Image from an LA River X guest host takeover by Jen Greenwood, 2025. Retrieved from Instagram.
Looking through the L.A. River X Instagram account, I was particularly struck by this image of graffiti reading: “I ❤ second chances.” In the context of our discussions walking around the river landscape at Lewis MacAdams Park, this phrase made me think about the idea of clean slates vs. second chances. It made me realize they are not necessarily one in the same. No, the L.A. River will never get a clean slate; it will never be fully un-concretized, scrubbed of its history, or returned to some pre-urban “natural” state. At least not while humans are still around. It carries too much. Too much legacy. Legacy of engineering, of human history, of concrete, of channelized water. The slate can’t ever be clean. But is that the point?
Looking at this image of this graffiti (“I ❤ second chances”), I am prompted to think a second chance means something different. It asks: What can we do with what we have? Who do we become when we choose to see possibility in the imperfect?
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?
Image from an LA River X guest host takeover by illustrator Su Jen Buchheim in 2021. Retrieved from the Western Water Archives.
Standing in a circle at the Lewis MacAdams Park along the riverbank, I was struck by what Tilly Hinton had to say about poet and activist Lewis MacAdams’ outlook on narrative building and narrative changing. As a poet, he believed in the power of language. “He always called it a river,” Tilly said. That refusal to concede naming power feels radical against the backdrop of what most Angelenos see as a concrete eyesore. Language is infrastructure too. We build worlds with it. And in calling the channel a river, MacAdams insisted that it could be more than the sum of its engineering, than its cultural and recreational relegation in the city of L.A. And in visiting his namesake park, I think he succeeded, at least on a small scale.
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.
Image from an LA River X guest host takeover by photographer John Worthy in 2020. Retrieved from the Western Water Archives.
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
Sascha Weiss is a member of the class of 2026 at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. She is pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Analysis and Science, Technology and Society. She is a born and raised Angeleno, growing up in the mid-Wilshire area. Sascha has always had a passion and interest in environmental causes, co-founding a web-based platform called the High School Sustainability Guide, a tool for high school students to be able to calculate and reduce their school’s carbon footprint, while she was a teenager. She has continued to pursue her interest in climate and the environment while studying at Pomona. Most recently, she was able to attend the COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan as part of a Pomona College student delegation.