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I Sing the River Electric
I Sing the River Electric
By Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis & History, Pomona College
By Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis & History, Pomona College
When Friends of the LA River issued Walt Whitman a river access pass in 1996, the cheeky document, complete with an ID photo of the hirsute poet, offered a mashup of Whitmanesque excited idioms: “Unscrew the locks from the gates! Unscrew the gates themselves from their jambs!” Only Lewis MacAdams would have thought to offer this humorous homage, from one ecopoet to another.
Image of the Los Angeles River Access Pass is from the Friends of the Los Angeles River records (Collection 2215) at UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, featured in the LA River X takeover of guest host Julia Wasson in 2021, archived in the Western Water Archives.
That said, would Whitman have grabbed the bolt cutters emblazoned on his pass, and joined Lewis MacAdams and crew in cutting through the chain-link fencing that separated the river from the city? Perhaps. Yet unlike the merry pranksters who disdained what MacAdams, in his iconic Whole Earth Review essay, called the “unholy din” enveloping the river—"A Southern Pacific freight train rumbled up the tracks on one bank. A Santa Fe freight rumbled down the tracks on the other. Traffic on two freeway bridges and the Riverside Drive bridge roared by…The scene was a latter-day urban hell”—Whitman would have dissented. The self-styled Bard of Democracy, who chanted his praise of those moments when “million-footed Manhattan, unpent, descends to her pavements,” unabashedly embraced the cacophonous interplay between, and the discordant juxtapositions of human and natural environments.
“It was a happy thought to build the Hudson river railroad right along the shore,” he wrote in Specimen Days (1882). “I see, hear the locomotives and cars, rumbling, roaring, flaming, smoking, constantly,” their throbbing presence even more powerful after dark. “At night far down you see the headlight approaching, coming steadily on like a meteor.” A sluggish Metrolink commuter, its horn blaring as it clanks along the LA River, might not have sent Whitman into orbit, but he would have gravitated to its banked energy.
Even more electrifying would be the thrum of the high-voltage transmission wires that bracket the river’s concrete banks. Their buzzing connectivity, like the telegraph’s vibrations about which he so frequently enthused, would have caught Whitman’s imagination.
Image from an LA River X guest host takeover by Helen Kim in 2020. Retrieved from the Western Water Archives.
Contributors to LA River X are similarly captivated. In Helen Kim’s “T and C walk along riverbank (2020),” the looming towers provide vital perspectives: the two ramblers, caught in mid-stride, are dwarfed beneath the concrete-footings and lattice-steel frames; their next steps will parallel the infrastructure that pull our eyes deep into the background.
These structures’ height—some soar 200-feet above the surface—add other dimensions, one component of which is that they seem to put nature in its place. “Geese flying over a dry river channel” is the title of Kyle Gerner’s 2022 photograph, but the immensity of the looming three pylons almost obscures these birds’ low-flying trajectory. Distracted by their winged flight, it took me multiple viewings to glimpse a lone egret standing on the debris-strewn concrete-river bed.
Image from an LA River X guest host takeover by Kyle Gerner in 2022. Retrieved from the Western Water Archives.
Image from an LA River X guest host takeover by Fred Kaplan in 2020. Retrieved from the Western Water Archives.
Nothing is hidden in Fred Kaplan’s spare, black-and white image of “Powerlines along the Los Angeles concrete river channel.” Its title is as utilitarian as its straight-lined subject. Sure, there are a clutch of opportunistic grasses rooted in cracks in the otherwise sheer slope of the bank. It’s the two bridges and a dense thicket of transmission towers that demand our attention.
Just so with John Kosta’s composition of “Double Decker 7th Street Bridge” (2021): That foregrounded eponymous structure, replicated in a receding series of other overpasses carrying cars and rail transit, is mimicked in the ever-fainter pylons that crowd the sky.
Image from an LA River X guest host takeover by John Kosta in 2021. Retrieved from the Western Water Archives.
Image from an LA River X guest host takeover by Miguel Rodriguez in 2021. Retrieved from the Western Water Archives. Instagram.
Anchored, this infrastructure also conveys movement. Look carefully at Miguel Rodriguez’s “Tower Power” (2021), set in Vernon amid a winter storm. As the imposing forms cross your field of vision, watch as they arc left with the river’s bend, a fluidity evoking the parallel flows of water and power, two essential elements in the development of urban space.
Whitman would have loved this inferred animation, what he called “character-beauties.” To see them here, though, he’ll need to reincarnate quickly. His river-access pass expires on May 1, 2026.
— Char Miller, November 2024 with additions in December 2025
Meet Char Miller
Meet Char Miller
Char Miller is W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis & History at Pomona College. His teaching and research reflect his fascination with all things environmental. Classes on U.S. environmental history, water in the U.S. West, and public lands management, like those on urbanization, have deeply informed his writing. His most recent books include Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, From Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning (2024); Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril (2022); and West Side Rising: How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement (2021). Miller was the Project Co-Director with Tilly Hinton (LA River X) for the California Humanities grant “The People's Archive: Los Angeles River narratives, counternarratives, and conversations”. His essays about Southern California’s environmental tensions have appeared in his books Natural Consequences and Not So Golden State. Char routinely takes classes to the Los Angeles River to experience what artist John Kosta calls its “unexpected beauty.” Some of their reflections about these field trips are posted right here, on the LA River X website.
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