-
Water (and Other Fictions)
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
18 through the gradient is completely impeded.The habitat losses in the Los Angeles River basin mirror and contribute to the state’s estimated 91% loss of wetland habitat and the 97% loss of floodplain riparian habitat in Southern California. As C.S. Lewis’s marshwiggles would say,“What rum little creatures humans are.” Commensal we are not. WaTer (and oTher FicTions) With a cumulative score of 0.9 GPA, the Los Angeles River consistently gets a resounding F from the Friends of the L.A. River (FoLAR) in water quality monitoring at 22 sites. A few sites averaged a C, such as Arroyo Seco, but most gauge stations from Owensmouth toWardlow Road spike straight F’s in test after test. During the dry season, in its Mediterranean climate, most of its water is reclaimed—meaning the mother liquor of treated human sewage spread over an anthropocentric landscape. Before the re-use of treated human sewage for the irrigation of exotic landscapes, the lower reaches of the river were actually dry during the summer in drought years,but today a foamy urban slobber drools down the trough year-round. Some of that slick green slaver accumulates via the 2,200 storm drains that empty into the river corridor throughout its course. Most commentary uses the metaphor of a corset,inspired perhaps by the fact that there are 110 road crossings lacing its descent to the ocean.Legal jurisdiction cinches it wincingly tight as well, given that there are over two dozen competing communities through which it shuffles its way.Yet who is responsible for what remains unclear, ten million pages 19 of litigation later.Who is in charge of making sure that stray dogs don’t chase off desperately weary sandpipers, feeding in Long Beach after migrating from tundra breeding grounds? Who will clean up the plastic bottles, or lobby the Feds for better anadromous fish management?Aging oil pipelines crisscross LosAngeles just under the surface, as Bill Fox notes in his L.A. meditation, Making Time. Rusting and gurgling, they remain hazards undiagnosed and uninspected.Yet potential disaster waits close at hand.As he reminds us,in“Long Beach in 1994,for instance, twenty-four thousand barrels of petroleum-contaminated water leaked into the Los Angeles River, necessitating the replacement of more than twenty miles of pipe.” Other spills “have drained out into, and helped pollute” the river’s mouth and other coastal waters.All in all,much of the modern river is a kind of existential nightmare for river ecologists—a thin, often frothy meniscus bleeding and oozing its way down a concrete trough. At the mouth, soft-bottom (areas not armored with concrete, but having soil as a substrate) extends from theWillow Street Bridge to Queensway Bay.This 2.6mile reach is fully tidal from the mouth upstream to Willow Street, with benthic salinities at the mouth of 33 parts per thousand in the fall to 26.4 ppt in the winter. The more dense seawater slides beneath the fresh in a salt wedge, with surface salinities at the mouth being between 29 ppt in the fall and 24.3 in the winter. Hard to conceive how different this was not so long ago.The fabric and detail of the historic floodplain is now lost, but the California Coastal Conservancy has stated that it generally consisted of “extensive marshes, streams, lakes, and [3.85.38.100] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:23 GMT) 20 seeps covering much of present day downtown Los Angeles to San Pedro Bay and eastward to the San Gabriel River.” It was one of the largest floodplains on the California coast,with a watershed of 834 square miles,and its final transformation into a flood control conduit was completed in 1954. A glimpse of what it may have been like can be found in the journals of Aldo Leopold, when he camped in the delta of the Colorado River in the 1930s.“The still waters,” he wrote,“were of a deep emerald hue, colored by algae, I suppose, but no less green for all that.A verdant wall of mesquite and willow separated the channel from the thorny desert beyond.At each bend we saw egrets standing in the pools ahead,each white statue matched by its white reflection. Fleets of cormorants drove their black prows in quest of skittering mullets; avocets, willets, and yellowlegs dozed one-legged on the bars;mallards,widgeons,and teal sprang skyward in alarm.As the birds...