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. Afterwards, 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, and creating their very own LA River X Remix. Read on for a remix from Spencer Nicholas (Pitzer '24).

It Really Is a River

By Spencer Nicholas, as part of Water in the West, Spring 2023, Professor Char Miller

Ankle deep in quick current. Cool not cold. Moving swiftly in the deep channel. Pooling, swirling back eddies. Willow leaning, roots in sand. It’s hard to see it as anything but a river.

It really is a river.

It’s funny. Standing barefoot in one of the soft-bottom reaches of the Los Angeles River, the phrase didn’t make much sense.

All I could think was of course. This feels like a river. I wanted to challenge anyone to come stand in my place and argue otherwise. What else could it be?

In that same moment, I also understood that this was not the norm. Not only was this one of few such soft-bottom sections, but the heavy rains of the previous winter meant that the flow now coursing between my feet was unseasonal – abnormal.

And yet it wasn’t. If there is one thing I have learned about water in California, it’s that this is how it always works. Droughts. Long ones. Harsh ones. Years or decades long. And then, there are floods. Big ones. Weeks and weeks of rain. California is bipolar in this way; temperamental. It always has been.

In that sense, the water, which was now brushing my shins as I moved deeper, was anything but strange. So why did it feel that way?

I’m beginning to think that it’s a kind of buffer. The engineering marvels – and they are marvels – that have reconfigured the L.A. Basin’s waterscape have done more than divert water. They have protected us from flood and drought. They have made our modern lifestyles possible. They have channelized – domesticated in the words of Charles Sepulveda1  – what were once raging, volatile rivers emblematic of the California of 150 years ago.  In other words: the California of today. 

These water systems provided us with a new normal. A more normal normal. A normal without floods or extreme scarcity. Our new normal is constant, comfortable. Now, as a result, anything outside of this constant – anything that cannot be effectively buffered by these systems – appears strange and alien. This winter was a testament to that.

It really is a river.

This is a powerful statement, but also one that many of us wish wasn’t necessary. It implies that this fact is not common knowledge; that we need to be reminded. It implies that we might otherwise forget what it means to live by a river – that we might lose sight of our river and learn to expect it to be something other than it is. 

These expectations are dangerous because they carry with them assumptions about how the world should work. What should happen. And losing sight of reality – losing sight of a river – can be dangerous in its implications. We lose the ability to fight for it, for its inhabitants. We lose the ability to critically analyze our use of it. The expectation that the L.A. River is a river provides a certain security and a certain protection. If we expect the L.A. River to be something else, these protections are gone.

It really is a river.

I have also been forced to grapple with my own expectations.

Our trip to the L.A. River caught me off guard. I was excited to go. I was eager for the intellectual experience of seeing the river firsthand. I was also anticipating a certain reaction. A certain river.

I expected to see a concretized river – one with little or no flowing water. I expected to stand on a high concrete bank and to try to imagine an older L.A. River, one that predated all the gray.

Instead, I found myself not thinking any of these more abstract thoughts. I took off my shoes and waded into the water just as I would the rivers back home. The water looked the same. The water felt the same. And if I focused on only the scene in front of me: rushing, swirling dark water framed by the shade of a sandbar willow, I felt as though I could have been in that earlier California.

Standing in the river, all other thoughts left me. All abstract philosophizing about what makes a river a river left my mind completely. There was no question anymore. It was obvious.

This, in a nutshell, is what I most appreciated about our trip together. Prior, I understood abstractly that the L.A. River is, in fact, a river. I felt – in that way that I suspect many ecologically minded people feel – a sense of loss and longing for an older, untampered river. And I understood the fight that LA River X and Friends of the LA River are fighting. But standing there, my own feet in the water, I began to see it. 

— Spencer Nicholas, May 2023, with additions in January 2026

1 Sepulveda, C. (2018). Our sacred waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a decolonial possibility. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 7(1), 40-58.

* "It Really Is A River" is an often-heard phrase about the Los Angeles River, and is the title of a photographic exhibition curated by Tilly Hinton and Char Miller that was on display at the Central Library in Downtown Los Angeles in 2022 and at The Claremont Colleges Library in 2023.

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.