By the Filmic Shores of Burbank : Reflecting on the Muddy Banks of a Town of Tinsel

SUSPENSION BRIDGE, BURBANK, TO VAN NUYS BOULEVARD BRIDGE, VAN NUYS

Everybody’s been real nice about it. Or not, as the case may be.

The Explorer has made a commitment--at least to his conscience--to walk or bike each foot of the Los Angeles River from its mouth to its source. This, of course, has entailed tacking across private property in a pinch.

Permission has been sought. Permission has been granted. Or not, as the case may be.

Whatever the case. He has kept his commitment. That’s explorer biz.

Today’s trek, however, will involve some particularly sticky wickets. On the previous night, the Explorer had solicited the benedictions of Burbank Studios, Lakeside Country Club, CBS Studio Center. . . .

Unmoved by the imperatives of history, Burbank Studios had been stiffer than buckram. (“The man in the moon couldn’t get in here,” said publicity director Shirley Krims. “Suppose you fell in a hole?”) The gate guard at Lakeside had called the manager, who had said no sweat, just submit a registered letter to the chairman of the committee on illicit ingress. Jim Gardner, CBS security chief and a font of river lore, had vacillated, but genially.

Today, then, the situation demands dead-serious contemplation, and high over the river, overlooking the Land of Milk and Money, the Explorer plots his strategy from a stone bench in Forest Lawn.

Yma Sumac and a Hip Flask

Even opposite Burbank Studios, access to the south side of the river is as arduous as it is unrewarding: Nothing to see in the vertical-sided channel but a beach ball, a full-sized bowling pin, two grapefruits, a Yma Sumac LP, a hip flask and a series of inexplicable traffic bumps impeding nothing but an already sluggish green gargle.

The Explorer crosses at Barham Boulevard, gives the forbidding Burbank Studios a wide berth and segues into nearby Buena Vista Park. In a quiescent cranny, a lovely old pine tree hard by the edge of the bank affords shade.

It is one of the river’s rare idyllic recesses, disturbed only by the flutter of a breeze-blown tabloid. Resting on the pine needles, the Explorer spears a passing leaf of the Daily Racing Form. A verse of bookies underneath the bough. . . .

Across the river, 30 yards away, a hobo has determined, against great odds and for reasons known but to God, to reach the unreachable stream. Scratching and clawing, scratched and clawed in turn, he scales one barbed-wire fence, then another, then drops eight feet into a drainage channel. By chance, a sturdy 15-foot metal rod is propped against the river ditch.

Agile if tipsy, the hobo goes down the rod, hand over hand. For 20 minutes, he wanders the wadi, solitary prince of all he surveys. Finally, he picks up a discarded Styrofoam cup. He dips the cup into the runnel and anoints his matted noggin; twice, three times.

Hand over hand up the ladder is a drag, but he makes it. Scaling the ditch wall proves impossible. Undaunted, the hobo disappears up a large concrete pipe. Five minutes later, he reappears, shuffling along Forest Lawn Drive and looking mighty pleased with himself.

From across the river, the Explorer applauds spontaneously. The hobo pauses for a moment, gives an illogically gracious little bow, and hits the open road.

Inspired, the Explorer resolves to surmount his own obstacles. Burbank Studios is not nearly worth the effort: late-model cars and a row of new pickups parked on a riverfront road. For this, they post sentries? Still, noblesse oblige.

West of Burbank, it occurs to him that he is in the vicinity of at least a subsidiary source of the river. Everybody talks about Toluca Lake but nobody does anything about it. The reason becomes apparent: You can’t get there from here--not unless you enter the grounds of the Lakeside Country Club.

A pity, too, because it is a bucolic little bayou--two ponds, actually, bisected by a causeway--rimmed by handsome houses, wide lawns and wooden docks. Even a couple of boats, destination nowhere. On one dock, one of those little jockey statues holding a ring for tethering horses. (Sea horses?)

Outlet is at the east end of the lake under two magnificent palms--a manhole-sized pit through which the lake water whirlpools with a Circean slurp en route to its rendezvous with the swinish river.

