Sam,
Your East and West Shtickle doesn’t really come in, and neither does the river example. If you lie down or you turn around the paper to read it up down, it won’t reverse to be read upward.
What you lead up to is the actual answer, though. In short, you are looking at a front view from the back. I wrote another example earlier, but the mods deleted it. I guess they found it offensive, somehow. Yeah, it’s hard to tell…