In Search of the Lost River

Shopping carts are strewn throughout the river and mark the shallow parts like buoys. Photo by Henry Cherry
In Search of the Lost River Up the Creek With a Green Paddle
By
September 7, 2021
Listen to an audio version of the story, read by the author.

 

 

I was paddling a commandeered canoe along an unfamiliar stretch of the Los Angeles River. Outside of birdsong and the large number of unhoused people cooking breakfast in riverside lean-tos, it was an astonishingly quiet idyll. A dense grove of walnut, swamp ash and willow trees seeding the riverbanks buffered the din from the nearby U.S. 101 freeway. Passing by a triangular patch of water flowers, I heard a horn-like bellow, deep and profound. After listening for a few seconds, I called back. Paddle resting across gunwales, there I was, communicating with an unseen bullfrog. It’s been a tough 18 months. Covid-19 altered the Earth’s movement by reducing seismic noise from the stay-at-home orders. Now, drifting away from Los Angeles into this bucolic bit of river, the turbulence of the past 18 months diminished. For a moment, there was only me and the frog. 

The LA River is a 51-mile waterway decline. The majority of the river’s watershed is “impaired,” according to the California Water Boards.  A color-coded map on the environmental nonprofit River LA’s website charts pollution in the LA River. There are five different levels; green as the lowest, red as the worst. The LA River flows almost entirely in the red. While the color code does change for the better in a few stretches, it never escapes the brown alert, second only to red. In 2019, University of California, Los Angeles researchers determined that river pollution levels were “dismal.”

The pollution “impaired” water gives life to the undying California palm trees. Photo by Henry Cherry

 

Several mountain ranges deliver runoff to the LA River, but so does a metropolis of city gutters as they send their toxic soup of ground pollutants, oil and gasoline into the river. Now developers are aiding city planners and architect Frank Gehry — famed for his elaborate aluminum sheened and leaky buildings — in crafting a master plan for the river’s future. That kind of collusion rarely benefits the animals, plants and people directly impacted by the redevelopment plans.

La River, as a friend calls it, has been humbled by ongoing engineering projects meant to prevent nature from destroying a city that has long outgrown its riverbanks. I didn’t let any of that stuff stop me from borrowing a stranger’s canoe and getting into the river. Traveling to the Sepulveda Dam, where I planned to put in, was a haze of on- and off-ramp merges. When I looked up and noticed the anxious palm trees lining the roads had given way to tolerant willows, I audibly exhaled and parked in the lot off Burbank Boulevard.

***

I’ve lived by the water for the majority of my life. I spirited canoes through the Mississippi’s tributaries and bayous near my home in New Orleans. I swam where it disgorged its baby-shit-brown froth into the Gulf of Mexico. Before moving to the Gothic South, I spent my childhood in Baltimore, where the Jones Falls Expressway (JFX) runs alongside a cement banked creek of the same name. When we piled into my father’s car to eat at his favorite restaurant in Little Italy, we rode the JFX into the city. I’d push my face against the car window and peer into the hazel water below, entranced by the blond concrete cradling it. Memories of those two waterways drove me to photograph the LA River. In the years since I started that project, I’ve come to paddle its waters a very few times. Each outing has left me wanting more.

The companies that offer excursions along the LA River primarily feature kayaks. They push their kayaking experiences with a friendly easy-going gleam in their eyes. When you say you want a canoe, the tone changes. The gleam is gone. I could have gone out and bought one of those oversized inflatable pool flamingoes and guided it downriver, but that’s not what I needed. The canoe is a childhood friend. Paddling the lakes and rivers of New Hampshire and the tributaries and bayous of South Louisiana, I developed a kinship with it. I felt the water become a part of me while falling out of canoes. I came to grasp the patience of movement while learning how to climb back inside without tipping. Truth be told, when you’re out on the water, you can drift as easily in either one. The kayak comes on like a hipster sports machine. The canoe arrives with an air of exploration: open bodied and free.

The thing is, I couldn’t find a canoe anywhere. 

At one point, after I got an email alert about an elegant, Canadian one in stock, I hustled over to a box store in Burbank. By the time I got there, it was already gone. A crafty salesperson nudged me toward a green paddle. “You never know,” she said. The color reminded me of a seaworthy, faded-green Old Town canoe I’d seen by the ocean a few days before the Fourth of July. In that split second, I hatched a plan to “borrow” a stranger’s boat, hit the river and reacquire a few bits of pre-pandemic sanity. 

