“Channel Crossing”

“Dover was a fine sight at dawn, its cliffs glinting crisply as they caught the matutinal rays. The steep rising escarpments resembled monumental slabs of white pork topped with dark rind. As the boat more closely approached them, they struck me as great chunks of stale white-chocolate from which bits had been broken or gnawed off or grand magnifications of the chalk chunks I had found as a child on hill hikes. As we came closer to these precipitous bluffs, I could see that their faces were not smooth but torn, jagged, and ripped, with large sections higher up overhanging recessed concavities further down and sharp chines of v-shaped rock that presented lithic prows to the storms, fogs, and winds that attacked them without abeyance. But these intimidating eoliths of some long lost race of ancient giants were not cold, dead monuments but residences for lithophilic creatures of many sorts: birds nested and hunted here, feeding on insects and sea life that made the stone their home. Such life forms lived, as it were, in the graveyards of their ancestors, for the cliffs themselves were partly composed of the remains of small plants, zoophytes, and other diminutive sea creatures.”