Friends of the Los Angeles River Clean-Up - Aquarius Springs!

This past weekend, Friends of the Los Angeles River held a clean-up even in near Lake Balboa in the Van Nuys/Encino area. After having a positive experience with an FoLAR sponsored clean-up this past May, I headed out to this event Saturday morning on the Red/Orange Line.



LA River before starting



One difference with this event was that it was sponsored by Aquarius Springs! water. The beginning of the event started with a few people talking, a presentation of a plaque and $50,000. Local television and print media was on hand to capture the event.



People watching the presentation. I'd be lying if I wasn't super anxious and ready to go (as demonstrated by the fact I was busy taking pictures instead of paying attention...)


I don't know if it was due to recent clean-ups or lack of rain or just that everything was buried, but there wasn't a large deal of obvious trash visible.


At first it looks like maybe there is a single piece of trash there...



... but when you examine things up close, you notice the plastic stuck all over the place.



more trash.....




I'm sure I was neither the first nor the last person to try to pick this up that day. It's the only part of a much larger shopping cart stuck in the ground. I know areas of the LA River near my home don't have the high rate of shopping carts that this area does. A little further up the river, there's a huge pile of shopping carts stuck in the river tangled up and stuck together. Wandering in that area you can find and see shopping carts from stores you forgot even existed.




This guy was telling this woman he was just walking through the park this morning, noticed the clean-up happening and decided to participate. Awesomeness.





So many dried thistles. Back in May they were purple.









The lighting was bad, so this photo does not do justice to the intense and iridescent colors on this beetle. There were also a large number of small intensely blue colored dragonflies that I was too busy watching to take pictures of them.





The opening to a small clearing in a bamboo forest. I could have spent the rest of the day in there.






At one point my boyfriend and I wandered a little bit away from where most people were and stumbled upon what ended up being a huge amount of embedded plastic bags, random items and stringy things. While I was digging and pulling at this plastic, a LA Times reporter came over and briefly interviewed me for a story about the clean-up. I said much more than what ended up in the story, including some comments about companies making the items that end up in places like this should be made responsible for the whole lifecycle of the the items they make, including packaging. Green LA Girl picked up on and brought up this conflict of sorts and how it wasn't mentioned in the article. While I agree since I said something very similar to the reporter, at least there seems to be a decent enough collection rate on CRV items that my boyfriend and I only collected a single crv item - a glass drink bottle, during our 3 hours of cleaning up.




don't be fooled by the beauty...






...there's still trash and other things everyplace. The tree actually grew around the cart. There's plastic in the trees and stringy plasticy things all over.






a trash bin, mostly buried.
When I saw this, I couldn't help but to think to myself about people finding this crap stuck in what used to be the only freshwater source in this area of California, wondering what on earth us 20th and 21st century people were thinking. Why is there plastic, Styrofoam and carts everyplace? Any answer I could give, even today, doesn't speak positively of the society we've created. Because no one told us or showed us? Because we were too lazy? Because we figured it was someone elses' responsibility? Because we figured the part we could do was too small to matter?














Because of the Aquarius Spring sponsorship, the water provided at this event was a bit more wasteful than at the past FoLAR event I attended. At that event I brought along my Klean Kanteen, but FoLAR also provided reusable water bottles and access to a water cooler. The result was no single use water bottles! I was curious how this would be handled this time, but brought along my water bottle anyway. As expected, we received water in single use plastic bottles. On one hand I was disappointed as I know that FoLAR knew how to do things in a less wasteful way. At the same time, I understood and could sympathize with the reply I got from a FoLAR representative in that some things come at a cost. FoLAR also sold and gave away reusable bottles that day in addition to the bottled water.

Overall it was a good event. We had some difficulties with the water situation, but it seems that FoLAR is very receptive, understanding and willing to try to fix these things. I was happy to find out that FoLAR is helping with the Heal the Bay/Coastal Clean-up Day event this year after some problems with the Heal the Bay sponsored event last year at the same location. It does make me frustrated and sad and countless other things to see all of the trash in the LA River, obvious or buried deep in the river beds. This section of the LA River is endlessly fascinating to me after getting a chance to spend time there over the past few years and conveniently easily accessible from public transportation. I find the experience to be somewhat meditative, wandering through tiny slices of nature, cleaning up the city along the way and learning things that nothing else has taught me in such concrete manner.

