Blue Highway

Rivers surpass our simple notions of beauty. They do not simply purl and chirp while pouring between obstacles. They roar. They disobey us at every turn, especially if we try to outmuscle them with concrete or with a wooden oar.

Rivers carry everything: dead cows, shopping carts, toxic waste and the exiled mud of entire mountain ranges. They hold no judgments or biases. They will take you dead or alive, and it doesn’t matter which. They bend to every change in the land. They alter everything that they touch. It is not that they are merely metaphors for life, with their starts and endings, their places of difficult navigation, their placidity and the language of riffles, eddies and waves that rise and then fall back. They are life itself. They are irresistible.

Rivers keep their own pace and their own attitudes, no matter how you look at them--nowhere more than in Los Angeles, a seemingly riverless city, as Patt Morrison reminds us in “Rio L.A.,” to “fresh generations of Angelenos [who] discover they have a river only when they hear that someone has drowned in it.”

People and the Los Angeles River are both headstrong and quite satisfied to live without each other, but they are stuck together in their stubbornness, leaving only one option: to imagine their common fates. That is what Morrison has done so nicely, giving us not the city of L.A. and not the Los Angeles River but Rio L.A., a distinct and mercurial beast dressed in graffiti and content to keep flood managers constantly on their toes.

Like any good river, “Rio L.A.” does not have only one origin. A columnist for The Times, Morrison provides the words, and Mark Lamonica is the source of the brilliantly soiled and architected photography. Amy Inouye makes the entire thing bold with her riveting page-by-page graphic design. “Rio L.A.” allows us to see into the heart of a river famous for its indifference, its sincerity and its peculiarities. Even though natural history (sans people) shows up here and there, Morrison writes mostly about the reckless, strange and heroic deeds of river-haunted Angelenos, capturing both the sublime and the ridiculous.

During the disastrous flood of 1938--a deluge that took with it nearly 100 lives and convinced the city fathers to contain this beast in a concrete den--a prop whale, of all things, was released from the Warner Bros. movie studios and, as Morrison writes, “[f]or a brief and glorious moment, it was free, swimming majestically downriver, a trompe l’oeil Moby-Dick bound for the freedom of a real sea, not a cinematic one.” And the Academy Awards were postponed for a week, in deference to the stranded movie stars in Malibu and the Valley.

Morrison also captures the more humble poetry of the river, writing in one chapter about the improbable but magnificent bridges engineered from 1910 to the Great Depression, many by one man, Merrill Butler, who studied the bridge trade through a correspondence school and broke away from the dull blocky tradition of spanning banks with railroad trestles. He instead engineered curves and sheltering vestibules, and in less than 20 years the city had a dozen of these remarkable edifices (nine of which were authored by Butler himself, who incidentally also designed the tunnels of the Pasadena Freeway), all listed on the National Register of Historic Places. “The river is nothing,” wrote architectural historian Robert Winter, “but the bridges are sensational.”

The turning of the riverbed into concrete began in the 1930s, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers. The numbers alone were daunting: 470 miles of open channels, 2,400 miles of covered storm drains, 98,000 curbside openings, 123 debris basins, hundreds of crib dams and catchment inlets, three reservoirs, several large dams and scores of pumping stations. It cost millions then and continues to cost us now, and still we remain ambivalent about it. There was a politician who once suggested that it be painted blue so that it might look like a river, and there are always those people who wish it simply had more of a purpose.

During World War II, they thought about constructing an enclosed munitions factory in the riverbed and topping it with a motorway, always a favorite idea for traffic-jammed commuters. In the 1950s, in fact, when commuters drove it as a bypass off the Ventura and Golden State freeways, it earned the moniker, “the poor man’s freeway.” And in 1985, a hovercraft ran along its surface.

The river--as this book shows--is filled with its own incongruities, not the least of which is the fact that at its terminus “the Queen Mary, one of the grandest liners of the great age of ocean travel, is moored in concrete at the mouth of one of the world’s least navigable rivers.” And Morrison is an excellent guide to all the eccentric and poetic proposals: Her flirtatious language is neatly contained within essay-like chapters, giving the acrobatic writing a solid structure.

Lamonica’s enjoyably peculiar photographs add another dimension to the story. A mangy street cat sitting in waterside bliss, an abandoned concrete channel on which a forlorn pigeon stands as if waiting to die: Many of the photos have an enigmatic quality, images whose narratives have long been lost, like so many in Los Angeles: a hubcap among rocks, galleries of graffiti, a set of thoughtfully abandoned shoes at the concrete edge of the river, the sleek lines of bridges and a dog peering up from a garden of water-driven trash.

The result is a book that both in the construction of the story and in the visual layout conveys the narrative of a river the way few books can. If I wanted a more scientifically sturdy read, I would go to Blake Gumprecht’s “The Los Angeles River,” a mainstay resource on the topic, but, as excellent a writer as he is, Gumprecht is a human writing about a river, whereas Morrison, Lamonica and Inouye are all together more like a river re-creating a river, with its myriad eddies, rapids and dry spells woven seamlessly together. This book is an event of nature, something that goes beyond the common restrictions of literature.

In the end, though, after the jolt of photographs and arrangements has worn off, “Rio L.A.” stands on Morrison’s words alone. If you want to know about the river, there are plenty of other sources. But if you want a feel that gets under your skin, that in the end leaves you soaked with this rich, quixotic river water, this is the book.