Getting Closer and Closer--but That’s Par for the Source

VAN NUYS BOULEVARD BRIDGE TO CANOGA PARK HIGH SCHOOL

Omens are where you find them. A crack in the mirror. A rainbow in the sky. A wink of Revlon on a white wing collar.

The bottom of a teacup, they say, can tell many things (whether, for example, the guest rates the Limoges). So, too, the bottom of the Los Angeles River.

Overnight, someone has stolen into the channel to chalk a message, perhaps a portent: THE END IS NEAR.

Can this be it, then? Can this be the day the Explorer finally discovers the source of the river?

Hyperventilating, he scales a fence and scours the soft underbelly of the sluice, thumping at the muck with all

This is almost the last in an intermittent series.

the vigor and profit of a man kicking the tires of a used car. Unswerving, the river keeps its counsel. Still, there’s no doubt about it: Something is in the air today--though nothing you’d want to describe in a family newspaper.

His sole overflowing, the Explorer, perhaps prematurely, ponders his place among Those Who Have Gone Before: Amundsen, Heyerdahl, Magellan, Polo, Franklin P. Adams . . . (Franklin P. Adams ? Mais oui. Who among us in the explorer racket can forget for more than a decade or two Adams’ inspired couplet, penned on the eve of his first voyage to the unplumbed voids of New Jersey: “It fills one full of joie de viver/ To look across the Hudson River”).

There is a muted joy, then, on the Porciuncula, an anticipation only heightened by residual anxiety. Was it not the Earl of Gustkey, The Times’ own semi-stalwart outdoor writer, who had dispatched the terse message by cleft computer: “Salmon and steelhead used to run the river. Pronghorn antelope, too, and GRIZZLY BEARS.”

Sure enough, just west of the Van Nuys Boulevard Bridge, someone has set out Styrofoam dishes--11 of them, to be precise, plus a bowl of water--for the riparian predators. Some contain what look like hot-dog haggis. Others invitingly display an opaque greenish gelatin with tangerine flecks; still others bite-sized geometric shapes in powdered pastels.

It is high noon on the river, and the hors d’oeuvre have not stood the test of time. The ubiquitous red river ants, though, are pigging out in force. It is not a pretty sight.

Inquiries in the Nearest Office

The table is set not more than 10 yards from the river-front Sherman Oaks Medical Center. Eschewing speculation on a patient’s ultimate solution to the hospital lunch, the Explorer makes inquiries in the nearest office, that of Marshall A. Zablen, Internal Medicine and Health Enhancement. The doctor is not in--off somewhere enhancing health, one presumes--but Dody, a receptionist, fields the Explorer’s questions with the skill of a St. Elsewhere surgeon.

“The L.A. River,” she volunteers, “starts way north somewhere, probably connected to the Sacramento River. And it ends in San Bernardino or Tijuana, take your pick.”

Burnt Offerings on the Bank

As for the burnt offerings on the river bank, “I don’t know,” Dody says. “There are a lot of bums around here.”

“The bums set out food ?”

“No, somebody sets out food for the bums .”

“Come on, now. Not even a bum would eat off the ground.”

“How do you know? You ever been a bum?”

Pleading the Fifth, the Explorer sideslips up the stream toward the Kester Avenue Bridge. Just east of the bridge, hollowed out in the oleanders, is a homey lair, recently vacated. Laid out on ground still warm are a pillow, a knapsack, four unopened cans of beer, a tube of dental adhesive paste and an entire wardrobe, socks to scarf.

Flirting from the fold of a pair of khaki pants is an exquisite lace handkerchief, the kind grandmothers used to embroider. (If rivers got mouths, bums got grandmothers.)

In the riverbed between Kester and Sepulveda is a collection of debris that looks as if it came over on the Mayflower: a Posturepedic mattress, one of those chairs that tilt the feet up, a green shutter, a metal mailbox, a newel post and a fireplace poker.

There’s a huge truck fender down there too, in which a commune of krakes has set up housekeeping. Washed up

against the fender are several dozen multicolored . . . bird’s eggs? On closer inspection, it is a cluster of little balls--red, yellow, green, white, blue--dropped at random as if an uncommonly ambitious juggler had panicked in mid-act. They are the size of golf balls.

They are golf balls, the fallout of an upstream miniature course whose inexpert patrons have missed not only the cut but the green, the fairway and the entire civilized world as we know it.

Across the San Diego Freeway, the shoe-box river veers to the northwest in search of identity. Looming ahead is the Sepulveda Dam.

