Time Traveling

Last weekend, we spent three quiet days swinging at anchor on the York River.  We followed the fishing boats out of Irvington and had a relatively short hop down the bay to Yorktown.  The Atlantic influence of this part the Chesapeake is in evidence everywhere we turn, with pelicans and dolphins eager to feed on the plentiful baitfish shoaling near the surface.   We’ve had our fishing lines out and had a few bites, but other than a couple of smallish perch, we have yet to catch anything worth keeping. 

Virginia is steeped in history and Yorktown was a great place to establish a base for a few days.  Of course, we were a little behind on the news so it wasn’t until we started walking around the historic sites that we realized the full meaning of “government shutdown.”  Fortunately, many of the museums and exhibits in this area are administered by non-profit foundations and are still open.  We caught a shuttle to Williamsburg on Saturday and spent a few hours exploring colonial life through the many exhibits there.  It was a beastly hot day and we sympathized with the living history docents garbed in layers upon layers of clothing.  Strangely enough, the magazine was a big hit.  I now know more about colonial weapons and ordnance than I ever wanted to – an odd thing for a pacifist.  It was fascinating, though, and we experienced an entirely different presentation at the Yorktown Victory Museum the next day when Jeanette volunteered to be part of a gun crew and the demonstration of a brass, 8-pound light gun (what I would previously have called a cannon).  She also volunteered to remove a musket shot from the camp surgeon’s leg and had much to add to his discussion on the medical treatment of soldiers.   A budding herbalist, she definitely would have been on the wrong side of the heroic medicine practiced at that time.  Ken, in the meantime, became almost misty-eyed over the simple one-room, dirt-floor cabins.  Apparently, my beloved Pimentels were born in the wrong century. 

Sunday evening found us pulling into Hampton in anticipation of heading across the river to Portsmouth/Norfolk on Thursday where we had reservations at the Tidewater Marina.  We rented a car on Monday and spent the entire day at the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News.  One of the docents, upon learning that we had sailed down from CT, referred to us as Yankees.  That was when we remembered that Virginia was only the second state to secede from the Union after North Carolina.  While the Yorktown Victory Museum really focuses on the ideals and optimism of colonial America that inspired and fueled the war on independence, the Mariner’s Museum is primarily concerned with down and dirty military battles.  Who engaged what, where - from the Revolutionary War through current military actions.  An entire wing of the museum is devoted to the design, building, exploits, loss, discovery, excavation, and recovery of The Monitor, which foundered in a storm off Cape Hatteras after a very short career in the Civil War.  The unique spinning gun turret is still housed underwater during conservation efforts but is visible from a viewing room.  The information and artifacts contained within that museum are vast and, in one day, we barely scratched the surface.  One of the more disturbing, if memorable, exhibits was on survival at sea.  Not shipwrecks per se, but the diaries and accounts of shipwrecked sailors as they clung to life rafts, jury-rigged solar stills and fishing spears, and prayed for deliverance.  I had my doubts about taking Jeanette through it, but it was a connector to the other part of the museum so in we went.  She was a little unnerved at first, but it was the video of the Queen’s Birthday Storm and the rescue of the crew on a catamaran that put her over the edge.  I quickly ushered her through the rest of the exhibit and I’m not sure which one of us was the most relieved to put it behind us.  It was all a little too close to home. 

With the weather deteriorating rapidly, we decided to cross over to Portsmouth early and checked into the marina yesterday morning.  We’ve had torrential rains all day and, even in the middle of the marina, the gusts are well over 30 kts.  Inside, we are warm and snug, huddled together on the settee, glad for this time that we have with each other.