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Most national parks don’t begin this way, with volunteers rushing to help. but for the people of Shanksville, Pa., the Flight 93 memorial just had to happen.
By Charles Slack, Parks Magazine
For four years, the Reverend Marlin Miller has stood a two-hour shift every Friday on a treeless hill near Shanksville, welcoming visitors in every kind of weather; at one point he had begun to wonder if anything could keep them away. Winters in this hilly region in the Allegheny Mountains are severe, and getting through them is a point of pride among the self-reliant residents. But that winter Friday, even Miller was impressed. Under the best conditions, there isn’t much to see from the hill, besides an American flag hanging on a 40-by-10-foot chain-link fence some 500 yards away. That day, as the wind whipped over the hill in angry bursts, driving snow into gravity-defying swoops, Miller couldn’t even see the flag. Who would come on a day like this?
But they came. First a lone car, headlights showing weakly through the snow, then, a few minutes later, a bus. Miller, a friendly, patient man, welcomed the visitors, as he always does, and answered their questions, beginning, inevitably, with, “Where did it happen?” He raised his arm and traced an arc in the sky, describing how an enormous jetliner, United Airlines Flight 93, screamed over the hill, heading south at roughly 600 miles per hour, rushing closer to the ground. Then it flipped several times and plowed into the earth near a row of hemlocks on that awful September day in 2001.
From the first, Shanksville was the unlikeliest point on the 9/11 triangle. In New York City and Washington, D.C., world capitals and obvious targets, the terrorists hit their marks with terrible accuracy. But no one meant to bring Flight 93 down here. One shift of the rudder and some other town, perhaps in some other state, would have had history thrust upon it.
Flight 93 was on its way from Newark to San Francisco when it was hijacked. It rose sharply near Cleveland and swung around to draw a bead on Washington, D.C. When it crashed, it was a mere 20 minutes from the White House, the Capitol and other national landmarks. The Boeing 757 had taken off later than the other hijacked jets, giving those aboard the time, in urgent phone calls with people on the ground, to hear about the crashes at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They could guess their hijackers’ intention, and in their storied struggle they fought to control their destinies.
Many Shanksville residents, watching with the rest of the world as the Twin Towers burned, remember feeling not only horror but also vindication for choosing to live hundreds of miles from everything, in a place where things like that didn’t happen. And then, at 10:03 a.m., they heard an ungodly boom. Their houses shook, the electricity went out, and life in Somerset County changed forever.
The road that runs closest to the crash site, Skyline Road, was basically a dirt lane prior to 9/11; now it is paved. It winds past a metal-recycling plant, on the right, with stacked hulks of vending machines and other miscellaneous metals. Most of the area was formerly used for strip-mining bituminous coal. Two enormous draglines, cranelike machines that scrape coal from the surface, loom by the roadside; one has been emblazoned with an American flag since 9/11. Soon, the road crests and a wide expanse of barren hills begins.
The crash site itself is now fenced in and guarded around the clock by the Somerset County Sheriff’s deputies. Officers stand vigil over what, beyond its historic and symbolic meaning, is also a burial ground. Like the plane itself, the remains of the passengers and crew were reduced to fragments or vaporized on impact. By weight, only 8% of their remains was ever found, and a few weeks after 9/11, when recovery efforts ended, workers bulldozed dirt into the crater dug by the crash. Grasses and thousands of wildflowers now blanket the scene.
Other than the fence, the most obvious sign that something unusual happened here is a dent in the stand of trees at the southern edge of the crash site, as if a mammoth creature had taken a bite out of the woods. Although the plane did not strike the trees, a fireball singed about 100 hemlocks, and the force of the blast sent debris flying into trunks and branches.
Once anonymous and forlorn, this land outside Shanksville now has an official title: the Flight 93 National Memorial. If all goes well, on September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of the crash, a 2,200-acre national memorial will be dedicated, permanently honoring the 40 passengers and crew members.
Unofficially, though, the site became a national memorial the moment the jet plowed into the field. Almost immediately, people started arriving outside of Shanksville, bringing gifts to a temporary memorial—flowers, homemade signs, baseball caps, T-shirts, handwritten messages, folk art. They left offerings along Lambertsville Road, which was then the nearest paved thoroughfare to the crash site. A makeshift memorial was created in a front yard on Bridge Street in the town center. More than 130,000 people have made the trek each year, and after a while, because visitors needed another place to leave gifts, local officials erected the 10-foot-high section of fence on the hill overlooking the crash site.
Donna Glessner, who, in January 2002, organized the Flight 93 “Ambassadors” to take daily turns on the hill, lives with her husband and two children a few miles outside of Shanksville. She says traffic in town was heaviest the first year after the crash, before tapering off to the current—yet considerable—flow. “Before 9/11, you could cross Main Street without looking,” Glessner says. “Then you had to wait to cross the street. These days, you may not have to wait, but you’d better look.”
Barbara Black, a Shanksville resident who once served on the staff at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and, until 9/11, was curator of the Somerset County Historical and Genealogical Society, initially took care of the tributes and is now working with the National Park Service (NPS) to preserve and catalog the items visitors have left on the memorial fence. The permanent memorial also will include places where people may leave offerings. Says Black, “We’re asking the public to help us write this story.”