Virgin Golf Balls

The riverfront bushes along the Lakeside course hide the best class of lost golf ball this side of Riviera, a disproportionate number of them virtually virgins. Flower beds flank immaculate fairways, in startling contrast to the scene directly across the river: Glimpsed between Quonset huts are the outbuildings of a ghost town and the unmistakeable silhouette of a Bronx blackstone (we don’t have brownstones in the Bronx any more).

What it is, just a duckhook away, is the back lot of Universal Studios, and what it leads to is a unique establishment: Los Angeles’ one and only riverside cafe--three outdoor tables under green-and-white Perrier umbrellas.

The restaurant inside used to be called the Universal Joint, before that the Left Bank. Now it is simply Paul’s, though Paul Northcott, the pithy proprietor, has a vision:

“I used to be a river rat when I lived in Colorado,” Northcott says over a bank-side Bud, “but this ?”

“It does get pretty wild in the channel,” he concedes. “The studios stage car chases and blow things up, and we have a ringside seat. Ordinarily, though, while it’s pleasant to sit out here, the vista is strictly wistful.

“But I have a plan. We’ll dam up the river, put in little locks so you can boat from one point to the next.

“And I have the sign all ready. We’re going to call the restaurant ‘Paul’s Landing.’ . . .”

While Northcott dreams, the short-sighted valley turns its back on its only liquid asset. West of Vineland, parallel to thoroughfares blatantly labeled Aqua Vista, Valley Spring and even Picturesque Drive, the stream cringes past the rumps of steak houses to the south, the rumbleseats of “riverside” condos to the north. Behind a used-car dealer’s lot, the rickety tree house of a long-ago kid still stands, but a woeful stand of firs has been hacked to the stump. Merry Christmas, somebody.

Pudgy Jogger

Between Tujunga and Colfax avenues, though, things look up, if briefly. In front of a surprisingly opulent estate, a pudgy, pasty jogger in black shorts Jell-Os by, pumping a pair of red hand weights--the Belgian Flag in overdrive.

In the lee of Colfax, a couple with a wolfhound walks a plank-floor footbridge equipped with turnstiles on either end, a token gesture of exclusivity. On the river walls, the Valley version of graffiti: a contemporary combine of rune and hieroglyph--pyramids with eyes, fylfots, Mondrian squares. . . .

E. S. Bova, another jogger, wiry, middle-aged and bewildered, stands at the wall, trying to crack the code.

“Damned if I know,” he tells the Explorer. “The river? Well, that’s no mystery.

“Let’s see, it’s flowing east, am I right? So logically, it’s gotta start at the Pacific and empty into--say, the Colorado River.”

Not unkindly, the Explorer suggests that by Bova’s reckoning, the river would flow uphill.

“So?” says Bova, jogging in place. “Life’s a struggle.” And off he trots, uphill all the way.

Up the creek is CBS Studios, ardently guarded by Jim Gardner, and not exclusively against people. “You get hawks swooping down the channel,” says Gardner, “and when it’s hot and dry, coyotes.

“It was before my time, but I understand they used to drive cattle across the river, too, for the ‘Rawhide’ series I think.

“We get a lot of coyotes in the lot here. We keep cats for the mice, and the coyotes go after the cats.”

The Food Chain

In the shadow of a movie-set mansion, a black kitten bedevils a big bug. From the fence separating CBS from the river, an outsized black crow eyes the pussycat, doing a pretty fair imitation of Snoopy imitating a vulture.

The Explorer can’t look. Besides, he has problems of his own. According to his indispensable atlas, the Thomas Bros. road guide, the fershluginer river is supposed to end here. Here--just west of the Tujunga Wash, precisely at Radford Avenue in Studio City--Thomas’ pretty blue ribbon, traced all the way from Long Beach, is arbitrarily snipped. The river, though, slops on and on without missing a trickle.

(Later, the Explorer calls the Thomas people. Mike Van Raalte, lead draftsman, is by turns indignant--does one doubt Thomas?--puzzled, apologetic. Obligingly, he checks the files, all the way back to 1915; finds the error in 1956. On the map, the river stopped at Radford in ‘56, still does, “and I plain flat-out don’t know why. . . .”

(“We get caught in a lot of errors,” Van Raalte confesses. “A street zigs where it’s supposed to zag, or somebody calls who lives on an alley we’ve neglected to chart. Then you get some nut who’s walking up the L.A. River. . . .”

