Where shopping carts spawn
WE GATHERED AT THE RIVER. JUST US, THE BIRDS, A few poor people with no place else to lie down, a poet and all those tons of concrete.
This was the Los Angeles River, the tattered ribbon of embattled nature that trails through the middle of North America’s most notorious urban sprawl. There were about 30 of us, mostly professional nature-tenders on a field trip from a National Park Service conference downtown. There were no baptisms.
There was plenty of talk about redemption.
“I’m fascinated,” said U.S. Forest Service fisheries biologist Rebecca D.G. Wassell, “by projects that take creeks that have been made into ditches or culverts, and make them into creeks again.”
She and the other nature-tenders had abandoned their posts in America’s canyons and forests to be here on this late November afternoon. Now they filed out of the bus, stepped through a handsome gate, admired a bicycle bridge that opened last year and stood squinting in the sun along an unlovely concrete shoulder of the channel. Here was the Grand Canyon’s top dog, Supt. Joe Alston, gazing thoughtfully upon our sewage and graffiti. And here was Wassell, whispering:
“I didn’t realize there was so much concrete.”
A few years ago, the Trust for Public Land did a study and found that the biggest U.S. cities average about 16 acres of open space per 1,000 residents. Los Angeles’ acreage, however, was closer to 8. In the same study’s 55-city analysis of spending on parks, Los Angeles ranked 48th.
Yet here stood parks people from across the land on the banks of our river, delicately sidestepping the bedraggled pair of people apparently living in the bushes. The theme of the parks meeting was partnership, and the more they heard about our little 51-mile ditch’s circumstances, the more sense it made to be here.
The day’s adventures had begun at the convention center downtown, where the out-of-towners piled into a bus. As we rumbled through Little Tokyo and across the 4th Street bridge into Boyle Heights, Park Service planner Peg Henderson ran down a brief history.
Until Depression-era flooding killed scores of people and the Army Corps of Engineers in 1938 began confining the currents within ton upon ton of concrete channel, she explained, it wriggled freely, sometimes a mile wide.
Then came the concrete banks, straightening and quickening a flow that falls, one way or another, under the purview of more than a dozen overlapping local, state and federal agencies.
When it’s not raining, most of the flow is effluent that’s been through tertiary treatment. But in a storm, anything can end up in the soup. And every time somebody lays down more blacktop within the river’s 870-square-mile watershed, the ground absorbs a little less and the channel catches a little more.
When he founded Friends of the Los Angeles River in 1986, poet and activist Lewis MacAdams told the group, “I thought the basic task was to convince people how much better the river could be. But then I realized: I first had to convince people that there was a river.”
After more than a decade of partner-courting, press-wooing, deal-making and politician-pressuring by MacAdams and hundreds of other individuals and groups, more than $50 million in public funds (mostly state money) has been spent on river improvements, half a dozen substantial projects are in the works and the route between Glendale and downtown Los Angeles is fringed with trails and patches of parkland, most notably the fledgling Cornfield and Taylor Yard state parks, but also the handsome gate the visitors just strolled through.
Meanwhile, MacAdams has published two books of “The River,” which he sees as a five-volume cycle, following the structure of “Paterson,” a gritty municipal epic published by New Jersey’s William Carlos Williams in the 1940s and ‘50s. But MacAdams’ fondest river dream, he says, is wordless. He merely wants to glance down one day and see a steelhead trout, a fish last spotted in the river in 1940.
You never know.
“Mallards!” said Chris Goetze, a Moab-based cultural resource program manager for the Park Service, pointing out a clutch of ducks. A moment later, Goetze sighted a flock of rock doves, and then a great egret.
Startlingly white amid so much gray, the egret looked up as if from a nap, rearranged its long limbs and hopped in a flutter of wings to a new rock, where it folded up again.
Just think how many more plants and animals would flourish, the green people say, if we subtracted a few tons of concrete. But plenty of engineers aren’t in any hurry to make the city more vulnerable to floods. The next 20 years -- during which officials say the channel is due for some kind of updating -- will tell.
On the bus ride back downtown, some of the out-of-towners despaired that through all these decades, nobody’s been able to find and sell a better solution than all that concrete. Bobbi Reichtell, development officer for Slavic Village in downtown Cleveland, explained why she saw the channel half full. “No matter how hard you try to kill that green stuff,” she said, “it keeps coming back.”
To live near this river and stay sane, you have to see it Reichtell’s way. I went back to the riverside a day later and spotted a few more egrets, a few cyclists, a couple on horseback.
Then I tried the next step: to hear that whoosh of freeway traffic as water, racing over rocks; to see those shadows in the shallows as steelhead. That I couldn’t do, and I wouldn’t count on a politician or a park superintendent for that either. That’s why we need poets.
To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous West Wild columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.
