Columnist Steve Lopez writes in the LA Times:

“This is gonna blow your mind,” Josey Peters promised, calling me down to the banks of Ballona Creek. “You’ll never be the same.”

I pushed through the bushes, eased down the slippery slope and stepped into the muck of a million pieces of trash. For as far as I could see, east and west, the banks were littered with plastic cups, fast-food containers, spray paint cans and chip wrappers.

It had rained a smidgen the day before, the first wet weather of the season, and this was what had washed downstream from the area west of downtown Los Angeles. Debris floated in the murky water, too, and a lot more, no doubt, had washed out to sea.