A dam, of course, is designed to contain a large body of water--a place to boat, to swim, to water-ski. Put a prefabricated river below the dam if you must, but by nature, the dam itself is where you separate the men from the buoys.

With due respect, then, even diffidence, the little stream backs up to the Big Barrage and laps at its gate.

Panting in empathy, the Explorer lurches up the steep sides of the dam, the one he has often seen from the freeway but has never had the occasion to peek behind. An inland sea is perhaps too much to expect, but a lake? A reservoir? Even a pond?

Not by a dam site. On the other side of Sepulveda “Dam,” believe it or not, is an honest-to-God farm . Doing quite well, too: acres and acres of grain, vegetables, corn.

It is the cornfields, mostly, that the river people have zeroed in on. North of the dam, six or seven snuffed campfires are garnished with chawn cobs, as well as remnants of roast mickeys, tossed salad (flung, actually), toasted turnips and even fresh flesh: Impaled on a skillfully fashioned homemade spit is the chassis of what once was a fat, foot-long snake.

A Concrete Kimono

Shaken if not stirred, the Explorer repairs to the bank of the river, newly liberated from its concrete kimono and reveling in the reprieve. Once again, the river has attracted its natural constituents--fish and kids.

Harry, 8, Laurie, 9, and Jason, 8, all from Encino, frolic along the banks, free as the breeze and brown as the proverbial berry (proverbial by necessity; when is the last time you saw a brown berry?).

What they are playing, Jason says, is “pings” and “bops.”

“Pings,” Laurie explains, “is when you toss a bottle in the stream and try to plunk it with a pebble. It goes ‘ping,’ you know?

“No fair breaking it though. People wade across and could cut their feet.”

What people? “The night people,” Laurie says without further comment.

And “bops”?

“Let me show you,” Jason says. He reaches a few feet into the ripple and breaks off a cattail near its root.

“Turn around,” he orders, “and don’t look.” Harry and Laurie giggle.

Whap! The meat end of the cattail catches the Explorer just above the ear. The sensation is not entirely unpleasant; something like being blackjacked by a bratwurst.

From the point of impact, hundreds of white spores catch an updraft, like so many peewee parachutes.

“Lookit!” Jason squeals. “I bet they go a million miles! I bet they go to Japan !”

Then, as an afterthought, “You’re not hurt, are you? You couldn’t be. See, that’s the fun of it--to get you when you’re not looking.”

“Hey, bobba rebop,” the Explorer says.

“Sure,” Jason says.

North of Burbank Boulevard, bigger boys play at their own bops. From the Sepulveda Basin Model Airport, serious-looking studs send their beautifully maintained model airplanes aloft with the roar of Alaskan mosquitoes, to do loops and dives and Immelmanns.

The Explorer watches for a while, intrigued especially by an elderly gentleman who squirts the windshield of his model from a Windex bottle, then wipes it with a chamois. One half-expects a tiny hand to emerge, making the thumbs-up sign. . . .

In the stubble of an adjacent cornfield stands a claque of adolescent crows, cawking at the usurpation of airspace, nudging one another as if to say, “ I could do that, but Mom said I had to wait an hour after eating.”

In the distance, the unmistakable “thwack!” of willow against leather, as the King’s Head XI has at the Pakistani Cricket Club in savage post-crumpet conflict.

By the river--swampy now, but still in form--dirt-bikes have carved a maze of fiendish trails between the Woodley and Balboa golf courses. Rabbits are at home along the banks, and dogs and squirrels and gophers and birds the size of pheasants with feathers like autumn leaves.

World’s Biggest Spider

From out of a gopher hole stomps what has to be the world’s biggest spider, licking its chops. (Spiders got chops?) It is a horrendous, hairy Tinkertoy of a thing. The spider just stares, waiting for somebody to make its day. It is the Explorer who blinks. Grizzly-shmizzly.

West of Woodley, another farm: tomatoes, squash, carrots, corn. French beans prosper like Merimee in well irrigated soil.

The corn is green all the way up to Balboa Boulevard. The river, by contrast, has turned brown, in mood as well as hue.

The halcyon three-mile thrust of pings and bops, of hares and hounds and fishing holes, will prove to be the stream’s last hosanna. A scant 500 yards east of Balboa, pile drivers are pounding the pizazz out of the Los Angeles River--a humiliation from which it will never recover.

What can the Explorer tell you? That from here on up--through Reseda, Winnetka, Woodland Hills, Canoga Park--the river “flows”? It would be a lie, and explorers never lie--at least not when there’s the slightest chance of corroboration.

