Exhibit A for River Activists

The road to old Los Angeles passes strawberry fields and nurseries and lonely oil pumps creaking in the midday sun. The pavement turns into a sandy trail wending its way to the shade under a bridge, where two teenagers are shooting arrows at carp in the tea-colored river.

With plastic bags and brown scum collecting in the reeds, there is nothing pristine about this spot along the Rio Hondo. You’d have to travel back more than a century to find untouched wilderness in the coastal plains and valleys of Southern California. But here in the Whittier Narrows, the waters still flow through patches of nature and agriculture, along horse trails and enough flat land for almost every type of recreation.

To many, the Narrows is just a glimpse of green viewed from the Pomona Freeway--a rural anachronism in the urban sprawl. It has never gained the attention of Griffith Park or the beaches of Santa Monica.

But for generations of Eastside and San Gabriel Valley residents, the Whittier Narrows is the outdoors. Now, as conservationists and politicians focus attention on creating more urban park space--especially along watercourses such as the Los Angeles River--the Narrows provides the outstanding example of the benefits of vision and the price of neglect.

“What we have here--this trail system and rural atmosphere--is really what people are trying to create on the L.A. River,” said Ken Manning, president of the Upper San Gabriel Water District, which is hoping to build a new interpretive center for the Narrows. “We don’t have to tear down any concrete.”

Yet the area has largely been overlooked in the debate about restoring urban open space. Many speculate that this is because its two rivers do not flow through the city of Los Angeles--the mythical heart of the region--but through dozens of cities with no collective clout.

To Victor Valle, a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo professor who has written about the Narrows, the area has been marginalized partially because its constituency has been primarily Latino, working class and less politically connected. “If you are looking for a center point of the Latino community, this is it,” he said.

Whereas conservationists recently established a posh new $5.7-million Los Angeles River Center and Gardens in Cypress Park, the Narrows headquarters lies in a dim old barracks with some stuffed mammals and a few living reptiles, fish and spiders. And though environmentalists have fought hard to create a park on an abandoned railroad yard near downtown Los Angeles called the Cornfield, they have waged no equal fight to save or connect remaining space along the San Gabriel River.

“The uses we see being made of the Whittier Narrows are some of the same uses we would imagine for the Cornfield,” said Les Howard, a professor of sociology at Whittier College.

With 1,500 acres, the Narrows is a geographical quirk in the flats of Los Angeles County: a funnel of green where the usual street grid is wrung out like a rag between the Puente and Montebello hills. The Narrows sits in one of the Southland’s most polyglot areas and at the heart of the region’s Chinese population, bordered by the densely packed neighborhoods of South El Monte, Montebello, Pico Rivera and Rosemead.

“A lot of these people live in apartment buildings and don’t even have a frontyard,” said David Jallo, a regional parks superintendent for the county. “You have to have somewhere to unwind. These folks probably need this place more than any others.”

The area serves many needs. Among the stands of trees nourished by both the San Gabriel River and the Rio Hondo--which are not encased in concrete here--you can sunbathe at an inland beach, shoot a shotgun, picnic, fly a model airplane, ride on a BMX bike track, watch ranchera concerts and rodeos, and play soccer, tennis and golf.

The water may not be crystal clear, but these are not the giant gutters we’ve come to accept as rivers in Los Angeles.

Socorro Castillano brought her third-grade class from Rosemead this spring for a nature tour, after a disappointing field trip to the Angeles National Forest. “They didn’t have the variety there,” she said. “It’s excellent here because it’s right in town and it has all the city wildlife we have studied.”

At the Narrows, her students gaped in awe as an osprey dove for fish in a 20-acre lake. They took a hayride and learned mind-boggling facts from the county docent: “If you all had the vision of a great horned owl, your eyes would be as big as oranges.”

“Woh!” they gasped as they clutched their mouths.

About 1.8 million visitors come to the county-run Whittier Narrows Recreation Area every year, though it is no tourist destination. With a dearth of parks and yards in some of the communities nearby, families often come to celebrate birthdays, weddings and quinceaneras.

As a relief valve for the lack of green space that politicians and activists are increasingly ruing, one would expect the Narrows to be in vogue.

But it is decidedly not so. Which is part of its appeal.

Marie Love rides her horse with the reins in one hand and a Bud Light in another. She just got laid off from HomeBase and doesn’t have a telephone, but she says she will somehow keep her 17-year-old horse, Doc, at the Narrows’ stables. She calls herself and other equestrians at the Narrows “backyard horse people,” because they don’t have money to buy real horse property.

“Down here is the only place backyard horse people can afford,” she said. Many nearby stables have closed.

A resident of Downey who first has to jump on the boxy hood of her 1973 Ford Ranchero to mount Doc, Love regularly rides down to the San Gabriel River, along the gravelly riverbed, through thickets of bamboo and pits of “sucker” mud, occasionally into deep currents.

“It’s a real river,” she said. “A couple of horses drowned out there recently.”

The county created the recreation area as something of an afterthought.

In 1938, devastating floods along the 29-mile San Gabriel, which flows from the San Gabriel Mountains north of Azusa to Long Beach, prompted calls for controlling the watercourse. But when the federal government revived plans for a dam and reservoir at the Narrows, locals in El Monte and surrounding areas fought it vehemently.

The alluvium, after all, provided one of the most fertile agricultural swaths of the county, with English walnut groves, fruit orchards and truck farms irrigated by the two rivers.

The Narrows also had a rich history as the birthplace of European civilization in the Los Angeles region. The Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola camped on the lush river banks here in 1769, and two years later missionaries and Indians built the original San Gabriel Mission along the Rio Hondo.