If you have time this next weekend, FoLAR is holding another clean-up event in Cypress Park.

Review: Skid Row

The first time I ended up in the Skid Row area, it wasn't on purpose. I didn't even realize I was there. I was driving to a concert at the smell, an odd venue with the entrance in an alleyway on the edge of skid row. I was in the general area, but couldn't see any addresses or signs and was having problems finding parking. I kept on driving, searching, looking for the destination. Eventually I realized there weren't many cars around, but there were tons of people in tents all over the sidewalks, people wandering in the streets, yelling at me.
At another point someone ran across the street with a gun in their hand. After spending most of my time in California in Claremont, I was somewhat terrified, but I had to give someone at the concert a ride home. I tried calling the radio station I volunteered at to find out more info about the venue, but no one knew anything and no one answered the phone at the venue. I made it to the concert alive that night, eventually. The following concert were all fitting for the night (the artist said the smell was their favorite venue to play because of the atmosphere!) but I've had various, less terrifying, but more intentional experience with Skid Row since then.

This past week I came across a documentary called Skid Row, "starring" Pras Michel of the Fugees. Essentially Michel lives on Skid Row for 9 days with a body guard under cover, $9 and a tent, discretely filming a documentary of life on skid row. Michel has to deal with still trying to maintain his normal self in the atmosphere and realizes that in some ways, the living situation changes your person. They seemed to have picked one of the few rainy periods each year in the Los Angeles area, bringing more drama into the documentary including rats running around due to their homes being flooded. Although the footage is a bit jumpy at times, the film accurately shows what I've observed while walking around Los Angeles. The random seeming altercations, people clearly under the influence of hard drugs, the debris, the tents and rats and gatherings. They don't really interview or show any individuals clearly suffering from major mental disorders. It's worth watching if you are at all interested. It can't bring the smell and chaos or make you feel the same way as walking past many people living in this situation does, but it does prepare you for the experience to some degree.

One reason I bring this up is that living in a more car-free manner in Los Angeles and means dealing with more homeless individuals. Just this afternoon while on a bike ride I saw a guy urinating in the Universal City Metro parking lot with a limo parked nearby. A little further up the street in front of an apartment building, a guy smelling strongly of alcohol was laying in the bushes. Many people in cars just put up their window and keep looking straight ahead. I've been on the train when someone gets on, smelling strongly of urine, sweat and whatever other things collect on clothing and the rest of the people on the car gather down on the other end, but you can't help but to notice the homeless individuals' shuffle and that they must be suffering in some physical way. I've seen the same woman rant loudly about Jesus and her husband and Satan on the trains and staying at bus stop after bus stop in my neighborhood, talking to no one in particular. I've seen children innocently getting into conversations with some homeless individuals only for the child to be completely confused once the homeless individual starts talking about something unrelated or something that isn't there. As the Gold Line leaves Union Station, there are various sites visible on both sides of the tracks that are common gathering places where I've seeing rats running around and trash piling up. A couple of weeks ago I saw a woman standing in the LA river near downtown with a t shirt on, washing her pants in the river. One thing I found to be so difficult is seeing so many extremely poor and extremely wealthy people living so closely in a city. I've heard people covered in all sorts of sores with densely tangles hair talking eagerly to one another about where they would go to get drugs once they got off the Red Line at Pershing Square. While some people are going through things in life that live them few other options, some people make decisions that someone leave them in this situation. It's hard to keep your eyes closed and ignore it when it's in front of you though once you start moving throughout the city without a car. That's why I was torn when I saw the guy taking the recyclables out of the recycle bin last week.

Friends of the Los Angeles River Clean-ups

On August 22, 2009 from 9am-noon at the Sepulveda Basin at Balboa Park in Van Nuys, Friends of the Los Angeles river will be having another river clean up. I am hopefully going to make it there! This part of the LA river is super pretty and somewhat natural. The last FoLAR clean up I attended was also well organized!

There is also going to be another clean-up event on August 29, 2009 from 9am-noon at Taylor Yard in Cypress Park.

wild fennel

wild fennel, 8/2/09, hiking in Franklin Canyon Park

daily days

Another day, another 5 bags and a couple of hands full of trash. I picked up some new, better fitting gloves yesterday, which made picking up trash and cleaning up the ground a little easier.

