Quixotic Writer Bags His Prey at L.A. River Cleanup

They taunt him from the trees, those “flapping, smart-alecky” plastic bags.

“There’s something about them that just makes me mad,” says writer Ian Frazier. “They think they are exempt, that no one can get them.”

So instead of spending his free time--as he once did--shooting guns and drinking, or whacking golf balls at passing boats in the East River, Frazier has launched a quest to clean the trees.

He and his friend Tim McClelland invented and patented the Bag Snagger to grab airborne litter caught in high branches. It’s something of a grappling hook on a long pole, with which they have cruised New York City for the last several years goring their smug little enemies and ripping them down from their perches.

“To me, the upper reaches of a tree are a romantic place,” he said. “Just getting one bag out that might never have been caught is very satisfying.”

On Friday, Frazier picked perhaps his biggest battle. The 50-year-old New Jersey resident brought his snagger to a place where bags own the trees, where they sneer at cleanup crews every year, where they are as entangled and intractable as gum in a dreadlock.

Yes, the Los Angeles River was a whole new challenge for the quixotic writer, known for his humorist musings in the New Yorker and Outside magazine. And yes, the river does have trees.

Under the Fletcher Street Bridge near Glendale, Frazier trudged through what one observer aptly described as a “hobo jungle.” He picked away at ragged scraps of plastic that seemed perfectly adapted to defy his invention. Indeed, Frazier may have done better grabbing lizards by the tail, as each bag came apart in worthless shreds.

“It’s splendidly futile,” he conceded. “But everything we do has some level of futility.”

He’s dealt with this issue before.

One time, as Frazier struggled to extricate a hopelessly ensnared bag from a tree in Brooklyn, a jogger watched for a while and remarked: “That’s a lot of trouble to go through for just one bag.”

Frazier’s response: “Is it more pointless than running in a big circle back to your apartment?”

He and his buddies have confronted many obstacles, from questioning city workers to gawking onlookers to residents of a housing project who dumped Chinese noodles on them as they picked underwear out of a tree.

There is a Zen-like sense one gets snagging trash, he says. Each plastic bag poses a simple challenge to overcome, to focus your mind on. It’s the type of everyday meditation that one gets while fishing, or gapping a sparkplug or edging a lawn. “You concentrate on the problem and solve it,” he said.

Plus, it gives the thrill of, say, vandalizing boats with golf balls, while actually doing some good.

The author’s obsession even inspired a character in the Harvey Keitel movie “Smoke” who travels around Brooklyn menacingly announcing to bags: “You’re coming down, pal.”

Coming from the East Coast, where rivers are rivers, Frazier was oddly inspired by the L.A. River, a concrete channel where his dad once came from Ohio to test cars when it was dry.

Frazier was invited to the Friends of the Los Angeles River’s annual cleanup on Friday by the group’s co-founder, Lewis MacAdams, an equally quixotic person who envisioned a revived river when most people thought it was a massive gutter. About 80 people volunteered for the cleanup on Friday and more are expected today.

MacAdams had read about Frazier’s invention, which is now produced by a company in Santa Ana, and thought the event would be a good way to demonstrate its merits.

Frazier’s other friend and business partner, Bill McClelland, came as well, and quickly realized that the tool worked better on the tall trees of New York than in the thickets of willows and sycamores in the L.A. River.

“This is really grim,” he said, pointing at trees that looked as if kids had toilet-papered them with plastic.

As helicopters throbbed and trucks groaned, he said he had not quite come to grips with our great watercourse.

“I was like everyone else who didn’t even know there was a Los Angeles River,” he said. “And I’m still not so sure.”

Toiling under a layer of sweat and bugs, he made some headway, filling up a trash sack. He says that their company is starting to get orders for the snaggers and that others have joined their efforts to rid the trees of these neglected nuisances.

“We’re a multihundred-dollar company now,” he deadpanned.

For all three partners--Bill’s brother Tim could not make it to L.A.--the goal is not money, but something more vindictive.

“It’s amazing how these bags find this environment, how they survive for years in it, how they have this life span,” said Frazier. “We’ve created these little demons and we’re going to get them.”