While admiring the river's decolletage, I stand under the hot sun in an empty lot strewn with junked living-room furniture. On the channel floor, a flock of scavenging crows wade through an inch-deep sheet of water. Five miles downstream, I straddle what a realist might call the contemporary headwaters of the Los Angeles River, a concrete box that serves as a discharge point for the massive Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant. Before me, treated wastewater boils up to fill a small lake 50 yards wide. Willows and cattails line the shore.
Minnows dart through the shallows.
I see white egrets, blue herons, red-winged blackbirds, even a brown pelican. The birds don't seem to mind that this water has traveled via aqueduct from the Sierras, then was pumped over the Tehachapis, distributed to millions of toilets and sinks, and finally was collected, purified, and released into this little freshwater marsh. Perhaps avian species can acknowledge that city life is full of compromise. Los Angeles has to flush. In exchange, the birds get 40 million gallons, every day of the year.