YORKTOWN  AFTERNOON

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2007

Driving out the Colonial Parkway from Williamsburg to Yorktown, you go mostly through

green trees that grow tall on either side of the amalgam surface of the roadway. But when

you get closer to Yorktown, everything opens out to your left and there is the York River.

There's a large white vessel on the horizon just at the end of the distant trees but rather

hard to see.

I zoomed in a bit to show it better but it still barely shows against the pale sky.

We walked along the British lines near the visitor's center...

I liked the look, the shape of this clump of cedar trees.

Behind the visitor's center, the path leads down to a mortar facing the York.

It was the oak, though, more than the mortar that caught my attention.

Looking back at the visitor's center

The York just past the mortar

Looking back at the oak with seedheads of the grasses in the front.

My mother used to call these bushes with purple berries "Beauty Bushes"

More oaks along the earthworks where the British cannons sit

Looking at a distant cannon between two big oaks

The tall seedheads of the grasses were everywhere alongside the narrow dirt path and

I kept letting my hands move over them as I walked along, finally deciding to capture these

two particular ones because I could bend and see them against the sky.

Another oak. When I think of this walk along the top of the earthworks, it will be the oaks

more than the cannons that I'll remember.

A berried dogwood and grass seedheads....

Dogwood in the afternoon glow...

Flag snapping smartly in the breeze near the visitor's center...

I couldn't seem to find my "sense" of Yorktown where we'd been before. Then we drove

here to Surrender Field, parked, and walked down a trail to the viewing place. These are

the woods just to the right of that trail.

The ramp up to the viewing place where the voice of Orson Wells awaits to describe

events on the field that spreads out before you.

Looking at Surrender Field from the end of the viewing site. The British marched from

Yorktown down the road that lies just at the far edge of the field on the right at that line

of distant trees.

Somehow this field, what happened here, was Yorktown for me. I was glad I'd found it at last.

The late afternoon shadows were wonderful.

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