Image from an LA River X guest host takeover by Trinity Zhang, 2022. Retrieved from the Western Water Archives.
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.
Image from an LA River X guest host takeover by Lane Barden, 2021. Retrieved from the Western Water Archives.
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.
Image from an LA River X guest host takeover by Peter Bennett, 2019. Retrieved from the Western Water Archives.
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.
Spencer Nicholas now works as the River Operations Coordinator at Friends of the River – a statewide water policy nonprofit working to protect and restore free-flowing rivers across California. Spencer graduated from Pitzer College in 2024 with a B.A. in Environmental Analysis/Policy with a focus on the history of water infrastructure development in the West. Spencer’s undergraduate thesis, Pedaling the Dream, investigates the lasting environmental and sociological impacts of water infrastructure in California’s Central Valley, told from the perspective of a three-week bicycle trip that traced the valley’s man-made waterscape from Shasta Reservoir to Bakersfield. You can connect with Spencer via email.