Memories of those two waterways drove me to photograph the LA River. In the years since I started that project, I’ve come to paddle its waters a very few times. Each outing has left me wanting more.

There are well-known writers who have caromed along the Brutalist cement walls that cling to much of the L.A. River and who have divined moonlight cascading in its pooling water. The late Lewis Macadams dedicated much of his writing and his life to saving the river. Luis Rodriquez devoted an entire poetry collection to the urban strife overflowing the banks in East L.A. My own love of river paddling cannot be unbound from the literary works of Ernest Hemingway, James Dickey and Joseph Conrad, each of whom symbolized the hell out of rivers. I discovered all three around the same time canoes befriended me. However, it is Eudora Welty’s winsome river writing that most inspires me. 

When Welty died in July of 2001, I’d completed my first year of sobriety. In that year, her short fiction offered a tonic. A writer friend likens the change that comes with recent sobriety to the sound of jet engines winding down. Everything comes at you with a decaying thunder. More often than not, you lose perspective in the noisy complication life delivers in those new moments. It was Welty’s poeticisms and delicate compositional nuance in the face of cultural thunderclouds that aided me at the beginning of sobriety. 

Triptych Los Angeles River at the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Center. Photos by Henry Cherry

 

Her rivers naturally cohabitate with the people who live beside them, at times inside them.  When the river crests its banks and floods the town in her story, “At the Landing,” no one blames the river. Impoverishment licks at her riverbanks without ruining the character of those caught within it. In “The Wide Net,” the river water is flesh-toned, then it’s golden. At last, it is a mystery, translucent and, “yellow like an old bottle lying in the sun, filled with light.”

I wanted to capture the halting appreciative gauze Welty applied to her rivers when I put into water. I wanted to be filled with its light.

Near the Sepulveda Basin, the city peeled away. The cacophony of L.A.’s inharmonious architecture was swapped out with scrub brush, Jimson weed and oleander. The frustrating, angular palms disappeared, replaced with drooping willows that kindly blocked out the hot sun. A deceptive radiance bathes so much of Southern California in a mirage of splendor. Even the sunken shopping carts can charm you when you realize that they double as markers for shallow water. 

Haskell Creek just before it empties into the Los Angeles River. Photo by Henry Cherry

 

A canopy of trees covers Haskell Creek. Cobwebs cling to the branches that lean close to the water. There is a timelessness bound to the unmoving water and the slanting sunlight that pierces the leaves. The creek itself is too shallow for paddling. Having eagerly mistaken it for the river itself, I committed to the methodology. While dislodging clumps of creek bed from paddle blade, I noticed the camouflaged lean-tos on the north bank of the creek. Every 10 feet another, many covered with impressive blankets woven from leaves and branches. The discovery of the river dwellers was another connection to Welty’s literary river. I should not have been surprised. There are encampments in every parcel of Los Angeles County. You can bake your brain inside a tent set up without shade from the hot sun. 

This past spring, Ken, the NBA-sized man who lived on a patch of sidewalk across from my post office, died after a decade and change living on the streets. A group of neighbors pooled resources to memorialize him. While I glided alongside the river encampment, I thought about that. Why hadn’t we done more for him while he was alive? It happens everywhere you look. There’s no relief. The tents populate our psyche. This is Los Angeles. This is Seattle. This is New York, Paris, London, Rio De Janeiro. This is Mumbai. This is the river.

Shopping carts mark the entrance of a hidden riverside encampment. Photo by Henry Cherry

 

While the only people I saw that day were on the banks, the river supplied enough emotional ballast to keep me from sinking into the bankside desolation. On the water, I was alone, punctuating the continuum. When I lazily scraped my knuckles against the hull, my instinctual drag of the paddle at the stern kept the canoe from turning toward land. Cognitive restructuring. In a wonder of muscle memory, kneeling at the thwart, I reversed and spun the boat around in circles. I drew it closer to the banks, then pushed it back to the middle of the river. I hadn’t forgotten the encampments, but this waterborne ballet offloaded their heft. I could almost hear John Gaffney, my camp counselor, calling out directions. His thick Texan accent adding syrupy extra syllables to each word: “Keep your stroke short. Keep your paddle close to the boat.”

