Eden Keigs Naturalists Guide to Nature Writing by Eden Keig Lyrics
The day I found the river remains one of my finest days in L.A. I was looking for birds, so I visited three short stretches where the Corps had left a soft riverbed: a flood control basin near the headwaters; an eight-mile piece in the middle, where the water table rises so close to the surface that it would punch through concrete; and the three miles of tidal estuary at the mouth. I started upstream in the San Fernando Valley, on the sole half mile that doesn’t have any concrete at all. I continued downstream to the middle stretch above Downtown, which boasts an inspired new string of pocket parks with native vegetation and outdoor sculptures. Both stretches teemed with herons, ducks, coots, and other birds. Far downstream, in Southeast L.A., the channel widens to the girth of a freeway, and I ended the day looking out over the river from atop a thirty-foot wall. Scores of black-necked stilts picked their way around upturned shopping carts. A mallard shot down the swift current, and swallows sliced the air. The sun set spectacularly to the southwest through power lines, billboards, and the smokestacks of the L.A. Harbor. A man on a horse rode by, wearing a cowboy hat, a Mexican blanket, and a cell phone. “This is L.A.,” I thought. I was steeped so contentedly in the Complex Life. All day I had been marveling, “There’s a river in L.A., a real river, what do you know,” and it seemed, after a year of loving L.A. but not knowing why, and of wanting to write about L.A. but not knowing what, that I was now looking at the place (duck-filled, no less) that held the key to both.
With urban designer and L.A. River aficionado Alan Loomis, I lead informal tours of the river—for friends, and their friends too, who like to think about L.A. and who have heard L.A. has a river and want to see it. We walk around the new parks, but we also insist on a stop at the Confluence, which I located at last on my own third try. We wander among the trash and muck, and skirt the homeless tents, and lean against the massive pylons of the freeway overpasses. Here, we say, lies at once the most hopeless and the most hopeful spot on the L.A. River. The geographic, historic, and ecological center of the river, the Confluence is perhaps the most extreme testament to L.A.’s erasure of nature, community, and the past. This spot is at once the logical nexus for the proposed fifty-one-mile Los Angeles River Greenway. Indeed, the city has broken ground on the first half acre of what should, eventually, become a grand central-city park. Here, we say, is one of the finest places to think about the river, which has to be one of the best places to think about L.A.—and L.A. historically has been one of the most powerful places to tell stories about America. You are standing, we allow, at an American narrative vortex. This spot ideally should be swarming with Angelenos, with writers, with nature writers. And to our delight, the people on the tours say, “What a cool place.” They take a great many photographs—more, usually, than at any other stop—and then we continue downstream to imagine the future of L.A. and the Los Angeles River Greenway at a place where you can drive into the river Downtown.
from Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A. by Jenny Price
With urban designer and L.A. River aficionado Alan Loomis, I lead informal tours of the river—for friends, and their friends too, who like to think about L.A. and who have heard L.A. has a river and want to see it. We walk around the new parks, but we also insist on a stop at the Confluence, which I located at last on my own third try. We wander among the trash and muck, and skirt the homeless tents, and lean against the massive pylons of the freeway overpasses. Here, we say, lies at once the most hopeless and the most hopeful spot on the L.A. River. The geographic, historic, and ecological center of the river, the Confluence is perhaps the most extreme testament to L.A.’s erasure of nature, community, and the past. This spot is at once the logical nexus for the proposed fifty-one-mile Los Angeles River Greenway. Indeed, the city has broken ground on the first half acre of what should, eventually, become a grand central-city park. Here, we say, is one of the finest places to think about the river, which has to be one of the best places to think about L.A.—and L.A. historically has been one of the most powerful places to tell stories about America. You are standing, we allow, at an American narrative vortex. This spot ideally should be swarming with Angelenos, with writers, with nature writers. And to our delight, the people on the tours say, “What a cool place.” They take a great many photographs—more, usually, than at any other stop—and then we continue downstream to imagine the future of L.A. and the Los Angeles River Greenway at a place where you can drive into the river Downtown.
from Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A. by Jenny Price