The anti-dam movement eventually lost out, though a compromise brokered by then-Rep. Richard Nixon saved the area from inundation and allowed it to be used for recreation. Many people, including residents of several local barrios, were moved out by 1950, when the Army Corps of Engineers began constructing the dam.

The rivers were loosely channelized, meaning no concrete, and connected so that flood water from the San Gabriel would be diverted to the Rio Hondo and then whisked down to its outflow in the Los Angeles River. The recreation area, managed by the county on land leased from the corps, was established in 1957. The Narrows is protected from development, though surrounding open space is not, and portions of the area remain laced with utilities, freeways, agriculture and oil production.

“It’s an ambiguous place,” said Valle, the Cal Poly professor. “You see its problems, but it has life.”

He said the people who enjoy the atmosphere of the Narrows--suffused with the ever-present sigh of the Pomona Freeway, the twizzling of power lines and the intermittent pop of the shotgun range--see nature more as a process than a work of art. There is little notion here that a landscape is unredeemably tainted by roads, high-tension lines or nonnative plants--as is felt in some environmental circles, he said.

It is simply a place to be outside with family and friends. And the weedy, decentralized hodgepodge of the Narrows allows people to find what they want--even to be nostalgic for their homelands. “Even though it doesn’t look exactly like the Mekong Delta or the Rio Lerma in Mexico, there’s enough there to find a familiarity with the landscape they left,” Valle said.

But if the Narrows lacks popular identity, it’s partly because it has no main entrance and each part seems disconnected from the rest. Unlike Central Park or Griffith Park, the acreage is bisected by roads and freeways, leaving the sports fields in one quadrant, the fishing at Legg Lake, which is stocked with trout, in another, and so on. By the time you navigate the sometimes vexing geography, you might feel that the golf course is miles from the nature reserve. (Coyotes and raccoons know otherwise.)

Valle grew up in Whittier and often went with his family to a place on the Rio Hondo dubbed Marrano Beach, or hog beach. Others called it Malaria Malibu. “It’s Chicano humor,” said Valle. “We didn’t have Huntington Beach. This was the playa de los pobres”--the beach of the poor.

“It always felt like you were going somewhere a little exotic,” he said. Though it is not quite the destination it once was, the beach still draws people.

Josh Ramirez, 17, and his best buddy, Danny Avila, 18, cut school one recent day to kick back in the sun and fish with bows and arrows. From their crowded neighborhood in South El Monte, they bicycled to a secluded spot among the willows where the water swirled into an eddy about four feet deep.

The modern day Huck Finns had fashioned their own cheap bows, knowing the weapons would be confiscated if they were caught fishing this way, and without a license.

No worries this time. A ranger never spotted them.

On other days, the two get groups of friends and shoot paint balls at each other in the tangled growth or ride their bikes on the BMX track.

“This is why I like South El Monte. You have horseback riding, you can bike and fish,” said Ramirez, whose father and grandmother came to Marrano Beach when they were children. But looking at the seemingly endless flotsam of litter, he added: “We don’t eat the fish, because it’s contaminated.”

Local activists hope that a new state agency, the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, will bring more money to acquire, clean and maintain parkland on the rivers.

Rep. Hilda Solis (D-El Monte), who grew up in La Puente, is working to get federal money for the area. “Everyone looks at the beaches at Malibu,” she said. “The Whittier Narrows deserves that kind of attention.”

Marrano Beach was officially designated a park--grandly called the Bosque del Rio Hondo, or Forest of the Rio Hondo--in 1997 by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy with the help of county Supervisor Gloria Molina.

Molina says she hopes to complete more projects in the area as the county Department of Parks and Recreation devises a new plan to improve the Narrows. “It’s the only space like this around here, really,” she said. “I even drove by on Christmas morning last year and it was wall to wall with people.”

And if you’re looking out your passenger window as you descend from the Montebello Hills on the Pomona Freeway, you might notice something else: men in orange glasses shooting at you. If they had rifles, you might be dead. But only shotguns are allowed at the Triple B Clays Shotgun Sports Park, and the pellets don’t travel far enough to do any damage.

On weekends the shooters are lined up 300 yards away, blasting away in one another’s direction.

No one gets hurt.

“For our insurance premiums, we’re 16 times safer than golf,” said Bruce Barsotti, who bought the range two years ago.

Barsotti said the Triple B is the largest shotgun range on the West Coast, last year dispensing 5.5 million clay targets. At the shooters’ clubhouse the clientele is more upper-crust than at the equestrian center or the picnic grounds at Legg Lake. They smoke cigars, wear khakis and sip strictly nonalcoholic drinks.

Mike Yashiro, 57, drives to the range from Laguna Hills almost every day. He whips off the San Gabriel River Freeway, unloads his $25,000 Italian-made shotgun from his white Lexus and begins blasting skeet. Shooting Olympic-style, he holds the 12-gauge gun at his hip until the orange clay is soaring. Bam! The skeet explodes in shards.

“I used to sail, but I sold my boat,” he said. “Now I do this. It’s more challenging.”

Fred Lohman gets his relaxation just across the freeway, flying his two-stroke, remote-control plane and talking shop with the other pilots. The smog, the noise, the trucks groaning and downshifting, the little planes crashing on the lawn--none of it fazes the 62-year-old restaurant owner from West Covina.

“It’s not even there,” he said. “When you’re out here, you forget about the world.”

*

For a further look at the Whittier Narrows and the people who enjoy its surroundings, see a video on The Times’ Web site. Go to https://latimes.com/narrows