Episode : Explorer Takes the High Road to a TV Location on River

GLENDALE BOULEVARD BRIDGE, ATWATER, TO SUSPENSION BRIDGE, BURBANK

Up on the dike, the Explorer double-knots a new pair of Hush Puppies. He will take the High Road this day, walking the banks of the Los Angeles River and leaving the deep to its denizens.

He knows now that there are crawly things down there, snakes, and bloated rodents with needly little teeth, and killer frogs, and unfocused gangs of teen-agers who smoke long green cigarettes and . . . music?

The Explorer cocks his good ear. Sure enough, from far below in the wry recesses of the river echoes an insistent beat--the boomlay-BOOM of the Congo as translated by Philly Joe Jones. A lull in the freeway traffic on the opposite bank opens the air to a swoop of sax, a snatch of synthesizer.

And from under an overgrown flap of brain, a phrase struggles to the surface, then bursts free: “What is he doing, the great god Pan/ Down in the reeds by the river?” A semester not entirely wasted.

Searching as much for the genesis of the phrase as the source of the music, the Explorer abandons both resolution and caution and clambers down the dike.

The river, at this point, still sports bushy green sideburns of bog grass and bulrush, the only shelter for miles around from a hot and humid morning . . .

Just in time, the Explorer puts together the elements of the equation, but not before he has glimpsed, inadvertently, a telltale tableau: Two big feet, one little one and the corner of one of those huge transistors called a “blaster.” The fourth foot, he assumes, is around here somewhere. Let it be.

Pan is indeed abroad today. In an extemporaneous eddy just off the main flow, a dozen three-inch fish of indeterminate sex chase each other in crazy circles, having a ball, secure in the knowledge that nobody’s going to eat them.

The dragonflies aren’t so sure. Sambito, 9, and Sambito, 11 (“He’s my cousin”) are out for blood.

“You gotta be fast to catch ‘em,” says Sambito II, up from Frogtown on a picnic. “The little ones are real quick. The big ones bite.”

The big ones, a feral orange-red, join the Sambitos in chasing the little ones, which have sparkling aqua heads, string-thin bodies and fluorescent tails.

“You put some food in this little basket,” says Sambito I, demonstrating. “When they land, you go ‘zip!’ and cover the basket.

“They’re neat, aren’t they? First time I saw one I thought it was a stick. Then a turtle et it.”

It is the dance of the dragonflies that kicks through the mucilage of encroaching senility and liberates the phrase, something of Browning’s: “What is he doing, the great god Pan/ Down in the reeds by the river?/ Spreading ruin and scattering ban/ Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat/ And breaking the golden lilies afloat/ With the dragonfly on the river.”

An omen? The Explorer will keep a sharp eye out for golden lilies and goats today--neither of which he will sight. As it turns out, he will have to do with a ghost, a buzz bomb and Ernest Borgnine . . .

For now, though. it’s up the graffiti-scarred bank--”God Is Alive,” “Defend the Faith” and “Make Them Red (sic) You Your Rights”--and over the river on an unexplained footbridge. A precarious, swaying affair with a floor of peeling metal plates, the bridge continues to the west over the Golden State Freeway.

The second segment is completely enclosed by wire mesh that shelters the pedestrian against neither wind nor rain nor the sonic boom of an air-horn let loose precisely under the bridge by a crazed trucker. It occurs that the cage is less to keep the elements out than to keep the brain-damaged from getting back at the good buddies.

The bridge, in any case, leads to a sylvan soccer field in a corner of Griffith Park. The field is empty. Recrossing the river, the Explorer comes across a band of the youths for whom the bridge presumably was constructed. They are playing baseball spang in the middle of busy Sunnybrook Street.

North of Los Feliz Boulevard is a nine-hole riverside golf course. Outside its fences is a smooth path atop the dike, which should be open to cyclists but isn’t. (In the riverbed, a yellowed old Acushnet with a lopsided grin hacked into its cover takes a benign view of man’s inhumanity to ball.)

Upriver from the links, a huge hump of loose dirt tumbles from dike all the way down to channel, like a sand castle kicked over by a Brobdingnagian brat. Across the river is a similar dirt hill. Atop the near pile sits a boy named Darek, 13, who kindly explains that the piles provide access to Griffith Park for the equestrians who live on the east shore: Down the hill, across the river, up the hill, through a tunnel under the freeway, and hi-yo, Silver.

