L.A. River Cleanup

My name is Ricky Hoang and I'm from Ximena Hernandez English 101 class.  This past Saturday we had to clean up the L.A River.  At first, I wasn't looking forward to it because it was hot and I had to wake up early on a weekend.  When i came to the event, I noticed there were a good amount of people there, it seemed like a lot of people really cared for the environment.  I was put in a group with four other people.  I didn't really have a specific job, I just picked up trash as we went along the river and let people put trash into my bag.  As the day progressed, I noticed we started to gather more and more trash, the item that we seemed to get a lot were plastic bags, this surprised me because I didn't really expect to see a lot of plastic bags there.  The river itself was very shallow and dirty itself, but it was nice to see it.  I noticed as we got deep into the river, the more cotton there was, I'm not sure if it came from the trees or not.  Besides the plastic bags, we picked up a good amount of food wrappings.  When I saw the river, I wasn't surprised to see it the way it was because I seen part of the river on the bridge on Chinatown.  The water was pretty green and there wasn't much in the water at all.

This experience had a lot of relations with the readings we been doing for "No Impact Man" because both of these situations had to do with the environment.  "No Impact Man' talked a lot about plastic bags and how they end up in the ocean, I know the river isn't a ocean but it made realize why there were plastic bags there.  Overall, this experience has taught me a lot about the environment.  It showed me that a lot of people ca come together to clean up something that's very important to us.  The L.A isn't the most cleaned place but after that day, it was definitely better than what it was before.  This experience was not easy because of the weather and the conditions of the river but I would it was worth it because at the end of the day, the river was cleaner than what it was before.  This has taught me a lot about nature and something I would like to do in the near future.