I’d slowed the canoe to a drift. The water browned to perfection. Catching sight of a man walking to his lean-to with a passel of fish affixed by string to a stick, I knew that was the balance of the misery and of joy. That was the river I found.

 

Sun peaking through the canopy to illuminate a quiet eddy, as the bullfrog sings. Photo by Henry Cherry

 

When I returned to photograph a few days later, the cheerlessness was less abstract. You couldn’t ignore it. There were no hand washing stations or portable toilets here, just creek water feeding into the river. The drought brought with it a perpetual cover of dust. It was everywhere, floating on the river, gripping the sweat on my face, crawling up my pant legs and down my shirt sleeves. If you gasped, you’d swallow a handful. Some of the camps were marked with brightly colored pieces of trash or clothing tied to brambles or leftover fence posts. Others had been burned out, marked only by charcoal smudges left by the fires that took them.

***

Years ago, I recognized that action will dominate poetry, destroying sequence after sequence without regard for subtlety, if you let it. The river in Dickey’s Deliverance breaks like glass, becoming, “marvelously clear and alive.” In another section, he anoints it, “blank and mindless with beauty.” The Congo River in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness “seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair.” 

Those men had spent time in the water of action while ingesting rivers of poetry. So, they were telling the truth, but also collecting a broad spectrum of waters within their writing. Their rivers are symbolic and chart a course into human misery and then back out of it. That’s largely because people are stubborn; they want to train the river. The river doesn’t give a shit. If you don’t respect it, it’ll kill you. The Los Angeles River has wiped out legions with tragic and costly floods. Those disasters convinced civil engineers that the best way to incapacitate La River was to wrap it up in concrete. Still, over the years, they’ve had to raise its cement banks again and again to stymie inundation.

The riverbed returns to concrete as it approaches the Sepulveda Dam. Photos by Henry Cherry

 

All of that is extracurricular information at the Sepulveda Basin, where the river tickles natural banks free of construction. This section of untamed river streams in the face of the metropolitan roar. As the river curved to the right, the northeast bank rose nearly two stories. I kept paddling, kept watching the river. A bale of sunbathing turtles floated beside me, obliging my passage. But even there in the center of that miracle, the Megalopolis returned. It came in the sounds of the remote-controlled planes flying over their airfield a few steps beyond the steep bank. It came in that beep-beep-beeping alert of an unseen truck gearing into reverse. It came with a dog barking somewhere, the sound bouncing along the river and off into the tree-line. It was time to turn back.

Despite the ultimate collapse surrounding them, the couple seemed to be happy. I was, too. Such is the situational complexity of the Los Angeles River.

That night, after I returned the canoe, leaving the green paddle behind as a peace offering, the river came back to me. I remembered gliding past a gap in the thicket of foliage. A couple was seated by their lean-to. I stopped paddling and watched them fry their fish. They’d caught it in waters that now have a beacon system dreamed up by a 12-year-old Angeleno who lives near the river. The beacons work like traffic signals to tell you when the water is safe. They flash red when it is overloaded with dangerous bacteria, like MRSA. Despite the ultimate collapse surrounding them, the couple seemed to be happy. I was, too. Such is the situational complexity of the Los Angeles River.

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Henry Cherry
Henry Cherry
Henry Cherry lives in Hollywood, California. He works as a teacher and a journalist. You can see more of his work here.

COMMENTS

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2 responses to “In Search of the Lost River”

  1. Anonymous says:

    What about the lower end of the river as it empties at Long Beach
    No one seems to go into the industrial concrete section.
    I have gone up river a bit but was scared of the posted legalities.
    PS Built my own cedar strip canoe sealed with pine tar.
    Let’s paddle sometime. colr@earthlink.net

  2. Anonymous says:

    I would love to see that canoe! And I think the Long Beach section of the river is a great place to explore. Night paddling!

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Our team is working hard every day to bring you compelling, carefully-crafted pieces that shed light on the pressing issues of our time. We rely on caring supporters like you to help us sustain our mission. Your support ensures that we can continue to provide deeply-reported, independent, ad-free journalism without fear, favor or pandering. Support us today and make a lasting investment in the future.