VIEWPOINT : While Parents Grieve, a Task Force Ponders, and the River Still Flows : The ditch that killed their boy has no ropes to catch the next boy.

The Hug A Hippo and Love A Llama people gathered in force at the Los Angeles Zoo late last month, protesting wildly and waving signs over the unfortunate, tranquilized death of Hannibal the elephant, who was on the verge of spending the rest of his life in a Mexico City zoo with tens of thousands of people trying to bounce a peanut off his head each day for the next 50 years.

No More is their message. The death of an elephant cannot be tolerated.

The Los Angeles River, as it winds its way through the Valley, sits nearly empty today, its cold, gray concrete scrubbed clean by the pounding rains of the past two months.

The rains that seem to have ended our drought.

The rains that turned our lawns golf-course green.

And the rains that swept a terrific 15-year-old kid named Adam Bischoff into eternity.

There are no protest groups along this grim channel. Not a single person or a single sign screaming over the not-so-tranquil death of Adam, who slipped into the water to retrieve his bike Feb. 12 and was washed away, struggling for 40 live, TV Action-Cam minutes, grasping horribly at a few ropes that were too short, at garden hoses that were too ridiculous and at scores and scores of would-be rescuers who watched as the frothing water carried the wide-eyed boy under 14 bridges before his exhausted body could fight no more.

David and Marilyn Bischoff sit in their living room seven weeks later, and the silence is overwhelming. Life has chewed them up and spit them out. They will never again be who they were or what they were. The years will ease the pain a bit. But you never come all the way back from something like this.

And they think about this: The cement ditch that killed their boy and shattered their lives beyond all recognition still has no ropes nearby to snatch the next boy who slips. Still no nets dangling from the bridges for a struggling child to grasp onto. Nothing, not a single flotation device stashed in the area for someone else’s terrified son to cling to.

What we do have, however, is the Los Angeles River Rescue System Task Force.

This task force, hastily put together by 3rd District Councilwoman Joy Picus two days after Adam’s death, will issue a big, thick, nicely packaged report on the problem.

In May.

Long after the rains have stopped.

And David and Marilyn Bischoff sit inside the silent house that their only son once filled with life and laughter and they read about the angry protests over the death of an elephant and they wonder if they are going crazy.

All it would have taken, David Bischoff says, is a net. Nothing more. Or 50 ropes hanging from the bridge, spaced a foot apart. That’s all. His son, a strong swimmer, would easily have grabbed onto one or two of them and been pulled back into this world.

Simple.

And instead of lying on this overcast and chill day in a cold, damp hole in a cemetery, Adam would have been playing soccer. And David and Marilyn, instead of sitting in a dark and silent house trying to survive the quiet nightmare for another day, would be watching him, their hearts alive instead of aching.

Recently, another teen-ager fell into a rain-swollen feeder channel during a storm. Miraculously, he was plucked from death by a Fire Department helicopter that was sitting just yards away and was summoned, entirely by a massive stroke of good luck, by a police officer who happened to see the youngster floating by.

And just last Wednesday, two more kids were swept away in San Gabriel. Both were saved after 20 minutes--and at the point of exhaustion--as firefighters hastily stretched a rope across the raging ditch and snatched the boy and girl from death after several all too familiar rope-tossing efforts failed.

The boy is 15. The girl is 13. The dramatic, unorganized, no-plan, frantic rescue was carried on live TV. There will be no funerals this time.

“It was all mixed up, but it worked out well,” said San Gabriel Police Sgt. Gene O’Connor.

Pure luck.

Since the river was paved in the 1940s, dozens of people have been swept toward the ocean.

Many have died.

Fifty years.

Common sense would bring us permanent, fixed nets or ropes.

Politicians have brought us a 90-day task force.

“I think if we lived in a small town, the problem would have been solved already,” David Bischoff says. “After a tragedy like this, the people would have gotten together, that same night or the next day. And they would have come up with a solution. They would have installed nets. Or ropes. And the next time, someone’s son wouldn’t die.

“But in a place like this, with all of its technological advantages, things don’t work that way.

“It’s funny.”

And then David Bischoff lowers his head and slumps into his chair and is stone-quiet for a long time, realizing perhaps that nothing in his life will be truly funny for a long time, that too much of his future died while reaching frantically for kinked-up garden hoses and one or two thin, short ropes and even an aluminum pool-cleaning pole.

David Bischoff believes that things that are funny may never, ever, come back.

The City Council’s Los Angeles River Rescue System Task Force issues a report on May 14.

Maybe it won’t rain before then.

Maybe it will.

Damn shame about Hannibal, wasn’t it?