Follow the path to the overlook
Ahoy, mateys.
I hope you had a blessed and love-filled Thanksgiving with many sweet faces to look upon and plentiful scrumptious goodies to eat.
We certainly did. There were a few bumps in the road but none of us are too much the worse for wear.
So preoccupied have I been that I just realized it's one week and then some, since the aforementioned quintessential fall holiday. Where that week went, I will never know.
The wall of names resembles accordion-pleated marble
I guess I would have to say that it went mostly to cleaning and decorating and getting organized for Christmas.
Some shopping may have taken place as well.
I have technically been finished with Christmas gift buying for a few weeks, but you know how it is: there are always loose ends that need tying up.
The stark concrete walls are broken in places, revealing the sky
Someone whose gift idea didn't work out, forcing you to change directions. The returning and replacing of things. Planning and buying of stocking stuffers and such like.
It will all be fine.
But a few weeks ago I promised to tell you about the second leg of our late-October trip, which began with a visit to my friend Sara and her husband Marty, in Virginia.
So let's get started.
The Tower of Voices late on an October afternoon
On the day we left Sara and Marty's bucolic environs, we were headed for a place that, in late summer this year, I developed a hankering to see with my own eyes.
(It followed my chance reading of this short essay by Ben Domenech on his substack, The Transom.)
And that place was Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Trivia: The crash did not actually take place in Shanksville. The address of the Flight 93 National Memorial is Stoystown, Pennsylvania.
The structure delineating the flight path, from a distance
Stoystown proper is located a few miles northwest of the crash site.
It is more accurate to say that Flight 93 ended its journey in Stonycreek Township.
(I imagine that the first reporters on the scene referred to the site as Shanksville, as it is the nearest town.)
(Certainly many of the first responders to the scene came from Shanksville.)
The gate leads onto the field and to the place of impact
It took us less than three hours to get there. it was a sunny, windy, chilly day that would see me needing to add an extra layer to my outfit before heading out to the field where the heroes died.
First though, we drove into the town and saw the same sign that Ben Domenech mentions in his article.
Welcome to Shanksville ... A Friendly Little Town.
Home of the Vikings.
One of the few pieces of the airplane showing United Airlines livery
And, below all of that: Shanksville Honors the Heroes of Flight 93.
It's unassuming farm country. There is nothing on your approach to the Flight 93 National Memorial that signals your proximity to it.
The original entrance to the memorial has been changed, and when you reach that first one via your phone's GPS, a vague sign points you in the direction of the new one.
We got there, and again: at a glance, there doesn't seem to be much to see.
The Visitor Center
First to come into view was the Tower of Voices, of which I'd read and which I was eager to both see and hear. It is ninety-three feet tall and there are forty chimes: one for each victim of the Flight 93 crash.
(There were forty-four souls abord the plane; the four terrorists are not counted among the victims.)
I'd assumed that the tower would be close to the other things, but it is in fact a good distance from the Visitor Center and Memorial Plaza, and from the crash site itself.
The chimes are motivated to ring only by the wind, and winds of at least twelve miles an hour must prevail in order for them to sound.
This sign welcomes visitors to Shanksville
This day, the ambient winds were light, wafting through at perhaps seven miles an hour. The voices were still.
I was disappointed at the silence. If you're interested, you can hear the chimes here.
But I am getting ahead of my own story. We visited the chimes as we were leaving the memorial site; first, we went to the Visitor Center.
It is an odd-looking structure until you realize what is going on. The approach is like walking towards a tunnel of sorts, with high walls which separate at intervals, and no ceiling.
It happened here: the field and the boulder, from the overlook
At your feet there is a walkway of stone that resembles black planks.
I later learned that the walls and the stone planks delineate the plane's flight path in its final moments. Their texture also mimics that of the hemlock trees that became part of the crash site.
Once inside the initial opening between the two walls, you see the Visitor Center itself.
Inside, there is a small gift shop, and then various displays and mementoes relating to the crash and the passengers.
It was an honor just to stand beside their pictures
Television monitors play, on an endless loop, the footage we have all memorized from that day.
You can stand at a bank of headphones and listen to the actual messages that several victims left for their loved ones on their answering machines or cell phones.
On display is a small piece of the plane -- one of the few pieces that survived and exist.
And of course there are pictures of the victims.
There is one chime for each silenced voice
By the time I had seen and heard all of this, my heart was hurting so badly that I had to get some fresh air.
Back outside, you keep walking on the black stone pathway until, off to the left, you are steered towards an observation deck.
From it, you can see the field where the plane crashed, at the edge of a grove of hemlock trees.
A seventeen-ton sandstone boulder moved there at some point from elsewhere on the site marks the spot where Flight 93 made impact with the earth, traveling at a speed of 563 miles an hour.
First responders are appropriately memorialized
The field is enclosed by a low wall, and there is a discreetly placed gate through which only family members, and the occasional government official, are allowed to pass.
After hanging out on the observation deck for a time, I went back inside the Visitor Center in search of TG.
We decided to drive down to Memorial Plaza rather than take the long walkway there from the Visitor Center.
An informative talk was being delivered by someone official but we decided to keep walking towards the field.
The overlook offers a sweeping panorama of the crash site
Once there, all you can do is look. You can try to imagine what those people went through, but nothing in your experience compares to it, or even comes close.
You look back at the concrete tunnel that marks the plane's flight path, and see how short a time there would have been from that place, to the place where it ended.
The boulder sits marking the spot and you gaze at it, thinking about all that it means.
There is a wall of corrugated marble with all of the names, and past that, the gate that I talked about before.
Never Forget: September 11, 2001
By this time, grief was dogging my steps. We decided it was time move on.
If you have never been to the Flight 93 Memorial and you're curious as to what all I am talking about, this YouTube video offers an informal guided tour that you may want to watch.
Before leaving the area, TG and I each took one another's picture beside the pictures of the victims.
On the way out, we stopped at the Tower of Voices and wished that the winds were stronger.
I appreciated the freedom to walk in ... and out
That was it. I had planned a place for us to eat in nearby Somerset, and we made our way there.
After supper, we drove to Pittsburgh.
Next time, I'll tell you what we did there.
Meanwhile, I hope you will enjoy every minute of this glorious Christmas season.
And that is all for now.
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Happy Friday :: Happy December
