fallout. A torrent surges off a rock cut, a waterspout erupts from a crevice, the roadside gutter a torment of asphalted debris. Our paths continue to diverge, the crumps clinging to the high tops, whilst we drop into to a wide strath, a flat bottomed valley that’s speckled with grazing llamas. All the arroyos that we cross are bone dry as the effects have still to arrive. Then from the struck hillside, a 
bore of scum and froth worms across the gentle incline. A bullnose of scud pink silt laden water is braiding towards us. Like raindrops running down a windscreen, they split and merge, some racing, some making slow progress towards the wind rippled, dry stream bed and a pass under the road. A few paces behind the dozing front, a reef of small standing waves have built up, pushing the creeping grub onward. There’s an element of fantastical fiction about watching this apparently animate being, moving with purpose and unstoppable determination. The lather of suds, the ichor of rust, the relentless determination, it comes straight from the special effects studio of a black and white era: ‘Dr Who’.
A living being that tomorrow will be but a dead, damp patch of sand. A riverlet, a mineral conveyor belt that’s mining a mountain down to the ocean. Like Lantana flowers, here today, gone tomorrow. Only to be awoken by the next storm.
