Quixotic River Activist Savors Major Victory

The day after a major decision to halt the flow of trash into the Los Angeles River, Lewis MacAdams headed down between the downpours to the spot where he first saw a bit of nature in the industrial wastes more than 15 years ago.

In those days, the poet was one of the river’s few advocates, the spokesman for a joke, really. Those who knew that the river existed generally thought it was a giant gutter, as artificial as the Long Beach Freeway. MacAdams once did a performance art piece about the river that was so poorly received his girlfriend left him and the theater refused to pay.

But in the last decade his vision has percolated into the city’s consciousness. Parks are emerging along the banks, as politicians and fellow environmentalists take up the cause to make the 51-mile river something people can do more than laugh at.

To MacAdams, who founded Friends of the Los Angeles River and remains chairman of the board, nothing reflects the change more than the Regional Water Quality Control Board’s decision Thursday night. After nine hours of testimony, the board adopted a plan that will force cities and the county to spend what could be more than a billion dollars to stop litter going into the river.

“This is historic,” he said. “Ten years ago, we couldn’t even get people to admit it was a river. And now we get a unanimous decision.”

The trash problem so vigorously discussed in a wood-paneled boardroom is strikingly real at this spot just north of the Pasadena Freeway. A doomsday environmentalist could not overstate it.

The trees seem to be sprouting Vons bags instead of leaves. A pool swirls around a fetid couch. A plastic Sprite bottle races the ducks south in the turbid current.

MacAdams, who is now 56, first trekked to this spot with three friends on a hot day in 1985. As part of another performance art piece, which no one but them would see, they clipped a hole in a chain link fence by the 1st Street Bridge and began following the concrete channel north.

The scene he encountered was an urban hell, so unholy it was almost beautiful. “It was an awesome concrete scape,” he said. Railroad cars clattered above. Traffic from several freeways sighed and groaned. The din filled a chaos of warehouses, switching yards, graffiti-tagged bridges and raw sunlight.

At the place where the Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola camped on a lush bank in 1769, the river was just a trickle in the low-flow slot.

They reached the end of the concrete bottom at dusk; the Army Corps of Engineers did not pave this stretch, unlike most of the river, because the water table was too close to the surface.

Surprisingly, the group found some willows and reeds swaying in the current. Swifts dove after gnats and pools had formed around rocks that had rolled down from the mountains.

“There was a sense that we got to life after all that death,” he said.

MacAdams realized the waterway, at its heart, was actually a river, and Friends of the Los Angeles River was born.

“There is no question that if not for Lewis MacAdams there would not be the renaissance going on on the river today. Period,” said Joe Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, which has been building parks along the river.

A west Texas native with strong hippie credentials, MacAdams was an unlikely candidate to guide public policy in Los Angeles. Just five years before, he was living in the rugged Northern California coast town of Bolinas, where he held the popular opinion that L.A. was nothing more than a profligate, sun-stroked sprawl.

“My only experience with people in L.A. was reading Herb Caen’s columns that they wear white shoes down there,” he said.

He had spent the late 1970s writing poems, digging ditches and chasing a woman he was infatuated with to Paris. But he had also been fascinated by politics since his days at Princeton. In Bolinas, he was elected to the board of the Public Utility District, where he worked to slow growth in the rural area. But he wanted to write screenplays, as well as articles for a Venice magazine called Wet. He reluctantly moved south with $200 in his pocket.

The screenplays never made it to film, but his articles gained him a little notoriety. He wrote a story of three Buddhist monks taking three steps and a bow all the way up the state, and a profile of an artist who had sex with a corpse as a performance piece.

“That got us both in trouble,” he said. “Somehow, people identified me as if I was the one doing it.”

Inspired by the ecological passion of his friend, legendary beat poet Gary Snyder, MacAdams began focusing his art on the river. And even today, while Friends of the River takes on more scientific, litigious and political endeavors, MacAdams wants to keep the group true to the poetic vision.

To him, the river has personality--both sadness and humor. The sadness is what struck him when he first saw the bleak channel, waiting for a bus near skid row after working construction all day. But to see its smile you have to look deeper.

He writes: The river is a rigorous mistress. But if you tickle her with your deeds, you can hear her laughing beneath her concrete corset.

Laughing now, as the city realizes it may have been overzealous in conquering her tempestuous ways. But in the end, laughing because she has been around for thousands of years and will outlast the humans who have channeled her.

Other leaders of Friends of the River, of which there are and have been many, see it more as a traditional environmental cause.

“Most people in FOLAR roll their eyes when I start talking about the river as performance,” said MacAdams.

The once-fringe group is closer to the mainstream these days, though some say the river has simply moved to the mainstream.

Many people have joined the river effort and were instrumental at pushing the cause. And certain news events, like then-Assemblyman Richard Katz in 1989 proposing to build a freeway in the river, helped rally the forces to restore it.

But with so many big-budget groups, from the Sierra Club to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, now weighing in on the fate of the river, the group that was once a ragtag band of artists is reassessing its position.

“The hardest thing for me is figuring out where I fit into all of this,” said MacAdams.

Living in a rambling house on a hillside in Silver Lake, MacAdams is a husband and father of two young kids. He coaches their soccer, football and basketball games and just finished writing a book, published by Simon & Schuster, about the genesis of the concept of “cool.”

Esther Feldman, a former county planning commissioner, was inspired by MacAdams on a walk along the river in the early 1990s, when she was working for a branch of the conservancy. A tenacious activist, Feldman took his vision and ran with it, helped build one of the first new parks on the river four years ago. When she later went to work for the Trust for Public Land, she carried the cause to that group, which also started developing river projects.

In MacAdams, she sees intelligence and grace. “Even when you terribly disagree with him, he keeps a level of civility that is rare in environmental arenas,” she says.

And Friends of the River have certainly had their critics. Cities in southeast Los Angeles County, where flooding is a serious concern, have been resentful of the group’s strong advocacy of tearing down the concrete banks.

Those issues have largely cooled down, as the prospect of altering the banks has taken a back seat to building parks along the levees. But MacAdams’ eyes are still focused on that distant goal.

After all, despite MacAdams’ vision to see a river with promenades and ponds, green banks and a section where the water meanders through willows and alders, the river is still much like it was back in 1985.

On this gloomy Friday at the spot above the Pasadena Freeway, the river certainly does not seem to be laughing. The water is brown and rushing unnaturally fast in its straight channel.

There is so much urban refuse that it is interesting just to pick through: some crime scene tape, a sink, an old skateboard, red overalls, a baby bottle, a brick smoothed to a ball by the distance it rolled. Over the years around here, clean-up crews have found a hot tub, a Santeria sword and a skull.

Grocery carts are often so embedded in the detritus that they cannot be extracted by hand. Bags are so high in the trees--from the floods that raise the river several stories--that volunteers need long fruit pickers to grab them.

The trash collects along this eight-mile stretch from Burbank through Los Feliz because there are trees to snag it. This slice of nature has along way to go.

“My goal is to see the steelhead trout return to the L.A. River,” MacAdams said. “That’s the challenge we have not stepped up to yet: How do we take out the concrete so the steelhead can run?”