If You're Hungry, Why Not?
Fishermen battle over shit-sucking carp in the L.A. River
Mario stands on the concrete bank of the Los Angeles River in cracked boots and paint-stained denims, holding the end of a fishing line. He stares resolutely at the other end, circling in a black eddy at his feet. Mario’s face and hands reflect two decades of beer, freebase cocaine and general construction. Lately, though, with the collapse of the housing market, the Guatemalan immigrant has had little better to do than fish. When he catches something, he’ll boil it intact: “If you’re hungry, why not?” he says through a Marlboro.
“Even the head,” he adds, with a lick of his parched lips. “You buy tacos on the street, you don’t know where that came from, either.”
Every day, people fish on the natural-bottomed Glendale Narrows section of the river. There are two main groups: those like Mario who wouldn’t think of throwing back a perfectly good fish, and those who wouldn’t think of eating one. With few exceptions, the eaters are immigrants – Latino and Asian – the sportsmen comfortable Caucasians.
All the fishermen are seeking the same species, the solidly blue-collar carp – the most common fish in the river. Most American anglers consider carp a loathsome sucker indicative of a sick watershed. In Japan, England and continental Europe, however, sport fishermen consider them a respectable adversary. Americans are catching on, and the fly fishing community has burgeoned on the L.A. River in recent years.
“There are two reasons we’re here,” says John Yancey. “It’s five minutes
from our house, and carp are a fun, fighting fish.”
The sportsmen tend to gather upstream of the Hyperion Avenue Bridge, while those with pigment stay downstream of Fletcher. The two groups cross paths between Fletcher and Hyperion, and the usual WASP-versus-immigrant bickering ensues.
“Only the Mexicans eat that shit, and I’m not a Mexican,” says Doug Poulin of Atwater Village, casting near a torrent pouring from the Glendale Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Technically, both the sportsmen and the sustenance-seekers are engaged in a misdemeanor. Los Angeles City Park Rangers spottily enforce an ordinance that prohibits “loitering or remaining” on the riverbed. The fly fishermen seem to suffer worse persecution for it, though.
The sportsmen’s preference for pools near Griffith Park may be why. Park Rangers reckon that their dominion includes the bike path running along one edge of the river from Riverside to Fletcher, because it is maintained by the Parks Department. They use that scrap of legitimacy to banish anglers.
Head Ranger Albert Torres claims that he is beholden by the spirit of equality to do so. If he kicks out a vagrant camping on the river bed, he says, it is only fair for him to kick out everyone else, too. Furthermore, “Duck Man” – Tony Taylor, who feeds the ducks and geese near Hyperion – often forces the issue by summoning Rangers to the scene.
Taylor hates all fishermen. A gap-toothed old country boy, his love for ducks and geese developed on an Indiana farm. Both the Mexicans and the sport fishermen are irresponsible lawbreakers and litterbugs, he says. They leave behind hooks and line in which his beloved birds become tangled. Recently, Taylor rescued a pair of geese with line wrapped around their legs.
In a YouTube video, Taylor and fisherman Carmelo Gaeta verbally tussle.
“Why don’t you go drown in the river, you motherfucking spic!” Taylor screams.
Reflecting on the incident, Taylor is only slightly more diplomatic.
“Carmelo is just like the rest of ’em,” he says on a recent cloudy day in Atwater. “He wades out in the middle of the river. If he gets swept away, the fire department is gonna have to come rescue his sorry ass.”
Each rescue, Taylor says, can cost taxpayers thousands of dollars. LA City Fire Department Captain Tina Haro says three people were rescued from the river in 2008.
Taylor would like to see the river become an exclusive wildlife refuge.
“I don’t have much use for people,” he says. “They’re irresponsible.”
Though he has nothing against vagrants, he adds, they do sometimes shit in the river.
Despite Taylor’s pleas, the Rangers never venture south of Fletcher, where a tree-root-torn crust of asphalt replaces the bike path. Since the LAPD has more pressing concerns, immigrant fishermen like Felix Martinez are left unmolested.
Martinez fishes with his family beside the pilings of the Glendale Freeway Bridge. He limps with a strange gait on a permanently bent leg. Accompanying him on a recent afternoon, a fat middle-aged Latino woman nurses Miller High Life while her children amuse themselves loudly, surrounded by broken glass. Felix’s uncle, an illiterate geriatric from rural Chihuahua named Roberto, commands two giant sea-fishing poles nearby. Between them, they pull out a fish every 10 to 20 minutes, smashing each on the head straight away and tossing them in a sun-baked plastic bag.
“We saw a police once, maybe
six months ago,” Felix says. “He didn’t do anything.”
No such luck for the sportsmen.
Bob Moore of the Pasadena Casting Club fishes with a fancy fly rod at the Glendale sewage outlet pool, wearing a vest with a fishing license clipped to its collar and sporting a white mustache. He looks like a member of Dick Cheney’s Jackson Hole entourage. One of the Rangers’ recent victims is his colleague Harry, an old angler who stopped showing up after he had an unidentified female Ranger “read him the riot act,” Moore says.
Like Moore and most of the licensed fishermen, John Yancy is miffed that the Mexicans get away with fishing without licenses. He accuses them of doing far worse. They take scores of carp out of the river and stalk the lake in Lincoln Park, he says. The Rangers should be busting them instead, he says, as
well as Tony Taylor, who is committing a “federal crime” by feeding
migratory birds.
The poor quality of the water is perhaps the only thing on which both the bourgeois and the proletariat agree. During dry weather, the river is composed entirely of outflow from sewage treatment plants like Glendale’s. The plants filter the sewage so well that it comes out as clear as a mountain spring. But a mysterious soup builds up behind the heavy steel outlet doors of storm drains – the unofficial trash can of ten million people. Rains flush the drains all at once, swelling the river with bloated dog corpses, crackhead shit, transmission fluid, marinated pigeon guts, battery acid, millions of cigarette butts – a bubbling cauldron of hepatitis. The mixture runs swift and cloudy down the channel.
Edward Belden of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Watershed Council vacillates incorrigibly when asked about levels of pollution in the L.A. River.
“I can’t really answer that question,” he says. “There’s no simple answer.”
Would Edward eat an L.A. River carp?
“You know, I’ll have to check the latest metrics and get back to you about that,” he says.
“It’s filthy,” Mario admits as an aerosol can drifts past his toes. He pulls his hooks in, and they come up laden with thick green algae, part of an annual bloom fed by fertilizer runoff.
Published: 03/04/2009
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Comments
Yes, we eat carp in Europe, especially for X-mas, but there are special ponds with clean water for them. Here is a link, sorry to say it is only in german. http://www.teichwirtschaft-moritzburg.de...
regards from Sara, and complimet to the author
I've had carp. Grass carp. Not bad if you get them not too big.
From considerably cleaner waters than the LA River.