January 2025 - the fires

Last November, I went with a group of friends to see an art project at the Los Angeles River called What Water Wants. We all wore headphones and listened to Rosten Woo’s project about the LA basin’s watersheds.

Activists and artists and planners and researchers have been working for decades on a new plan to reclaim the river. In the ‘30s, the Army Corps of Engineers strait-jacketed it with concrete channels. But last year, my friends and I saw a heron pecking in the grasses at the foot of a tree. We watched water flow towards the ocean. The area across from us would soon be turned into a park. What Mike Davis once called “the redemption of Los Angeles’s riparian landscapes” seemed so close we could taste it.