If there was a body of water bigger than a pothole it came to mean something special to me, namely that water did exist. “All rivers have their smell. The L.A. smell was diesel fuel, carburetor dust, fear, loss, emptiness, and the future,” MacAdams wrote. The year is now 1985 and he has founded Friends of the Los Angeles River. An activist foremost, MacAdams had been elected to the Water Board in Bolinas, California in the early seventies.
His poetry and creative output was in service of call to action. He set to writing his epic The River, after reading William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. The River reads as a journalist’s steno notebook, with observations and visions only a poet might have the courage to philosophize in an otherwise cynical world. “Catherine Mulholland says that when she was a girl sometimes you'd have to row to Van Nuys High School / Now the school is bordered by deep concrete canals...Very intense dreams I must be coming down with something / I hope it's nothing nearly as intense as my vision of Earth as the New Mars—red dust storms rolling around a planet /that died a long time ago.” He writes a familiar line, “I wish you would walk with me here more often / red-wing blackbirds nesting in the cat-tails / electricity humming in the high-tension lines...remember me as one who called himself a country boy yet wrung his song out of the city.” MacAdams meant a great deal not just to writers and fellow activists (Mike Davis admired him so much he fabricated an interview between the two at Elysian Park), but to community members who would start and end their day biking concretized earth, searching for herons and a language that could account for stark contrasts.
“If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much,” is a line from a Mary Oliver poem. I instinctively liken it to, “I wish you would walk with me here more often, red-wing blackbirds nesting in the cat-tails.” Oliver describes the woods of rural Ohio and MacAdams describes the sun bleached pavements striving for semblance of landscape. The LA River was the last place I was in love. It reminds me of harmony, of the possibility of still winds and water on days the bureaus of land management try in vain to suppress hope. My resolve is to return soon, three years from that memory, and search for MacAdams’ name finger-painted in Nature’s halfpipe.
-Katie Calderon