A woman from my apartment building who owns dogs was out this evening and talked to me a little. She always asks me about riding my bike. She previously lived in Japan and would ride all of the time, but feels unsafe riding a bike here in LA. She also told me she has been picking up some glass in that area (so her dogs aren't hurt!) so she was happy to see me cleaning. At another point a somewhat dirty man carrying a bag and a guitar walked by and smiled and said something about building your community! That was odd, yet also again very encouraging. I stayed out for about 40 minutes, picking up trash and cleaning up the land a little.

Toward the end, a guy appeared with a grocery basket, trying to pick up the few recyclables I had left in the bushes. Then he walked over to the blue bin I had been filling with recyclables and pulled out all the cans and bottles, including the ones I had just put in there. On one hand, I wanted to pull out the ones I just picked up and give them to him and gently remind him that removing stuff from the blue bins isn't exactly legal. On the other, I knew many of those bottles and cans had been sitting in the bushes since last week because I didn't pull the out of the bushes at that time and I don't know if he would have even gone through the effort of removing some (I had gloves and some tools to help). Then again, most of the time when people are digging through the recycling bins, things aren't great. But the money for the recycling program comes from the things being recycled. I didn't say anything in the end, but I could tell he was trying to avoid me.

After reading about The Daily Ocean where beach trash is collected every day and weighted and photographed in some ways, I thought I would share some of the gross/weird things I found today (although I didn't have my camera):
-beer can still filled with beer and a condom (gross!)
-most of a roasted chicken from the nearby Ralphs in a plastic container
-a few security tops from bottles of alcohol (looks like some stole some alkehol)
-a bottle of arnica montana homeopathic medicine
-tons of styrofoam cups and very few plastic bags

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In other news, yesterday morning as I approached the Gold Line at Union Station, I saw a sign saying something to the effect of "You agree to have your bag searched if you step beyond this point", this point being the ticket area leading to the Gold Line. Blood boiling! I knew these bag searching were happening with the Metrolink, but I was not happy to see this. I'm not really sure how I feel about riding the train knowing this is happening now, even though I don't have anything to hide. I just don't want people's noses in my bags when I'm just trying to get to work.

There is also something weird going on with the sheriffs on the metro in general. Today while riding the Gold Line to Pasadena, sheriffs came on the train twice to check tickets, in about a 10-15 minute period. When I maybe foolishly asked what was going on, another regular on the train mentioned this happened earlier in the week too. The thing that I find so weird is that someone that rides the train or bus every single day would only have to be caught once every month to 3 months to make it more cost effective to pay for your daily rides instead of getting fined! I don't know if someone is trying to artificially raise the sheriff costs before they install turnstiles, if they've had some sudden rash of problems and are searching for certain people or are just hoping to make people's day horrible when they legitimately can't find their pass/ticket or what, but this is rather odd.
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calm

8/2/09 - Ducks at Franklin Canyon Lake at Coldwater Canyon Dr. and Mullholland.

1 Year Car-Free

I've been so busy the past week that I forgot to mention it was my 1 year anniversary of being car-free! For the most part, the year was what I expected. I saved more money that I thought I would (although my work increased the reimbursement for not driving to work as well). I've discovered countless small businesses in my neighborhood near home and work that I simply wasn't looking for in the past. I can now confidently rack up bike mileage in the double digits in a day without feeling like I was about to die. I've found beautiful little gardens and places to bike. I've still been able to make sure the recycling program continues at work (one of the last errands I did weekly with my car!) It's been good for the most part.

I had some difficulties until I learned what I needed to do to plan my transportation. My boyfriend was extremely helpful at times in filling in the holes with public transportation service gaps, getting places that are more difficult to reach without public transportation and helping carry larger things. I actually haven't driven at all since my car accident where my car and I parted ways. Granted I know my car-free transition was already most of the way there compared to some others - next month will be 4 years since I started riding the train to work, but taking that last step is scary in some ways. I had already flirted with the idea of getting rid of my car, but I still didn't know how to handle my pets, the recycling at work, my recycling at home and other thing. I managed to work around them all and purchased a new bike to help me out with getting to some of those places on my own (I still dream of biking to the Burbank airport at some point, only I doubt they have long term bicycle parking!) and only had 2 flats along the way :)





at a unknown intersection in the West Hills/Canoga Park area, 7/24/09