Rio de Dios

Mal Sueño

77 MAL SUEÑO “Landscape only seems innocuous.” —Mark Klett at the Getty, 2006 In the eager rain of an El Niño dawn a thousand waterfalls wait to pour red mud into the open mouths of bedroom and slab, pool deck and spa tub, mud that will thread oak trees through Cadillacs, wiping toyon clean with the hem of a prom dress and the bent rod from front room drapes and a dozen newly peeled slabs of Irish-green, laid-by-amigos sod.That will be the first step. Second, after the fires and earthquakes, will be to pick up the river and give it a slap like a rope trick, a wrist-flipped ripple to lift and shift and snap the bed out to full length, letting it be a river and not flood control’s stone barn.Alders will bud as black rails call; 78 new condors will hunch like winos in the rain. When the levees fail and Lakewood looks like the Lower Ninth Ward, nobody will say, as most do now, what, Los Angeles has a river? Name it ecology’s last dibs when even Bill Mulholland will have to ride sidesaddle over the passes and into the valley of the shadow of the death of nitgrass and broomrape, pickleweed and galled oak limb.The cowled gull wheels; surging water low-bids cement even in summer; retaining walls can’t hold back the pressing fingertips of history. Tag while you can, happy vatos. Sniff glue, watch those poorer than you do laundry in the shiny runoff from the Lockheed parking lot. We will all be gabachos in Heaven.And when a hundred-year rain storm brings Los Angeles a thousand-year flood, look up at the mountains and curse the men who told us to live on the sodden plains of Eden, and not, instead, amid the granite and agave and lightning spikes of the tallest, safest, 79 hardest places. In 1700 the Chumash mended nets, rode out the hard rains, moved like the antelope from ciénega to ciénega, from salmon to cielo. By 1800 smallpox had come and gone, meaning there were too many horses, not enough cattle, so the extra horses were rounded up and driven off the seacliffs to die smashed on low tide rocks. It was a hard thing to be Spanish, and by 1900 reduced to begging work and living in Niggertown, harder still. Paving the channel saved the mortgages of the brown people owned by red brick banks and if the steelhead stopped running, so what, go to Seattle and get more, and bring back some 2 x 4s while you’re at it.Adobe is an archaeology of transubstantiation: just mud and straw, but the clay came from the body of Christ of the Past Floods and coring the binder reveals the pollen of the grasses that kept coming back after the first grasses couldn’t come back anymore: cheatgrass and Russian thistle instead of the bunched rice grasses that could feed a city 80 of deer, an empire of ants, a river of red-winged blackbirds. Now it just gets stuck in the socks of the kids cutting across the vacant lot on their way to ESL lessons or to take abuelita to Our Lady of the Angels for Sunday mass; the grass spikes are from Europe and the socks are from Wal-Mart, and in Frogtown, 1968, when the cholos said Hey Paddy, gimme your watch or I will break your arm, I wanted to say back, no, not ‘Paddy,’ since Irish is the one indentured heritage I am not, or maybe, what, you can tell time now? But I didn’t, I just gave them my watch and went to sulk down by cat-faced storm drains grinning from slab sides of a river that is in the background of the chase scenes in Laurel and Hardy, Keystone Cops, Grease. Around theWorld in 80 Days was backlotted by Stage 27, look for the river as the balloon rises. Some days even movies cannot save us my mother said, sending me to Saul’s market for a fist of ground-round in white paper. Kids never know what the hell grownups are talking about, and thank god for small favors. Now 81 the river has bird guides, hiking books, but...