LA RIVER CLEAN-UP

Hello! My name is Tina Nguyen and I attend Cal State Los Angeles. I had no clue Los Angeles even had a river before I enrolled into Professor Hernandez’s English 101 class. Most of our readings had to do with the environment, Jenny Price’s article was specifically about the Los Angeles River so it prepared our class with what we were going to deal with. On the day of the FoLAR (Friends of the Los Angeles River) clean-up which was April 23^rd 2016, my friend and I got hot and were already irritated by the heat. We collected our shirts, gloves and trash bags for the clean up to start at 9:00AM, but we got bored and left to the river. We complained a lot, but once we walked towards the river, we got confused or at least I was. I was expecting either full on cement or an actual river, but I saw that the entire concrete was overfilled with different types of trees and plants. Everything looked fine from the ariel view we saw, but the closer my friend and I got to the trees, the more of the flaws we saw. There was trash EVERYWHERE. Potato chip bags were lodged into the bushes, foam cups were decorative to tree branches, and plastic bags hugged almost every tree. We’ve only been scavenging trash for around 10 minutes and our bags became filled. On our way back to drop off our heavy trash bags, I spotted a baby grocery cart that didn’t even look like a cart anymore and a huge tarp attached to a bed sheet wrapped around a tree. We tried to rip it off but it was too strong. Anyways, we reached to the top of the river to drop off the trash bags and saw that the grocery cart I saw down at the river wasn’t the only one. There was at least 3 more large shopping carts filled with random trash along with other huge objects that got dragged up the river. Within half an hour of cleaning up the river, a pile of trash bags started building up quickly. The amount of people that showed up covered most of the river that we could see from where we were at. So in little time, there was no more trash to pick up and we started moving towards where the water to see if it was an actual river. There was flowing water but it was feet level. Other than that, the clean-up wasn’t as bad as we thought it’d be due to the heat. It made me realize that the times I was too lazy to throw away my trash in the trashcan, it could’ve went down the sewers and ended up harming the environment, which it probably did. The fact that I saw the amount of trash wrapping around the trees, bushes, and plants, it made me think twice about my laziness and that trashcans are there for a reason. Even though going to the FoLAR clean-up was going to be graded, I’m happy I wentbecause it made me feel good to clean up something that I could’ve caused and that my attitude changed because it taught me that trash doesn’t disappear once its out of your hands, it ends up where it shouldn’t be.