Shanksville, PA

I wrote this several years ago after I accidentally happened to find the raw and very moving initial memorial to Flight 93 in a scarred field in Shanksville, PA. The U.S. National Park Service has since constructed a more permanent and formal memorial to the heroes who first fought back.

A neat thing happened to me on a recent drive home from Pittsburgh.

I make that four-hour trip back to Lancaster about once a month. The Pennsylvania Turnpike is the most efficient route, but once in a while, tired of the monotony, I'll take the back roads - small towns, stoplights and all. Route 30 parallels the turnpike and provides a relaxed diversion. I've probably taken that route a couple of dozen times in the last 15 years, but never paid much attention to the small towns that you hit along the way.

On this recent drive I realized that one of those small Pennsylvania communities is Shanksville. The minute you hit that really small town you see an unremarkable sign pointing down a modest road to a memorial for Flight 93 from September 11. I caught a peripheral glimpse of the sign, drove past, had a quick twinge of regret, and made a u-turn back towards that side road.

After a couple of turns – past homes conspicuous only by the American flags in their front yards - the final road is a badly rutted path over an old coal mine. Near the end, the road has such a sheer climb that you're looking up at the sky. Just as you crest the hill and point nose down, you see the memorial. It was a pretty stunning sight.

The memorial is pure America. Its core is a web of 2 x 4's and chicken wire, strung up to form a backdrop that's 15 feet high and about 40 feet across. Fire hats, baseball caps, tee shirts, a local fireman's jacket and police department patches are hung on the wire, most with notes penned to them. Apparently the assortment is updated periodically and a few of the newest garments were sent by fighters on the ground in Afghanistan, many with hand-written declarations that the contributors are continuing the fight that Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Sandy Bradshaw and 37 other heroes began shortly before Flight 93 went down.

The 2 x 4's are covered - almost blackened - by hand-written notes. There are several plaques in the ground, one with the names of all the passengers and crew of Flight 93, others memorializing individual heroes from that day. Someone planted simple wooden markers for each of the passengers and crew; a few of the markers had plastic-enclosed pictures of their namesakes hanging from them, left, I would imagine, by family and friends. There are about a dozen benches around the site, each engraved with two or more names of the people from Flight 93. The benches are also covered with comments – many including the words “thank you” - the most heartfelt graffiti I've ever seen.

The crash site pictures that I remembered seeing all showed a backdrop of trees. There they were. Aside from that backdrop, you are in an incredibly open space.

Two people, a man and a woman, were there, on their own, as very casual volunteers. When she saw me reading some of the hand-scribbled comments at the site, the woman asked if I wanted to hear about "that day." She had a 3-ring binder with some pictures taken shortly after the crash. The photos don’t show much more than smoke and a scarred field. That’s all there was.

The actual crash site was about 500 yards away, fenced in, with an American Flag on the fence. Before she pointed toward the impact area, I hadn’t noticed it. Afterward, it was hard to look at anything else. The pit that was created by the crash has been filled in and covered over by grass, but you can clearly see that the ground had changed. The woman (I’m sorry I didn’t catch her name) pointed in the direction from which Flight 93 had approached, and mentioned that when the plane was overhead, it was flying upside down at 500 MPH, about to make a 45 degree roll into the ground.

When I mentioned that I'd read that a local man had actually seen the plane just before it crashed, she asked: "Would you like to meet him?" He was the other volunteer, a man named Lee. He told me about seeing the plane, hearing the explosion, and feeling the heat from the sudden fire. He pointed to his house off on a hill, and said that a piece of the plane ended up in his side yard. A small piece, the size of a car door, he said it was the largest piece of the plane that was found. He has met the families of many of the people from the crash, and appears to have made this shrine his life.

There are apparently plans for a permanent memorial, but it's hard to imagine how they could create one that's more moving. Just as the heroes on Fight 93 made it their battle, the site has a feel that it's "our" site. There was nothing for sale, and there were no requests for donations. It was a pretty windy day, and the only sound at the site was the sound of the flags, hats and shirts in the wind.

Originally posted to LinkedIn on September 8, 2014