(Van Raalte seems genuinely pleased, though, to have the omission pointed out, and appoints himself a one-man blue-ribbon panel to rectify the error in time for the 1987 edition.)

Amazingly, it’s still 1985 (seems like yesterday), and the Explorer has miles to go before he sleeps.

Tujunga Wash, a clone tributary of the Porciuncula, does not seem worthy of a detour, only a wry reflection: How nice it must be to live on the banks of the Wabash, or the shores of Gitche Gumeee. But who among us would be proud to say he has a summer place on the Tujunga Wash?

Neither are there bragging rights to the L.A. River. For a five-mile reach now, the ditch dithers along Valleyheart Drive, whose snug residents are indifferent to the river at best, hostile at worst. Starting at Laurel Canyon, the grungy stream is concealed from the fastidious by rows of giant oleanders parsed by pines.

A select few, though, are making furtive forays to the banks, leaving in the channel an awesome olio of clues. Dumped into the rivulet are: an orange Mae West life jacket; a welcome mat; a two-foot length of sugar cane; an entire toilet, water closet intact; a car battery; a whole ironing board with stand (“OK, Harold, that’s it; I’ve ironed my last shirt!”); a rusty clarinet, and what looks to be an alligator but turns out to be a long, undulating strip of dark-green gunk. (Riverwise, Sherman Oaks is the Slime Capital of the World.)

Clean Garbage Cans

Riverside neighborhoods here tend to be tidy, manicured, surpassingly suburban: Toyota Celica neighborhoods for the most part, neighborhoods of clean garbage cans (except for one: You know who you are!).

Nice-people neighborhoods, at least north of the river. The south bank tends to condos, and on the third-floor balcony of one--somewhere west of Coldwater Canyon--stands a man peering through binoculars.

“Whatcha looking at?” the Explorer shouts up.

“Go away. I’m looking at things!”

“What things?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Things in the river?”

“Nah. The other side of the river. I can see over the bushes. You wouldn’t believe what I’m looking at.”

The man won’t give his name, but insists it’s not Tom.

For the purer of spirit, there are consolations:

--A wooden footbridge at the end of Laurelgrove, perfect for Pooh Sticks ( you know, where you toss your sticks upstream and see which one emerges first from under the bridge).

--The river’s only riverside church: Thirty-sixth Church of Christ, Scientist, at Whitsett.

--The Studio City Golf Course (with a far more democratic class of lost balls).

--A tree near Coldwater harboring hundreds of swallows, including one gung-ho number that dive-bombs the inch-deep river stream, knocks itself silly, staggers around for a couple of minutes and at length flies off in search of a good eye-ear-throat-and-beak man.

--The river’s only midstream bus stop (Woodman Avenue Bridge).

At Fulton Avenue, another footbridge, this one boasting the first and last chalked hopscotch court of the trek. Martine, 6, when questioned, doesn’t know the name of the river over which she is tossing her potsy.

A Future Lesson

“Anyways,” Martine says with irrefutable logic, “I can’t know where it begins and ends if I didn’t know what it was in the first place. Besides, we didn’t get to that yet in geography. I have to go now. This is my sister’s bike.”

The river crosses under the Ventura Freeway at Sherman Oaks, and to the west, a number of large, livable houses--including Penny Pfening’s--have backyards flush with the bank. “In the ‘40s,” Penny volunteers, the best pollywog-hunting there was was in Studio City. Of course, our parents didn’t know we played down there.

“I’ve raised five kids here, and sure, they play on the banks, but above the fence. Anything to get mucky.

“Across the river, though, it’s dangerous. There’s a camp of what I assume are alcoholics, derelicts. They cook out, hang up their wash. Well, at least they wash. . . .”

In a tunnel opposite Penny’s house, the graffiti is new, but anachronistic: Dylan. Hendrix. Peace + Grass. Bye-Bye Beatles--For Now.

Upstream, on the way toward Van Nuys, the Explorer comes full circle from Forest Lawn.

On a berm below a chain-link fence is a tiny mound of fresh dirt. Above the mound, a cross, fashioned of twigs, and a miniature tombstone.

Inked onto the stone, a message:

“R.I.P. Belinda.

“Just a mouse, but WHAT a mouse!”