Introduction
Los Angeles basin and hill slopes / Checkered with streetways. Floral loops / Of the freeway express and exchange. —Gary Snyder
We can’t find L.A.’s major waterway, which sustained L.A. for 150 years and now runs under ten gridlocked freeways through the heart of L.A. County. A fifty-one-mile river in plain sight: lost. —Jennifer Price
It’s virtually empty. Sun blazes off its ugly concrete banks. Where the banks are earthen, they are parched and choked with weeds.
—Robert Towne
… I have been a stranger in a strange land. —Exodus 2:22
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All streams are unique but not all are strange. The L.A. River qualifies for the “strange” category on several counts. First, it both does and does not exist, depending on whom you ask, when you ask, and how the person you ask defines the word “river.” When it does exist, it runs through the middle of a major metropolitan region, physically there for all to see and yet singularly consigned to the shadows of custom and collective consciousness. To some who grew up in L.A. in the twentieth century, the river was a place to play. For fishermen, even today, it is a place of sport (and, in some cases, supper). Even so, innumerable residents, when confronted with information of its whereabouts, will say, with a lot of skepticism and a little curiosity, “There’s a river in L.A.?”
Second, for those who have seen it, the river’s physical traits make it seem more of an engineering feat than a natural phenomenon, due in no small part to the urban and suburban environments through which it runs. Set amid surface streets and freeways, its bed and banks mostly concrete, the stark nature of the river renders it an alien (and alienating) artifice, a fabrication draining an unreal watershed. And along with being a result of human ingenuity and manufactory, the L.A. River for ages has done its thing in a semi-arid climate, resulting in an intermittent flow dependent upon seasonal conditions. Nowadays, when not transformed into an unimaginably fierce flood during winter storms, the waters of the L.A. River are usually a trickle consisting of output from treatment plants and runoff imported from faraway sources. Simultaneously artificial and natural, a hard fact in concrete and an urban legend, the river bears the weirdest of waters.
Curious about all that, I designed an experiment to help me understand some of the many manifestations and meanings of the river’s strange waters. The project began around 2010. I was, at that time, a complete stranger to Los Angeles, never having been there before and never really having wanted to visit. Attracted more to the forests and fertile watersheds of the Great Lakes region where I grew up and now work, I associated L.A. with inexorable “development,” flimsy newness, alternating waves of industrial smog and post-industrial glitz. Oddly enough (at least nowadays, though quite common in pre-modern times), the river drew me to the place. And, perhaps just as odd, literature brought me to the river.
I had already written and taught about rivers in U.S. culture, and as I continued to think about the subject, I revisited the film Chinatown and its tangled story of water and power in Los Angeles, which led me to an eye-opening essay on urban nature that featured outings on the Los Angeles River, and then to a poem on the ghostly nature of the stream as it courses through the Los Angeles Basin. To see firsthand why different aspects of the river had caught the attention of assorted artists, I made my first visit to L.A., and as I stood on the concrete bed, in the empty, sun-saturated silence, alone in the middle of one of the busiest metropolises in the world, I too was hooked.
From that moment, the project followed two main channels of exploration, textual scholarship and fieldwork. For the former, I broadened the definition of “text” to encompass all sorts of literary expression: maps, songs, movies, murder mysteries, history, philosophy, engineering reports, anthropology, geographical articles, governmental decrees and proposals, etc. The fieldwork, while including interviews with interested parties, mostly involved spending time on the river, in its bed, along its banks, in its water, crisscrossing its course, either alone or in the company of authorities, friends, family, and paddlers. By these various means, I set out to understand the river, to bring its exceptional nature to light.
As I began publishing results of the research, mostly in academic venues, it became clear that ultimately a strange river required a strange book. Eventually, I found it necessary to add a third thread—imaginative expression—to the scholarship + fieldwork approach. Thus you will find in the pages that follow an unusual assortment of bedfellows: natural history, cultural history, textual study, interviews, field research (on foot, by car, on bike, in kayak), fiction, film and video, poetry, pencil sketches, music, creative nonfiction, photography, sound recordings, Lego blocks, treasure maps... I have arranged this experimental assortment into three volumes, which is to say that Strange Waters in its current format is actually three books in one. Each book involves a particular portion of the physical river (middle, lower, and headwaters, respectively), a corresponding genre of literature (nonfiction, fiction, poetry), and a larger thematic question (truth, paradox, home).
