LOS 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/08/national/08RIVE.html?ex=1071927326&ei=1&en=607e74fcd22ca431---------------------------------
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