In the Fall of 2025, students from The Claremont Colleges participated in a field trip to the Glendale Narrows as part of their Pomona College class, 'Water in the West'.  Afterwards, Sascha Weiss was inspired to trawl the LA River X collection on Instagram and in the Western Water Archives and craft this essay. Read on for an LA River X Remix by Sascha Weiss.

I ❤ 2nd Chances, Too

By Sascha Weiss, as part of Water in the West, Fall 2025, Professor Char Miller

So what does a “second chance” look like in practice for the L.A. River? Maybe it doesn’t mean perfect restoration or total ecological purity. Maybe it means learning to love a river that has been shaped by human hands, and insisting that that doesn’t disqualify it from care, creativity, or belonging in our city. Maybe it means embracing contradictions; concrete and crayfish, graffiti and great blue herons, neighborhoods and nature braided together. Nobody seems to care about these bodies of water the way they care for “actual rivers,” the ones that fit our postcard images and clean wilderness narratives. But in many ways the L.A. River is just as important and just as functional. It channels water, hosts life, holds memory, and marks place. So why can’t we give it a second chance? Why can’t its myth evolve? 

The sensory experience of being in the river stays with you, at least it stayed with me in a profound way. I’ve been an Angeleno my whole life. I used to drive past the L.A. River almost every day, I went to school alongside a stretch of it. And yet, I never truly grasped it as a living, breathing thing– dare I say, a river– until I stepped into it. The texture of the concrete river banks under my feet, a little slippery from the algae that has grown on it, the movement of water against my ankles, the perfect refreshing temperature, the unexpected sound of water flowing, the moments where the city faded from my immediate senses and the current became louder than the traffic. Of course, I still saw the rusted shopping carts lodged in the channel and the clusters of trash we tried to pick up along the way. 

But those didn’t diminish the experience. In fact, they completed it. They were and are part of my life in Los Angeles, whether I want them to be or not. In fact, there was something full-circle about it. Trash and storm drains were my first entry into environmental thinking; when I was little, I used to drag my dad around the neighborhood to pick up litter. To find myself doing that again, but alongside the river I had spent years passing without really seeing, felt a lot like kismet. It was actually quite emotional, as if I was reconnecting with the earliest version of myself who cared about place, responsibility, and water, and in a way, rediscovering the river at the same time. I’m not surprised it took actually being in the L.A. River to bring that feeling back. 

So, standing there, feet in the current, I began to realize that a second chance doesn’t have to mean an erasure or a return to something more innocent. It can look like recognition and reconnection. Being able to be present in a space that so many Angelenos, including myself, pass by everyday without a second thought. I didn’t need the river to be pristine to feel connected to it. If anything, the imperfections made that connection feel more honest. It reminded me that nature, particularly nature in cities, is actually something we live with far more intimately than most of us realize. It is just waiting there for us to step into relationship with it again. That embodied moment helped me see what Tilly meant about protecting the future mythology of the river. Second chances are acts of imagination, they ask us not just to repair the past, but to nurture what could be. The L.A. River might never be “untouched nature,” but maybe the future doesn’t need untouchedness to be beautiful, restorative, or worth fighting for. Maybe the river’s second chance begins with us choosing to see it, not as failure or infrastructure or afterthought, but as a living place, a shared story still and possibly forever in the process of being written.

— Sascha Weiss,  November 4, 2025