A River Runs Through Us

When the rain isn’t falling and the weather’s been dry for a while, the Los Angeles River is nothing more than a trickle of water meandering from Canoga Park to the sea. Sometimes there’s no water in it at all.

Even now, a few days after the big storms, it looks about as lethal as a frog pond for most of its 52 miles. Anyone seeing it for the first time would be hard pressed to imagine how dangerous it can be.

When El Nino comes howling at the door, that sleepy drift of a trickling stream suddenly becomes a muddy, roaring, ripping torrent pounding down a concrete channel at 35 mph and looking for lives to take.

Kids come to explore when it’s that way because they’re naturally drawn to chaos and pretty much unaware of mortality. Sometimes they climb fences and ride their bikes along the water’s edge, daring the danger and tempting the forces that drive the river on its twisting course to the Pacific.

Adam Bischoff was one of those kids six years ago. The river was up and thundering as he rode his bike along its sloping channel. Exactly what happened, no one will ever know. A miscalculation or a slip sent him into the torrent and carried him downstream like a leaf in a tide.

TV cameras caught the last futile efforts of firefighters trying desperately to save him. We saw Adam, a terrified little boy, screaming and reaching back to the life that had been before the rushing water swept him away.

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If there is redemption in tragedy, the price of Adam’s death is being repaid by sustaining the lives of others. Horrified by the pictures of a young boy’s last moments, both the Los Angeles City Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors ordered an overhaul to swift-water rescue responses.

The results are multi-agency teams whose equipment and rigorous training have become models for the nation. We want no more Adam Bischoffs disappearing downstream with no one able to save them.

But there’s more. Go back. It’s 1980, 12 years before television cameras would galvanize local government into action with pictures of a dying boy. There are no cameras present when another child ends up in the same river.

El Nino storms have been pounding the Basin for days, and on the first clear afternoon, Earl Higgins and Nancy Rigg decide to go for a walk. It takes them on a bridge over a dark and violent tide.

As they cross the bridge, they see two boys riding bikes at the water’s edge. A bike falls in. One of the boys goes after it and is swept away. Higgins vaults a fence, wades into the water and reaches toward him.

A foot in the current is enough for the swollen river to pull him into a roaring tide that ultimately spares the boy but claims the man.

Seeing her fiance taken by the river and witnessing the awkward response of firefighters ill-equipped and ill-trained to do anything about it, Rigg makes a vow that dark and terrible day. She will do something about it.

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For the next 12 years, Rigg campaigned for creation of the kind of rescue team that might have saved Higgins. She lobbied firefighters and lifeguards and wrote letters to anyone in authority, conducting her crusade with the passion of a saint and the determination of a street fighter.

“I wanted someone to listen,” Rigg said the other day in an apartment filled with boxes of books, research materials and files, “but no one would. The year Earl died, six others were drowned. Every time there was an incident, I’d fire off more letters.”

It took Adam’s videotaped death to realize her vision. The teams she had campaigned for were finally brought into existence. “It was a sad dream I had,” Rigg told a reporter, “but a dream come true.”

She didn’t stop there. Education was needed to keep kids away from the almost 600 miles of rivers and flood control channels in the county. She and Earl had been documentary filmmakers together before he died. Now she would use her skill to teach and prevent.

She and others created a videotape, “No Way Out,” through the Los Angeles County Office of Education. Its graphic footage serves as both a lesson and a warning. We see Adam Bischoff again, we see the dangerous waterways and we see what’s being done to save lives.

What we don’t see is what I saw: Nancy Rigg, eyes filled with tears, remembering the man she loved. What we don’t hear is what I heard her say in a sad moment of triumph: “I would have loved not to have done this.” The film is dedicated to Earl and to Adam.

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Al Martinez can be reached online at [email protected]