The river does not flow through the West Valley. It crawls on its belly. It cowers. Corseted in concrete, the river can hardly breathe, let alone sigh. Domesticated for all time into a dire strait.

--Tell it to the birds: In a stagnant puddle west of Lindley, four handsome waterfowls, off-course and anomic, rake the mud for anoretic worms. At the Explorer’s approach, their cries are plaintive: “Peeh! Peeh!” You said it, baby.

--Tell it to the troops: the 3rd Battalion, 144th Field Artillery of the California National Guard, hard by the river. Inside the compound (untended gates wide open), a solitary soldier in fatigues scrubs a garbage can and never looks up as an explorer takes inventory of jeeps and trucks. (Outside, beside an ancient cannon on an unmowed lawn, a poster reads, “Uncle Sam Wants You!” To cut the grass?)

--Tell it to the seniors in their animated new center in Reseda Park. Lew: “Don’t tell me this is a river. I come from Denver.” Iz: “I helped build the thing in the ‘30s--40 cents an hour on the graveyard shift--but don’t blame me . I was only following orders.”

--Tell it to the Hawns, Charlene and Jack, who’ve lived on the banks of the Los Angeles River for 26 years and still call it “the warsh.” The Hawns’ poolside patio abuts the top of the dike, and the wide channel affords privacy if not stimulation.

‘A Good Place’

“I don’t feel like I live by a river,” Charlene says. “In all the years we’ve lived here, I’ve never once been down to the stream. I wouldn’t know how. It’d be a good place to get a shopping cart, though, if you needed one.”

Jack, who was “down there once, when a kid fell off the bridge,” finds that riverside domesticity has its advantages. “It’s ideal for backwarshing your pool,” he says, “and for grading the vintage of your Champagne.”

How’s that? “I work the cork free,” Jack explains, “aiming over the wall. Halfway down the dike is a pretty good year; if the cork hits the bottom of the warsh, you’ve got one fine bottle of bubbly!”

Mumm’s the word at the Hawns’, and the Explorer, or at least a carbonated copy, heads west from Reseda with quickened feet and lighter head.

Hopes are raised, then dashed. A mini-tidal wave heralds not the river’s source but the rattling approach of a yellow Flood Control snowplow, bulling ahead of it not only a hump of water but a sofa seat, a sodden Halloween costume and a plastic skull (or so one hopes). The driver toots and waves.

West of Mason Street, a vertical channel scoops in from the north, but proves to be only Brown’s Canyon Warsh, barely damp. Tacked on a telephone pole, the white flag of a last-ditch riverphile: “Kayak and Canoe for Sale--709-0619.”

The river proper turns due west and tries to sneak unnoticed past a tree-trimming crew at Variel Avenue.

No such luck. The piddling stream has drawn the full attention of Angie Bucchese--sawyer extraordinaire, major-league expectorator and master of the non sequitur. “With rivers like this,” says Bucchese, “it’s a wonder we won the war.”

Six blocks later, still pondering the Bucchese postulate, the Explorer nearly misses the point--the point of his own story and the point of the river! The river does come to a point, just east of Owensmouth Avenue . . . or disappears into a point, depending on your perspective. From the south comes the Arroyo Calabasas; from the north, Bell’s Creek. In the hypotenuse, Canoga Park High School. Just like that, the Los Angeles River has disappeared!

Slack-jawed and wild-eyed, the Explorer storms the school gates and insists on seeing the principal. The urge is atavistic, a throwback to the days when the answers always came from Those in Authority. Received by the principal, a genial gent named Ted Siegel (they’re always genial after you’ve graduated), the Explorer demands, “What have you done with my river?”

‘Tell Me All About It’

“Sit down, son,” says Siegel, who’s seen it all before. “Tell me all about it.”

Fifteen minutes later, the Explorer and the principal have concluded that maybe the river’s source is at the high school. “There’s a picture of it in the plant manager’s office,” Siegel says. (There is indeed, and PM Mike Hash is more than willing to part with it.) “But why don’t you check with Mike Wiener? He teaches journalism and English, and he’s quite a historian.”

Wiener is located in his classroom. Preoccupied, the Explorer spares not a moment’s pity for the ink-stained wretches aspiring to the reporter’s trade but jumps all over the startled teacher: “Is this the source of the Los Angeles River, this fatuous funnel of trivial trickles?” (Spiro Agnew couldn’t have said it better.)

“No,” Wiener says, “this is not the source. But I know where it is. . . .”