When a continent and a seafloor collide and crack to pieces, so the seafloor buckles and the earth cracks open …

…the earth goes vertical instead of heading for Japan …

… then cools and turns hard …

… and lumpy …

…and is eventually known as a bluff, a flat, expressionless face, like a poker player who doesn’t show you his hand, but that’s just the talk of wanderers. It reveals itself easily enough…

as a short-season vertical river prone to flash floods, running over a bed of crustose lichens.

With eddies that collect bushes and trees, and even isolated lake systems.

Green lakes in a orange river with a blue-green bed. Very cool! It’s only humans, with our wobbly system of walking across flat ground, who think of this as a face, or even think of it as vertical at all. It’s just another stream, really. Or a waterfall, collecting rain from the sky. Quite the trick, really!

What a funny thing, to build houses under all that.

~

Peach Bluff, above sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitk ʷ