Bridge Is Step Toward Healing for Couple Who Lost Son

Just last week, for the first time, Laura Burchfield let her 12-year-old son Ryan cross by himself over the Arroyo Simi.

When she herself walks across the concrete bridge over the wash--a usually peaceful trickle bending across the east end of Ventura County--she tenses up. She gets stiff-armed. She grips her keys with an intensity that makes her knuckles white.

She wanted this bridge. She wanted it so badly she and her husband, Dan, went to every Moorpark City Council meeting for months to plead for it.

But it’s asking a lot to make her walk here: If this bridge had existed just four years ago, her son Joel might still be alive.

So when she heard about the two Long Beach boys who drowned in the Los Angeles River last week, she thought of her own boy. If he had known better, if he hadn’t been deceived by the tempting arroyo on that rainy January day back in 1996 when the wash was roaring, he might still be here.

“Kids are kids, and they’re fearless,” she said.

They don’t pay much attention to “no trespassing” signs. They need more than one warning. But, Burchfield hopes, the latest deaths will be the last warning children will need.

When her 11-year-old was alive, she had told him not to try to cross the arroyo. In fact, she had just grounded him for sloshing through it.

That was the week before he slipped, or fell, or even waded partway through, and ended up carried by the rush of the rain-swollen river until his body came to a stop at a seminary miles away.

He had planned to go to a basketball game with his dad that night. It was his first post-restriction treat.

The other children said he probably crossed the arroyo that day to avoid the school bus, and shave half an hour off his walk from Chaparral Middle School to the block of suburban homes where he lived.

All the children did it, and pretty regularly, though in the January rainy season, it was a challenge that some avoided. Joel’s parents think he probably went near, saw how rough it was and tried to leave, but slipped on the algae coating the side and fell in.

But, Laura Burchfield didn’t really know about any of that then.

She would soon learn that kids tied plastic grocery bags around their feet and trudged through the current to get to the playing fields on the other side.

Others would try to hop across on grocery carts scattered there, or when the stream was running low, by seeking out sandbars and avoiding the tangly masses of brush that break the water’s path.

For a while, after the accident, adults would guard the stream, especially when it rained. Laura Burchfield stayed far away, but Dan was among those parents, perched to warn kids off.

“I had to go back there a lot,” he said.

Even now, Laura Burchfield said, when the rain arrives, parents guard the spot to keep out thrill-seeking children who avoid the bridge.

After Joel’s death, his parents were contacted by Nancy Rigg, whose fiance died in a failed rescue in the Los Angeles River. She asked them to appear in a video she was preparing with the Los Angeles County Public Works Department, warning children away from river channels.

The video includes home-movie footage of Joel, smiling and talking goofily into the camera in his baseball uniform. Dan and Laura talk about their son’s smile, about how they warned him away from the arroyo. Laura said she cried after the filming. She cries after every time she has to talk about her son because life is different without Joel.

He still visits, they say, just before they fall asleep, to tell them that he’s in a good place and that he’s on a baseball team.

Dan decided to leave his plumbing job and become a schoolteacher after Joel died. It’s hard, he said, to teach children who are the same age Joel would be, doing things he never will.

“It’s just seeing the kids grow up,” Dan said. “It’s seeing them at the dances, the girls they like. . . . All the things he missed out on.”

They hope the video will be part of Joel’s legacy. It still runs during the rainy season on cable access TV.

At the dedication, nearly two years after Joel’s death, his dad read a poem he had written. It was called “The Bridge Builder.”

In it, a man struggles across a river, and then goes back to struggle at putting together a bridge. Why, someone asks, would he bother when he already made it across. For those who come after, he responds.

That, the Burchfields say, is how they think of their duty to Joel.

“I am absolutely sure the bridge has saved lives,” Laura Burchfield said.

But, that doesn’t make it any easier for her to cross.