»A river runs through it.

The concrete-clad Los Angeles River, ever-unappreciated and oft-forgotten, comes vividly to life in this journal entry. Post-moden historian Mike Davis wrote in his 1998 Ecology of Fear about the flood that caused Angelenos, always water-crazed, to shy from this natural river.
It looks very different in the movies.
Quoth Mike Davis in The Ecology of Fear:

... the Los Angeles River -- growing from a sluggish stream to a storm-fed torren equivalent in volume to the undammed Colorado -- has been known to increase its flor three-thousand-fold in a single 24-hour period. Local erosion and sedimentation rates also acceleratae explosively. Fluvial environments in the Mediterranean Basin behave in the same way.

December 8, 2003
LOS ANGELES JOURNAL

Los Angeles by Kayak: Vistas of Concrete Banks
By CHARLIE LeDUFF

OS ANGELES, Dec. 5 — The Los Angeles River is a river denied, dismissed, diverted. It stretches 51 miles from its official beginning behind the bleachers of Canoga Park High School in the San Fernando Valley to its mouth at the Long Beach Harbor. It is often hidden from view by barbed wire, cinder blocks, hurricane fencing and poisonous oleander bush. By unofficial count, the river is crossed by more than 100 bridges and 12 freeways.
So subdued is the river that some maps do not acknowledge it. Rand McNally describes it as dry.
This is untrue. About 80 million gallons a day flow along its channeled, concrete-lined banks in the dry season, fed by the sewage treatment plant near the Sepulveda Dam, a few miles from the high school, and street runoff. In the dry season, it is 18 inches at its deepest point. In places where the water is a steady trickle on bare concrete, it looks like a broken urinal.
The Los Angeles River has appeared in movies as a setting for car chases. Some have suggested turning the riverbed into a freeway. Someone wanted to paint the concrete blue, to make it look more like a river. Little ever comes of such proposals. It is a glorified trench.
But to travel down it — not walking on its banks but afloat, in a kayak, as it lurches in successive straightaways to the sea — is to see the Los Angeles River as something else. It is still a sump trench, but it is also an uncharted adventure, and at rare times it looks and acts like something living.
The river is where shopping carts go to die. It collects dead animals along its banks. It accumulates light bulbs, motors, couches and other effluence of affluence. The Los Angeles County Department of Watershed Management says it is also full of invisible detritus: ammonia, a number of metals, petroleum, coliform, chlorpyrifos as well as other pesticides and volatile organics. The water makes one itch in odd places.
When flood season comes — it is nearly here — the river is fed by no fewer than seven tributaries from mountain ranges. At this time, the river becomes a torrent, as deep as 10 feet, and claims its rightful attention. People invariably drown in it this time of year. They are children and bums mostly. Occasionally, a thrill seeker rides the rapids in his kayak, the Los Angeles equivalent of Niagara Falls in a barrel.
"It will never be an East Coast river," said Vik Bapna, a watershed manager for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works, who says that one day the garbage will disappear, the concrete will be gone and natural wildlife will return to the banks of the Los Angeles River and more parks will appear on its banks.
"It's not going to happen in two years," he said. "It probably won't happen in 20, but there is some point in the future things are going to change."
Because of the physical and environmental hazards, recreation on the river is highly discouraged. A reporter, paddling and dragging his vessel through water and muck, was discovered and expelled before reaching the ocean.
The river, sheathed in concrete after the flood of 1938, which killed 87 people, still looks like a river in a few places. Near the Sepulveda Dam, with a string of ponds, the river is home to much water fowl. About 10 miles downriver are the Glendale Narrows, where the riverbed is left to nature and plant life grows from the bed. But the trees, reeds and filth that collect here make this section unnavigable and smelly.
Amphibians live here. They are heard in the darkness when the traffic thins. A homeless man is singing Christmas carols, and listening to him, one notices the sky. At moments like this, the river feels like a river.
Around sundown, Tom Webber and his mother, Lorraine, were bird-watching at the Narrows from a bicycle path that abuts the freeway. Mr. Webber, a 51-year-old biologist, says there are more birds now than when he was a child because there is more water from the sewage plant. But then he stared at the hillside, covered in new houses.
"It's sad to see it all get chewed away," he said glumly. "That's the story of L.A."
In the morning, the glaze-eyed commuter will notice the kayaker and applaud his sense of adventure. Downtown, just south of the Hollywood Freeway, Esmerido Zamora lives on the river in a shelf cut into its banks. His shanty is a homey little affair made of wood, piping and tarpaulin, and it is topped off with an American flag.
Mr. Zamora, 60, is a short man with the build and look of a military officer, which he once was, in Castro's army, with whiskers, eye glasses, clean neck and clean clothes all washed in the river water.
He waves two boaters onto shore and offers a breakfast of homemade bean soup and buttered bread.
"Jesus is coming," Mr. Zamora says after pleasantries are exchanged. Consider, he says, the great fire that recently consumed much of Southern California. The freak hailstorm in Watts. The impending mudslides. The Pacific rains when the river becomes a tempest.
"Man thinks he can control nature," he said, tossing a thumb toward the river. "He cannot."
A society of transients lives on the riverbanks, and they tend to be cleaner and more self-sufficient than the run-of-the-mill mopes on Main Street. The authorities pay them little mind, except when there is a killing. Last month, a woman was found in a drainpipe, raped and stabbed with a screwdriver. A few months before that, another woman was found in a plastic bag.
"Except for that, it's peaceful around here," Mr. Zamora said. He arranges a beer party and makes his visitors promise to come.
It is a dreary paddle down river. Miles of graffiti. Kids drinking malt liquor. Men waving from the weeds.
But once in Long Beach, the river actually looks something like a river. The banks are mud, not concrete. There are plants and plenty of birds, like egrets and pipers. The highway cannot be seen. And then the port of Long Beach comes into view, with the tankers and oil slicks, and one realizes the river can never go back.

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