I searched the car frantically for her that day; swinging open each door, squeezing my hand in between the seats in case she had slid through like a stray quarter. Rational judgment doesn’t apply when you’ve lost your mother. We had driven into the city together, she waited in the car while I went inside for the job interview and now she was gone. I paced back and forth, panicking, when she suddenly emerged through a small break in the chain-link fence. “If you get this job, you’ll be close by the river,” she said.

I spent the next five years slipping through that fence, dozing off on the hard concrete riverbed during lunch breaks. When the rain fell heavy last winter I watched the river swell torrentially and by the next week, flooding had left the surrounding vegetation drenched in trash up to the highest branches. Oftentimes I stood numbly transfixed by the water; soaking the tips of my toes, fantasizing about submerging my feet, having the trashy moss curl up my ankles, becoming one with the sludgy lump of duck-shit bobbing leisurely downstream.

I don’t know if daydreaming about being duck-shit is problematic. I now walk on the opposite side of the river along an 18-acre strip of land dubbed the Bowtie Parcel. A former rail yard, California State Parks purchased the land in 2003 as part of a billion dollar initiative to revitalize the LA River. Pending its development into a park, the lot has become a site for cultural programming spearheaded by a collaboration between the State Parks and the arts organization Clockshop—commissioning artist Mel Chin to install eight small gardens as part of the city’s inaugural biennial, Current:LA Water.

Chin’s gardens are only just beginning to grow. Featuring native plant species which thrive on minimal water, the gardens model the possibilities for a larger drought-resistant Californian landscape. They have a long way to go amongst the throng of invasive species that have long overgrown the strip. A guide (or “MirrorMaker”) offers me a blueprint for growing my own native garden, but I tell her I don’t have any land; my cement porch is decorated with potted cacti and a dead bouquet of roses, none of which I have ever watered. The sun is setting as I arrive at the last plot. Across a sea of yellow brush, punctuated by the prickly coifs of stumpy palms, a train signal flashes intermittently red. The river surges powerfully here, gushing past the masses of bamboo that swarm the water. A plane dipping into Bob Hope airport roars mechanically overhead, while weekend traffic mumbles along on the 5. Within this moment of cacophony, everything sounds like water—and the transcendental aspiration of dissolving into a lump of duck-shit seems for once within reach.

Photos by Nadia Dougherty

Current:LA Water
LA’s Public Art BiennialThrough August 14