“The horses love the trails,” says Darek, “but they don’t always like walking in the river.”

Darek is not whistling William Tell. A lone rider descends the opposite dirt pile, then sits for fully 10 minutes as her mount, a well-muscled roan, stops still in the current, cooling its heels.

The roan’s reluctance is understandable: Just over the dike, the “Saddle and Sirloin Club” is preparing a sweet-smelling barbecue . . .

North of the knacker, the river begins to change character again. For a considerable stretch--Frogtown almost to the Ventura Freeway--it has been a pleasant stroll. The waterway, never exactly majestic, is still kind of cute, reminiscent of the headwaters of the Oise.

Now it turns square again, like a stretched-out shoebox into which someone has spit a stream of tobacco juice.

There have been some pretty raunchy reaches, to be sure, but under the freeway is Ultimate Ugly. Onto a pile of oil-slicked rocks has been dumped what seems to be the waste of the Western world. Styx and stones. And yet . . .

From the east, a tributary--the Verdugo Wash?--trills over a series of 18-inch steps, creating a little waterfall effect. Into the wash trail Rapunzel ropes of ivy from Luigi’s Pottery Shop.

There stands a young couple, hand in hand, oblivious to everything but themselves. The young man, Tommy Tirmane, responds to a question: “Yeah, that’s the L.A. River. Starts up in the mountains, I suppose. Maybe Mammoth.”

And its mouth?

“Tommy snorts. “You’re puttin’ me on. Rivers got mouths ?”

Groping for a breath of fresh air, the river bends west at the freeway. On the Glendale side, fluid ribbons from voluminous wooden vats flow down the four-story sides of a water-purification plant, with a hiss you can hear across the river on Zoo Drive.

Punctuating the hisses is the odd “whoosh,” the sound of the penultimate reel of a Randolph Scott movie. The Explorer whirls to confront a bulky brute in blue sweat pants, who urgently advises him to displace his derriere from dead center of what turns out to be the Howard Hill Archery Range.

When his brains catch up to his feet, the Explorer finds himself in a clearing hacked out of a modest wood, visible only from the freeway. Even in broad daylight, it looks for all the otherworld like the ring of a pagan rite.

The clearing is perfectly, unnaturally round, a dirt path dragged free of pebbles and twigs, even of incriminating footprints, possibly cloven. The “track” is some 60 paces across, too small for vehicles, even for jogging.

In the centre of the circle (“centre” always looks better, somehow, when dealing with the unknown) stands a tall totem of four oil drums, one atop the other, painted bright orange. A graven image from a garage sale. Four spotlights have been sunk into the ground to illuminate the totem (pagans being notoriously shy of crosses, garlic and the light of day).

Around the periphery are a wooden table, an old bookshelf, rusted metal chairs and a gallon cider-vinegar bottle two-thirds filled with gasoline.

The Explorer shudders, vows to return at the next full moon, climbs out over a padlocked fence. On the other side is Mike Spearman. “Yes,” he confesses, “I know what’s going on here, but to tell you the truth, I’m not going to tell you the truth.”

He does volunteer that the area is known as “26 acres,” and that it is haunted.

The city obtained the park, Spearman says, from an Indian princess who married a white settler: “This was her royal birthright, and many around here will tell you that she still walks the land . . . “

While the Explorer is momentarily distracted by the sight of a rabbit bouncing into the bush, Spearman has unlocked the gate, locked it firmly behind him and vanished into the Twilight Zone.

Still a little spooked, the Explorer proceeds westward up the river. He pauses to unwind at a picnic table in a far more temporal riverside glade northwest of the Riverside Drive Bridge.

Serenity is short-lived. From the riverbed comes a mighty rumble that shakes the park. Instinctively, the Explorer looks for a lintel, recalling the experience of predecessor Juan Crespi.

While exploring the Santa Ana River in 1769, Crespi laconically noted five earthquakes. With his mania for nomenclature, he dubbed the river “Jesus de los Temblores.” (How strong were the quakes, Juany? “The most severe lasted about as long as an Ave Maria.”)

