This quotation from Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” was published in 1908.  Of course, it’s a children’s classic, but the quote about England’s River Thames  inhabits the end page for the city’s Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan.

“By it and with it and on it and in it…It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.

Whether in winter or summer, spring, or autumn, it’s always got its fun and its excitements.

When the floods are on in February…and the brown water runs by my best bedroom window; or again when it all drops away and shows patches of mud…and the rushes and weed clog the channels…I can potter about dry shod over most of the bed of it and find fresh food to eat, and things careless people have dropped out of boats!”

See you on the river, Jim Burns