Ball's Bluff Battlefield

Author's Comments

There is a clearing in the woods above the Potomac where forty-three soldiers are buried in a circle of small white stones, and almost no one goes there. The cemetery at Ball's Bluff is one of the smallest the country keeps, and it sits in a pocket of hardwood forest a short walk from the parking area, reached by a path that does not announce itself. In October, when the leaves have started to turn and the mornings are cold enough to pull mist off the river below, the place becomes something I do not quite know how to describe. Quiet is not the right word. It is quieter than quiet. I have come here at first light more than once and found myself unwilling to raise the camera for the first twenty minutes. The fog moves through the trees in slow drifts. The stones catch whatever pale light filters down through the canopy. You can hear the river without seeing it. The trail continues past the cemetery to the bluff itself, where the ground falls away toward the Potomac and Maryland sits on the far bank. The view is not dramatic in the way an overlook is dramatic. It is quieter than that, more interior, and in autumn fog it gives you something a wider vista could not. Work close. The details here matter more than the landscape. A single stone, a single tree, the edge of the clearing where the forest begins again. That is the photograph this place wants you to make.

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