ABSTRACT
The day’s fieldwork begins at the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens, where I park the red rental car and run into Lewis MacAdams. The co-founder of Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), MacAdams is, to my mind, the friend of the LA River, a poet and scholar who, for the past several decades, has been a principal activist on behalf of (and self-proclaimed spokesman for) the stream I am researching. I introduce myself, although not because I’m outgoing: the cookie from last night’s restaurant contained a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The only way to have a friend is to be one,” and since I am here to understand the river, I’ve taken my good fortune as a nudge to befriend one of the river’s best friends. MacAdams kindly agrees to meet with me later in the week, and before I set off on foot to discover the river for myself, he warns me to drive farther upriver to a more scenic section. Around here, he says, it looks like a construction zone. But I’ve always wondered how rivers were made, so on foot I go-around the corner and down Figueroa, climbing over concrete barriers, edging along orange plastic fencing, squeezing through a narrow passage between the railing and fleetly passing cars-to the middle of the Riverside Bridge looking out on the midstream building project near the river’s confluence with the Arroyo Seco.