The story of the L.A. River begins in medias res—that is, in the stream's middle section, from the confluence with the Arroyo Seco near downtown L.A. (and the traditional site of the city’s founding) to the Glendale and Burbank reaches. Book 1, Handbook of the Middle of the River (Truth and Confluences), connects field research on confluences (where tributaries enter the river) and transition zones (where concrete bed abuts soft-bottom reaches) with nonfictional literature: histories, guidebooks, maps, firsthand accounts of the river, as well as other studies of the river’s role in Los Angeles. From the earliest written description of what the Spanish called the Porciúncula to 21st century urban nature writing, nonfiction has brought together place, people, and ideas in a meaningful but dizzying whirl. This section of the project investigates the extent to which literature might function as a conceptual mapping that helps us find “hidden” or “lost” nature, and includes my own creative nonfiction in different formats: verbal maps, charts, field-guides, reports, histories, catalogs, etc.
In Book 2, Mystery at the End of the River (Fiction and Paradox), fieldwork on the lower portion of the river merges with a study of fictional representations of the river, all woven together with a sci-fi detective story, a kind of eco-“Unsolved Mystery.” Although most fictional stories based in L.A. usually mirror the historical disregard for the river, some novels and films disrupt customary thought processes. Such texts represent a stream that does not conform to standard definitions of “river,” a phenomenon that paradoxically both is and is not a river. Considering fictional treatments of the conceptual end of the river (that is, when it ceases to be considered “a real river”) and connecting this study with fieldwork on the physical end of the river (where it enters the ocean) raises questions about the urban waterway’s odd and sometimes eerie nature.
Book 3, Songs of the River Beginning (Poetry and Home), is situated in the upper portion of the river, including its concrete beginnings in the San Fernando Valley, a remarkable soft-bottom section in Sepulveda Basin, and a sizable dam. This part of the project connects the river’s origins with a meditation on poetry. While fictional representations of the L.A. River can reveal paradoxes and nonfiction can guide readers to the heart of the river, poetic versions represent a possible reimagining of “at-homeness” in, or belonging to, a place. A number of poems regarding life in the L.A. River basin attempt to ground our ideas and nourish connections: language with locale, community with habitat, humans with watershed.
Why write (and why read) a book about an admittedly strange and, according to many, useless body of water? Keep in mind that one aspect of the L.A. River’s extraordinary nature has to do with how we think and have thought about it, how humans treat and have treated the river. If the Los Angeles “lost” its river, as Jennifer Price and other writers have suggested, perhaps it can be found (especially since it’s still there). Strange Waters experiments with the ways in which literature can change how we think about rivers, about “nature,” about thinking itself. A key premise here is that, through literary approaches to complex questions, we perhaps can discover new meanings about who we are, where we are, how we got here, and what we’re doing here.
Literature, understood in a certain light, allows us to try on unaccustomed roles and experience different ways of looking at the world. Neuroscientists, psychologists, and humanists are finding that literature can effectively “rewire” our brains and open up space for better thinking about the messes we’ve gotten ourselves into. We can reflect on stressful situations in a comparatively stress-free environment, and use these reflections as a base from which to change our responses to similar situations when we encounter them.
I am not claiming that literature has the answers to all of our problems. But literary works have a unique (one might say “strange”) ability to poke holes in our customary ways of thinking and behaving. Approached with an open mind, literature can provoke thought, kindle the will to rethink what we have done, and inspire us to imagine better courses of action. Literature does this primarily by asking questions, and questions are an effective means by which we can unsettle ourselves, reexamine the world we inhabit. “When we pry open the cracks in the concrete, we stand to encounter life itself—nothing less and nothing more, as if there could be more,” writes Jenny Odell. Nonfiction enquires into the nature of seemingly concrete truths. Fiction about L.A. asks how, under all that cement infrastructure, we can both lose and find a river. Poetry wonders if we can be at home along a concrete river. What matters most may be how we respond to such questions.