The visit to Flight 93 Memorial

I have driven from my house in Pittsburgh to Philadelphia countless times over the past three years and every time I see the exit in Somerset County for the Flight 93 Memorial I think I should turn off and go see it and every single time I find a reason not too.

This past weekend my grown son and I happened to be in Somerset County for another reason, he was driving me around and I told him I’d appreciate it if we could visit the Flight 93 Memorial together, so we did. We talked just a little bit about September 11th and what he remembered from that day and I told him what little I remembered about the flight that crashed into some farm land in a rural area of Somerset County on that terrible morning.

What I knew was this was one of the four planes taken over by terrorists. Then passengers overtook the terrorists and in the ensuing battle, the plane crashed. It’s been over ten years, I was pretty sure that was what had happened.

We drove through spectacular rolling farm lands on a bright and brilliant sunny day, quiet for the most part.

It’s about a 15 mile drive from the highway to the turnoff to the National Flight 93 Memorial and then another 4 miles to the actual memorial grounds. We passed a newly planted grove of small trees and I surmised by their number, they must represent all of the people who died on September 11th, not just the people who perished here in Pennsylvania farm country.

We rounded a corner and parked our car and got out and began to walk. There were a lot of cars, but plenty of room in the parking lot for more. There were rusted out beaters and new cars of every type, trucks and motorcycles and RV’s old and new. We were surrounded by Americans of every stripe and as we began to walk towards the various parts of the memorial I realized I was walking with a complete diversity of Americans in color, style and shape. In fact, the only thing we had in common was our quiet.

That is what stunned me and it still does. In my entire life I have never been surrounded by this many people of this much of a wide spectrum of backgrounds and every single one of them from small children to elderly cane walkers, all of them were quietly walking. No one blabbing on a cellphone. No one arguing, no one screaming. Nothing but the sound of all us moving slowly towards the crash site.

We walked a structured path that had designed sections that explained what had happened on that fated day. I did not take much time to stop walking. I was drawn to the actual end of the memorial. On one side is a series of large planks of what I presume is slate or granite, each with a name from the planes manifest etched on it. This forms the end wall and it is long and impressive in its breadth and solemnity. As you approach that, on the left is a large wooden gate, that looks to be hand made out of tough, hand strewn timbers. It is there that you can look out over a field, down a mowed path, the actual final resting place of the Flight 93 is off in the distance. I stood at the gate and just stared. About a city block away is something that is hard to make out, a pile of some sort, the last remains of the flight.

Only in comic books do we ever really get a battle of good and evil that played out that morning in the cockpit of Flight 93. That morning, in those moments, the decisions made by the heroic actions of the passengers on that plane, regular people who decided to step up.They took on a very real evil and in that field they won. Of course, unlike in comics or movies, when that plane crashed upside down into that grassy field going over 500 miles an hour, no one was going to survive.

It’s a strange place for a memorial. Then again, when you look at it, it’s a perfect place for a memorial. My son and I sat on a bench looking over the field. The only sound we could hear was the far off trees rustling in the wind and birds singing an incredibly beautiful song. We sat there for about ten minutes and for that entire time all the people who walked past us did not make a sound. The trees, the birds, the peace was all that we heard, was all that mattered.