Travel Photography > Desert Southwest > Los Angeles River

He stopped at my feet. "He don't hurt nobody," a man came out of the bamboo, speaking with the East LA accent we hear as Indians in old westerns. "Everybody throw trash all over the place," he said. "I cleaned this whole place up." He was referring to the gates of the Hanson Dam, where he was letting his boys play with their pit bull in the cool water. "Oh yeah, its okay, he jump on you, he friendly."

Alvin and I continued up a wash, which in spring is a wrestling, furious lake. The short distance to the headwaters was strangely silent. Quiet, sandy, on the edge of a desert and the base of mountains. From the bamboo, we found a small lake. Blue, with waves and white beaches by bamboo shoots, a soft breeze in the heat, like off a midwestern river in a hot, crop-killing August.

They say that Los Angeles is twenty years ahead of Middle America. That said, the view from the Hanson Dam at the headwaters of the Los Angeles River looks like the future of Kansas City, or St. Louis, or Omaha. Preserving the river is not a new idea; Los Angeles was founded on the premise of palatial riverside estates. There will always be ideas. There will always be some guy cleaning a riverfront for his children.

Even Col. Griffith J. Griffith, of LA's Griffith Park hailed his own grant of land as a grand riverfront park. This is the well-intentioned nature of people. But no, despite good intentions, Omaha's rivers will one day be bound by concrete; with a concave belly of stink, and plastic litter will foul her soul. There will be no gardening, no bicycles or idle talk between neighbors. Omaha, and all of the Midwest, will someday look like this; fenced in, gated, bound up, with her veins bloodied and sore, like that heroin addict cleansing his mind in the lower concrete banks of the Los Angeles River.

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