La La Land | Exploring the used, abused and often surreal L.A. River

“Kayaking is something I do sometimes to survey rivers for work,” says Heather, her straw hat hanging down her back by a lanyard around her neck. “But in this case, I’d get fired if they knew I was here. But you know, this is my day off and I want to support this.”

Eventually, the group catches us and we proceed downstream through the concrete canyon, whose 20-foot walls are topped by chain-link fences. Beyond them rises another wall separating the river from the 12 lanes of Highway 101. The buzz of traffic is plainly audible. We occasionally pass round openings in the wall—storm-drain tributaries that add a trickle of lawn-sprinkler runoff to our flow. A great blue heron lurches incongruously from one of them and takes flight around the next bend. Though the water seems clean enough, I’m shocked that there’s enough prey in this concrete trench to sustain the three-foot bird.

Then, a mile downstream, the river’s entire flow slots into an eight-foot-wide, three-foot-deep trench running down the center of the concrete canyon. I drop the tiny falls at the head of the algae-lined trench, dodge a stray shopping cart, and am whisked downstream with surprising speed at the head of a bobbing line of boats. The trench is too narrow to maneuver in, so we sit back and let the current flush us past the graffitied walls of the industrial riverway, like passengers on some blighted Disney Small World ride.

SEVERAL HOURS LATER, I’m wondering whether the river is navigable after all. The center trench is long gone, and the river’s anemic flow spreads over the entire 150-foot-wide riverbed. It’s not deep enough to float our kayaks, so by the time we pass behind the blocky warehouses of Dreamworks Studio in Glendale, I’ve been dragging my kayak for hours. The ordeal has broken our previously cohesive group into a row of stragglers stretching more than a mile. What’s more, I just slipped on the algae and whacked the back of my head against the concrete bottom. A red helicopter flies overhead, circles once above me, and then whirls downstream.

Joe Linton and Jeff Tipton have already turned the 90-degree corner where the river wraps around the brown hills of Griffith Park and a hulking industrial plant emits a noxious gas. Just ahead, flanked by a fenced-off recycling yard and partially hidden beneath the 14-lane Ventura Freeway Bridge, lies the confluence of Verdugo Wash, one of the Revitalization Master Plan’s five so-called “opportunity sites”—it’s biggest flagship projects. Right now, the spot is just an opening in the river walls and a thicket of weeds growing on the plume of sediment dropped there—so anonymous that it barely registers in the eye. But if the plan goes forward, the recycling yard will become a 15-acre wetlands park. Flood-resistant terraces traversed by boardwalks and viewpoints will replace the opposite shore. In the architectural drawings, people walk along an esplanade under blue skies, or sit on benches beneath shade trees. In one sketch, an attractive Caucasian couple points towards the water, presumably at some cute, cuddly baby animal. It’s a seductive vision, and it suggests the river will become two things that it emphatically is not now: clean and safe.

Most of the river’s flow is treated wastewater from three sewage-treatment plants along its course, but after a hard rain it can flash in minutes, washing every dog turd and brake fluid puddle in the Los Angeles basin straight to the river. In the 1920s, the city commissioned a plan to buffer the river with a series of parks that would absorb floodwaters. The plan was prescient, expensive and ill-timed: It was completed in 1930 as the country was careening toward the Great Depression, and the city parks department filed its copy without ever reading it. Eight years later a flood killed 85 people, caused millions of dollars in property damage, and sealed the river’s fate, literally. Workers soon began turning the volatile river into a 51-mile concrete storm drain. When they finished, more than 650 million tons of cement and 7 million tons of rebar girded the banks. It was a sort of matricide of the river that had been the city’s sole supply of water for its first 150 years.

The river remained all but forgotten until a citizen group called Friends of the L.A. River started advocating for its better treatment in the 1980s. But city government really only took notice when they learned of other cities creating real-estate bonanzas out of revitalizing tarnished rivers. Denver was first. Starting in 1975, the city’s $75 million of improvements in the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek has attracted $5 billion in private investment, transforming a once gritty industrial area into the city’s hippest new neighborhood. Other cities followed suit, including San Jose and Reno, which tore the concrete out of a half-mile stretch of the Truckee River and made it into a whitewater kayaking course and park. These projects brought prestige, money and a higher quality of life to their cities, and the Los Angeles planners took notice—if implemented, each of the five opportunity sites will be larger than anything undertaken in Denver, Reno or San Jose.

DESPITE THE THREAT OF FINES, we see a surprising number of people in the river. On our second day we catch a teen-aged graffiti artist at work on a bridge footing–his can runs out of paint and he tosses it over his shoulder into the meager current. We cross paths with dozens of Latino fishermen angling for carp, fat, oily bottom feeders native to China that can grow as long as three feet. Alarmingly, many fishermen say they eat the fish, and one member of our expedition tells me he once saw a man trap a 10-pounder in the concrete shallows with his T-shirt. In a stretch near Glendale where the riverbed isn’t paved (though the sides are) wild tangles of 30-foot high giant reed trees, another invasive species, have coalesced the rocky streambed into islands. We spot a family harvesting leaves in a mid-stream island. The woman says she’s going to make the leaves into a soup.

We are also on the lookout for Duckman, a notorious older fellow who comes to the river most days to feed the scores of ducks, many of which he allegedly bought in Chinatown food markets and released in the Glendale stretch. Anti-social and volatile, he accosts anyone he feels disturbs the birds—one such profanity-laden confrontation plays on Youtube.

“Hello,” I say, brightly, hoping to smooth my sudden intrusion. Beside him is a small clearing in the dense vegetation. A tent is tucked into one corner and a mirror hangs on a tree at face level. A giant pink stuffed animal—a teddy bear–is tethered to shore where river foam collects around its wet fur. It seems like a camp where several people might live, though this man is the only person I can see. “We’re paddling the river,” I say, “all the way to Long Beach.”

The people I’m most interested in are the homeless. No one knows the actual number, but the L.A. River is home to dozens, maybe hundreds. In the lower reaches, nearly every bridge has a camp crammed into the shady triangular space between the concrete bank and the roadway, and in the few earth-bottomed sections like in Glendale, people stake out space in the dense trees, where drivers flashing past on one of the interstate bridges never notice them.

Late in the afternoon on the second day, I’m bumping down the rocky streambed—paddling again now, but still trying to catch Joe and Jeff–when I pop into an eddy beside a mid-stream island and find a naked man squatting on a rock, a square washbasin in his hand and water dripping from his thick mop of hair and graying beard. He makes no move to cover himself and remains squatting on the rock, as though kayakers interrupt his bath every day.