Preface to Book 1
I first came to Los Angeles to find the river. Glimpses of it in literature and film had made me curious—what kind of river could that possibly be? Where is it? What is it really like? Why is it like that? Because of my professional training as a scholar, I began to address these questions through textual research into the physical nature of the river and the cultural history surrounding it, from eighteenth-century Spanish records of its “discovery” to twenty-first century music videos filmed on its concrete bed. The more I learned, the stranger the river became. Throughout that long history, it had meant radically different things to different people, and nowadays it meant next to nothing. What, I wondered, was the truth?Los Angeles has complexities not always found in other cities; it does not yield to analysis easily, even to those who have lived there for many years.
—John L. Chapman
The coastal plains are broken, here and there, by branches of the Sierra Madre range and by three of the driest rivers in America: the Los Angeles, the San Gabriel, and the Santa Ana. It was surely of these rivers that Mark Twain spoke when he said that he had fallen into a California river and “come out all dusty.”
—Carey McWilliams
Although the degradation of urban rivers is an old and familiar story, the destruction of the Los Angeles River is in many ways unique in North America because of the very different native character of the stream and the ways in which Euro-American settlers, their ideas about rivers shaped by waterways that had deep channels and carried abundant water year-round, reacted to it. —Blake Gumprecht
Confluence zones are of particular importance for the in-stream and floodplain ecology of large rivers that have been channelized and simplified for navigation, flood control and other purposes.
—Rice, Kiffney, Greene, & Pess
And how might a stranger to Los Angeles find the truth? To “find” something, especially a place, we often consult maps. In the case of the L.A. River, however, I learned that maps can be hit and miss, because many of them omit the river from their data frame. To get to the bottom of things, I supplemented cartographic versions of Los Angeles with historical accounts and other fact-based literature, attempting to assemble as large a context and as true a picture of the river as possible. Eventually, these efforts revealed as much about nonfiction literature as about the river and its whereabouts. For much of the last two centuries, nonfictional, fact-based, “true” writing about Los Angeles, attempting to provide either literal or metaphorical maps of the place, left the river out of the picture. Because of this, because the omission of the river told a story about its meaning in L.A., the study of nonfiction helped me get a sense of where the river might be, and why, for many people, it wasn’t anywhere. Equipped with bits and bytes of textual information, I set out on a series of reconnaissance missions to see the river firsthand.
Sometimes in the company of “research assistants”—a friend I’ll call “Captain,” “Queen” (my wife), a number of other friends, family members, and foundlings—I covered its course from beginning to end, from levee top to (mostly concrete) bottom. Numerous river advocates, activists, and artists also shared their insights with me: Joe Linton, the author of a guidebook on the river (and one of the creators of the blog “L.A. Creek Freak”); Lewis MacAdams, poet and founder of the Friends of the Los Angeles River; scholar, Urban Ranger, and writer Jennifer Price; George Wolfe, creator of L.A. River Expeditions and co-star of the documentary Rock the Boat, as well as the film’s director, Thea Mercouffer. Local experts such as these and other fine folk whom I encountered in the river basin, with their knowledge and generosity and good directions, helped me feel less a stranger.
But a stranger, to some extent, I remain. The more I saw of the river, the more I listened to it and smelled it, the more “truths” about its odd nature I pieced together from nonfictional representations, the odder its waters became. In the following chapters, I sort through competing accounts of the L.A. River, trying to shed new light on its nature and meaning, past and present. Book 1 jumps right into the middle of the river, combining fieldwork (on the stretch from the Arroyo Seco confluence upstream into San Fernando Valley) with literary study and creative nonfiction, and comprises a handbook of sorts, a compendium of strange but true stories. Can alternative ways of writing about the real L.A. River—maps, histories, guides, memoirs, reports and other forms of nonfiction—undo the river’s undoing?