In 2023, students from The Claremont Colleges visited the Glendale Narrows on the Los Angeles River.  The trip was part of a class at Pomona College on 'Water in the West' taught by Professor Char Miller. Following the trip, students wrote about their experience.  A few years on, some of those alums have revisited their essays, trawling the LA River X collection on Instagram and in the Western Water Archive, to create their very own LA River X Remix. Read on for a remix from Jude Iredell (Pomona College '24).

Slow Water

By Jude Iredell, as part of Water in the West, 2023, Professor Char Miller, revisited in March 2026

I was born at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. When I was two, my father took me surfing for the first time at Topanga Beach, just down the road from our home. I skied for the first time in the San Gabriel Mountains on snow that historically supplied my home city with drinking water.

I remember my mother screaming from the sand when she caught me and my friend surfing alone in storming March surf, ignorant of the brown creek churning all manner of filth downstream and into the ocean. I remember long summer freeway drives to doctors’ appointments, beside barren concrete wastelands that I childishly assumed were subterranean roads for the occasional vehicle.

All this to say that I've seen, felt, and grown in Los Angeles' water for my entire life, all without contemplating our city’s relationship to and treatment of this scarce and valuable resource. We may pump Sierra water over the Tehachapi Mountains, or marvel at the canals that line the Central Valley, but we neglect our waterways right here at home. Never has the local rhetoric on concretization, pollution, and usage criminalization resonated more than on our class trip to Lewis MacAdams Park.

I arrived at the riverside park expecting to see the tires, shopping carts, and plastic bags that have made the river famous in local conservation debates. I expected to see the homeless camps underneath the freeway overpass, a sad reminder of our crippling addiction and housing crisis.

I certainly did not expect a torrent of deep green, fast-moving water to cascade by me on its way to the Pacific Ocean. Of course, the 2022-23 winter was strong and everlasting, but to see feet of water in mid-April was a sight to behold.

Our group was standing on the island, marveling at the urban rapids when Professor Char Miller offered an observation that prompted a great deal of reflection. "Watch how fast the water moves..." he said. "When the river is at its highest, water moves faster here than in almost any other river in the country".

The implications of this sobering fact became clear as I rested my foot in the downstream flow. Urban planners and environmental engineers had designed a system around the quick, seamless removal of water from populated areas towards unpopulated ones. They created a kind of hidden drag strip, with water racing along beneath freeways and millions of unassuming Angelenos.

The flow rate, the concrete, and the barbed wire were all products of the same brutal system, designed deliberately to separate us from the natural environment that functioned this way for thousands of years. Today, Los Angeles’ most valuable biological resource—its water—is swept away without a chance for us to appreciate it.

The logic behind the river’s concretization is obvious. Storm runoff from surrounding hills posed a dangerous flooding risk to San Fernando Valley and L.A. Basin communities; shepherding it out to sea as quickly as possible was seen as the solution to flooding catastrophes that inundated Los Angeles in the early 20th century. However unnatural, the system was and is surprisingly practical.

But even among the extensive concrete channeling, there are clear signs of hope. The rare dirt bottom at Lewis MacAdams Park is one such example. At points in the park where river water moved leisurely, drooping trees rooted in the available earthen bottom, and ducklings poked out between the concrete bridge pilings. Nature was clearly trying, undeterred by her hominid enemy. All she needed was a little slow water.

On that day in April 2023, I saw the cruel logic in LA city planners' "water disappearing act". Flushing it down canyons and out to sea in subterranean storm drains was a deliberate ploy to separate residents from their river. Water moving quickly and unnaturally through giant concrete funnels could be easily ignored and neglected, hence the fences and the laws against usage. 

So yes, tear out the concrete, naturalize the bottom, and plant native riverside flora. But don’t forget the critical message that our dear city’s leaders wanted so badly for you to forget. Slow water is natural, life-giving, and essential to the future of L.A. River conservation. 

— Jude Iredell, Spring 2023, revised in January 2026 

Char Miller wrote an article about taking his students to the Los Angeles River, which you can read here or in the Eden Magazine archives.