River Voices

I believe that this planet, Mother Earth, has a voice, though quite unlike we humans. Some of what she says is expressed as body language. All humans witness at least a portion of this language's more dramatic displays, including earthquakes, hurricanes and cyclones, volcanic eruptions, lightning and thunder, floods, droughts, epidemics, and melting ice caps. Today more of us are beginning to glimpse meaning in these events. Beyond this, as I have said before, she has other, more subtle forms of expression which few of us now acknowledge or even begin to understand. Each unique to itself, awareness and communication are also faculties of all her distinguishable parts, among those of their kind and with the others who share their place. It is only humans, embracing cultures with a singular devotion to tools, and the illusion of power over the wild which tools seem to possess, who have made themselves deaf to this vast and wonderfully complex interchange. Mother Earth tells me that in the Los Angeles region our three rivers - the Santa Ana, San Gabriel and Los Angeles - are central to the recovery of her creation, which we call wilderness, and of humans as an element in that creation. Unless we welcome and aid the healing of these now dismembered, barred, and poisoned wild water creatures she will do it without us. Such an initiative by her could end our presence here. I fervently hope that humans may yet have a place in this region's future wilderness, but this is unlikely if we refuse to hear the joy, the hope and the agony of our rivers today, in their own voices. To this end, I have translated a fragment of what can be heard from one of these rivers. It is only a tiny part of what the rivers in the mountains say, and sing, each hour of every day, which I attempt to express in a language not shaped for the rivers' voices. Yet if just one of you gains from this an understanding of these rivers' actual condition, and seeks through our communities to free them, then the translation will not be entirely vain. Even better, listen to a wild river yourself. But be cautioned. The water makes, as it moves, wonderful sounds, and can be a delightful sight. Yet this is barely the beginning of what you need to sense if you wish to feel even one complete emotion, or understand even one idea, from the river. Find a part of the river upstream and beyond sight of any dams, where no tools are present, except those few that you bring for your own nurture and protection. Then think of the river not as something with which you are familiar, but rather thoroughly alien, about which you know almost, or altogether, nothing. Think of it as more than water, as a vast, powerful, vulnerable, creature which includes animals, plants, stone, earth, and sky, and much else about which you can hope to be only indirectly aware. Then think of it as part of you, and you as part of the river. Now breathe and listen, very quietly, in the presence of the river, to yourself; and accept that the river recognizes you, present, within itself. Do not be impatient, no matter if you have little time. Though a lifetime of such joining teaches us far less than the river knows, a moment, rightly held, is also enough.

The Santa Ana River

Like my sister rivers, I am a multitude, and yet one

I begin in mountains, at their greatest heights. I begin as an expression of their peaks and ridges, my substance theirs, and theirs mine. Hear me. Like our sister rivers, we also begin as rain and snow and ice. As these become one with the mountains, so do they become one with us, whether, in their liquid, irresistible sinuosity, coalescing under the surface or on it. Hear us. And so, like my sister rivers, I am water. Wild, stirring, pooling, searching, rushing, whirling, springing, twisting, leaping, crashing water.

Hear me. Like our sister rivers, we are rock. Wet, freshened, moving rock. Boulders, stones and pebbles. Placing ourselves free form within wild water, shaping it, shifted by it, strengthening, given bubbling, roaring voice. Hear us. Like my sister rivers, I am roots. Roots, drawing water through moist earth, anchoring and nurturing coastal redwoods, California alder, speckled-skinned sycamore, white and black oak, bay, spruce and pine, bush and grass, in all of whom I may be found.

