A photograph...

A scenery photo that, as usual, is too blue, too dark, too blurry. And what happened to the fish?

This is "West Wall", Salt River Canyon, St Croix, US Virgin Islands. A gothic place, the terrain is that of rock breaking off the land into pinnacles and steep arroyos, tumbling into the depths of the sea in incomprehensibly slow geological time. Speeded up, it might look like the ice falling off a melting glacier. But to us humans, it is frozen in time.

The top of this feature has twenty five feet of depth, an underwater plain stretching toward shore, flat and solid looking. The edge drops off as sharply as the edge of a table. Whenever I'm there, I always wonder what happened to jolt the rock loose to form this drastic terrain.

Geologically, Saint Croix is an ocean upwelling, a chip off the bottom of the sea. Scientists say it may have wandered all around before becoming lodged against the Caribbean Plate where the island is now.