Fingering a figurative rosary, the Explorer peeks over the dike. Subcontracted to the Army Corps of Engineers, a battalion of bulldozers is systematically short-sheeting the riverbed, razing the stream of flora precisely where it is beginning to look like a river again.

Why? “Cuz if you don’t,” says the foreman, a steel-thewed man, “all that stuff’ll wash down and put your concrete line in jeopardy.” And Lord knows we wouldn’t want our concrete line put in jeopardy, would we?

Barbara Minnick wouldn’t, anyway. A river dweller, living across the park, Minnick says, “The river has its quiet side but it can turn nasty. I lost a friend in the current on New Year’s Eve in 1936. A bridge broke and her car went down.

“When it’s quiet, though, my grandchildren go ‘treasure-hunting’ in the river, looking for--well, pieces of stuff; shells. ( Shells ?) “I love the area, though. You can keep horses here, buy hay and oats, ride the trails . . . “

A long bridle path indeed parallels the river here. Upstream access to Griffith Park is over a suspension bridge that whinnies and snorts like a swayback nag but gets the job done. As at Atwater, a tunnel under the freeway leads to the park’s equestrian trails--as well as to Traveltown and the Los Angeles Live Steamers exhibit. In the latter, exquisite scale models of historic trains (1 1/2 inches to the foot) carry passengers past vest-pocket villages and over tiny trestles.

Mans the Gates

Traveltown is the last station-stop for the real thing. Brawny black locomotives strain at the leash of obsolescence, still lusty in repose like bulls put to pasture before their time. “They were bulls,” says Art Vissars, “magnificent bulls.”

Vissars, a retired engineer, mans the gates in his spare time, and remembers. “Two of those old engines I actually fired,” says the old-timer. “It’s a novelty today but it was a job then--16-hour days, 24 during the war. Good old days, sure, but rough old days, I guarantee you.”

John, 10, and Parry, 11, run their hands over the sides of a locomotive and contemplate its power. “I bet if a train came by and you lay down between the tracks, it’d pass right over you,” says John.

“Sure,” says Parry, “but raise your head just an inch and that sucker’d sploosh your brains for three miles.”

On the way out, the Explorer admires a grounded China Clipper, a sleek, twin-tailed Cutlass fighter plane and, incongruously, a German V-1 buzz bomb, aimed to the northwest. Comes the revolution, bye-bye Burbank.

Back on the north side of the river, the Gatling-gun chatter of a helicopter demands attention. The noise comes from the polo field of the Los Angeles Equestrian Center. The Explorer concedes that polo rules may well have changed in the 20 years since he’s seen a match--but choppers ?

What it is is “Airwolf” on location. While ponies practice on an adjacent field, a camera peeks into the chopper cockpit. Director’s chairs are scattered about the turf. Those marked “Ernest Borgnine” and “Jan-Michael Vincent” come with little parasols. Alex Cord’s chair, presently occupied by an unreal blonde, sports no such parasol. Is this significant?

In the cockpit, Borgnine sweats a torrent, not quite the source of the Porciuncula, but close.

During a break, he is happy to rap about the river.

“Listen,” he says, “it’s just a cement ditch right now, but I’ve heard it roar like a tiger; I’ve seen it wash away everything in its path.

“OK, it’s not much of a river now, not like the Connecticut (Borgnine is from New Haven) where everything you can name grows on the banks--even tobacco.

Running Water

“When we were kids, we used to fish on something we just called ‘The Lagoon.’ Caught all sorts of fish, even eels, I wonder where they came from?

“The L.A. River? It’s hard to have an opinion on it--except, thank God, it takes our running water. I wonder, though, why they don’t dam it up to reuse the water, recycle it, the way they do in Malibu Canyon.”

“The way they’ve cemented it up,” he continues, “you have to figure the Army Engineers have found themselves a home.

“And I think I know why: In case the Army has to get out of L.A. in a helluva hurry, that’s the perfect route.”

Thinking of the Army, Borgnine laughs his distinctive laugh, the one he made infamous as Fatso in “From Here to Eternity.”

“I can just see them,” he says, “rolling up the river in armored cars. Then it starts to rain . . . “

Pan to the river.