Hear me. Like our sister rivers, we are animals, moving within, and to and from, the water. Fish, abundant until the occupation and severing, now almost vanished, trout planted and harvested by humans in their favored streams, impotent, without troutlet descendants. Deer, bear, bobcat, coyote, squirrel, lizard, mountain lion, bighorn sheep, sparrows, red-tailed hawks, and many others, share the water, sustaining and nurturing our substance, shaping our lives with gathering places. But many fewer than before, the grizzlies and the condors gone. So are the humans who once were with us. Hear us. Like my sister rivers, I am air. I am stirred by, above, the waters, and I move so that the trees which embrace the waters may sing. I breathe the water and become wetter myself, helping to cool all who share in the river's body. I bring mountain cold in winter, covering the banks with snow, leaving a place for winter tracks of those animals who gather to drink. I whirl and cascade in summer fires, which consume but which the river resists, and satiates. I am that which the river breathes in, and out. Hear me. Like our sister rivers, we are earth. Beneath and beside the water and the rock, sustaining us, forming us and offering us paths, holding and held by roots, trunks and branches, inescapably supporting and challenging our animals. Storing us in deep unlit cavities, returned again in joyful springs which delight us as unexpected gifts. Earth turned, lifted, reshaped by us from the smallest undulating depressions to great canyons, so that even time and we are one. We are not as we seem. Hear me. But like my sister rivers, I have been severed. Of my paths little remains, all of them in what you call the southeastern San Bernardino Mountains. Here are the names you have given to most of what is left. Alder, and Hemlock Creeks. Mile, Hamilton, And Rattlesnake Creeks. Wildhorse, Cienaga Seca, And Fish Creeks. Lost Creek, Santa Ana South Fork, And Frog Creek. Santa Ana East Fork, Santa Ana West Fork, And Barton Creek. Cienaga, Forsee, And Canal Creeks. Gone from us are our many other streams, which once stretched from the peaks of the eastern San Gabriels through the San Bernardinos to the southern end of the San Jacinto Mountains, filling the valleys and basins from there to the Pacific, our great planetary sea, and our final, ancient, constantly newborn home, for longer, longer, longer than you know. Dams are the blades with which you have cut us asunder, from one another and from the sea. There are others, but two have sliced through my once central channel. First, distant from the mountains, came the blade you call Prado Dam. Then, with doubled malice, at the foot of the San Bernardinos, we were struck by the Seven Oaks Dam. I no longer know the Prado. Now, after capture in a great, deformed, killing reservoir, some of our water passes through the still fresh Seven Oaks scythe and is lost. The rest is returned from the reservoir to the sky or lost through the earth below. Nothing else may pass. I wait for these and all other dams' passing. Hear us. The Santa Ana River, and her sisters the San Gabriel and Los Angeles rivers, still exist at their origins in the mountains of the Los Angeles Region. I have seen and heard them, and I know this to be true.

But those largely artificial channels south and east of the first dams are no longer rivers and streams, despite the terribly weakened, isolated, wildness evident in those portions of the downstream channels which are not concreted. It is also so that since the first dams on the San Gabriel and Los Angeles rivers, and on Bear Creek, a mountain tributary of the Santa Ana, are buried deep in the mountains, wilderness attempts to reclaim the waters which pass from these dams, until they emerge into urban areas at the base of the mountains. These attempts are, however, tenuous, subject to human management of the dams and the level and quality of the water permitted to flow from the dams. The inescapable reality, for those who will hear it, is that dams which aspire to permanence end true rivers and creeks, in Los Angeles as elsewhere. The water routes below the dams, which usually but not always follow paths once determined by natural waterways before the dams were built, are essentially polluted urban runoff and treated sewage/waste water drains which ultimately dump the befouled, imprisoned water into the Pacific. It is dishonest, and a betrayal of Mother Earth's creation, to give them the same names as the severed, original creeks and rivers now found only above the dams. Name them after the counties which control them, or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers which builds and maintains them, and give them numbers, such as San Bernardino Drain #2, or Corps Drain #15. Wild, organic, waterways are much more than water, or the water plus parks and bike paths currently pursued by those who would "green" the urban channels. And their whole, fulsome, wildness will return from the mountains to the sea, soon, whether we would permit it or not. This may be by floods which overwhelm the dams, and the urban structures that the dams seek to sustain in the floodplains of the lowland valleys and basins. As Bruce Gumprecht pointed out in his book, The Los Angeles River, millions of people live in these floodplains. He concludes that they are too many to be moved. Yet they, we, will be moved. Sanity calls for this migration to be voluntary, aided by every collective means at the disposal of the cities and counties of the region. For the last three years we have been experiencing a drought in Los Angeles; but the rains will return, and given global warming, it may be with unprecedented vigor. We, it seems, are prepared to wait, and ignore the enormous danger which such floods pose to our lives, and the lives of our families and friends. We, it seems, are prepared to trust in the Corps, even though its dams and levees have failed in New Orleans and, now, the Midwest. We, it seems, cling to the belief that our planet has no defenses against our destruction of her creation, a vital part of which are the seaward portions of the Santa Ana, San Gabriel, and Los Angeles rivers; or, we believe that there is no end to her patience. The Santa Ana is waiting for the dams to pass away. With the help of their mother, they may achieve it themselves. Do we believe it is acceptable to stand in their way? I do not.

Bill Luttrell, one voice of Mother Earth July, 2008. All photos on this page were taken July 14, 2008, by the author, on or beside the Santa Ana River near its beginnings high in the San Bernardino Mountains. They are only a glimmer of the Santa Ana's true character. The image in green which appears on this page was created by Ulla Weimann.