Part of that story will be told in the words of those directly involved, through the hundreds of interviews with families of the passengers and crew, investigative agencies, rescue workers and local residents. Glessner’s sister, Kathie Shaffer, has suspended her career as a nurse in order to work with Black on this oral history. And almost everyone in Shanksville has something to tell.
Shaffer’s husband, Terry, chief of the volunteer fire department, arrived at the scene from his loading-dock job in Johnstown about 30 minutes after Flight 93 went down. He remembers only the blank stares of fellow rescuers who had no one to rescue from the smoldering hole in the ground. Unable to aid the dead, Shaffer is now intent on honoring their memory. The department’s new tanker truck carries red, white and blue hoses, a banner with flags for each of the passengers and crew who died, and the words “United We Stand.” A memorial plaque reads dedicated to the memory of united flight 93. “This”—the banner, the memorial, the visitors and the searing memories—“is who we are now,” Shaffer says, without resentment or even resignation. “It’s not going away.”
It takes an act of Congress to establish a national park, but approval of the Flight 93 National Memorial was never in doubt. Congressman John Murtha (D-PA), the representative of the region that includes Shanksville, introduced a House bill, the Flight 93 National Memorial Act, on March 8, 2002, and Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) proposed the Senate version a short time later. President George W. Bush signed the bill into law on Sept. 24, 2002. Even before that, though, it was evident that the Flight 93 site was going to be part of the National Park System—rather than being under state or local jurisdiction—and the NPS began lending a hand.
Although 10 years may seem like a comfortable span in which to design and build a memorial park, a decade is like a blink of an eye, says Joanne Hanley, the NPS superintendent who directs the memorial project from nearby Somerset. That’s because the world of land planning is dominated by procedural and environmental considerations, detailed studies and often-conflicting goals. An initial round of feasibility studies, normally a three- to five-year process, was completed for the memorial in an astonishingly brief 12 months. Mindful of the park’s profound connection with September 11, local, state and federal officials, as well as Shanksville citizens, have resolved at every stage to keep moving in the same direction. “The legislation was passed so quickly and without contest because Congress and the country knew this was something very special—we needed to remember and honor the victims,” Hanley explains.
When the permanent park is built, visitors will leave their cars to enter past a 93-foot Tower of Voices; inside its semienclosed cylinder will hang 40 large chimes, each with its own distinct sound. Visitors will then take a winding, processional-style road toward “the bowl,” the large, circular area where the temporary memorial now stands. They’ll immediately face a long wall, with a gap directing their view to the area almost everyone refers to as sacred ground, the precise point of the crash.
The bowl will be encircled by 40 individual groves of red and sugar maples that grow naturally in this part of Pennsylvania. There will be winding pathways and plenty of room for quiet reflection, as well as a visitor center housing a museum. The simple, elegant design, by California architecture firm Paul Murdoch Architects, with Virginia landscape architects Nelson Byrd Woltz, was selected in September 2005 from more than 1,000 entries in a lengthy, multistage competition. Victims’ family members, design experts, and local and national leaders all had their say.
Significant work remains. Planners must finalize negotiations to purchase land from several companies and private individuals. Meanwhile, a nonprofit organization called Families of Flight 93 (honorflight93.org), with support from the National Park Foundation and other partners, has launched a fund-raising campaign to supplement Congressional appropriations. Other groups working on the project and its fund-raising include the Flight 93 Federal Advisory Commission, appointed by Congress, as well as a grassroots group called the Flight 93 Memorial Task Force and, of course, the NPS and the National Park Foundation.
Jerry Spangler, whose family operated a dairy farm outside Shanksville for five generations and who is now Somerset County’s district attorney, serves on the task force and the Flight 93 Advisory Commission. He says of the passengers and crew, and of their families, “They’re now our neighbors and part of our families. This is a sacred challenge and an obligation.”
On the hill at the temporary memorial, it hardly seems to matter to visitors that they can barely make out where Flight 93 plunged to earth. The specter of those last moments in the sky, and the courage of those on board, are always present. Yet after staring at the crash site, visitors tend to spend much of their time examining the artifacts on the memorial fence, often adding gifts of their own.
In the space of several hours on a recent July afternoon, there were truck drivers, families in vans and about 25 members of a Pennsylvania motorcycle club, who rumbled up Skyline Road and affixed a club T-shirt to the top of the memorial fence. Among other contributions: a pair of boots and a note—“Thank you for fighting back”—left by a soldier who had worn the boots in Afghanistan, an airplane carved from a tree branch and an unsigned note in a child’s handwriting and spelling: “When you got on the plane you thought you were regular people but now you’re heroes. Thank you all.”
Erika and Bill Reale, a retired couple from Shaker Heights, an area of Cleveland, drove from Ohio just to see the memorial. Aware that they’d traveled roughly the same path as Flight 93, they lingered over the items on the fence and read the agonizing transcript of the jet’s voice recorder, available at the site in a shelter donated by the staff at the Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland and Virginia. Thinking of the passengers and crew, Erika Reale says, “The personal sacrifice is overpowering.”
The 245 residents of Shanksville, plus another 2,000 in surrounding Stonycreek Township, are mainly farmers, laborers or commuters to nearby Johnstown or Somerset. Before 9/11, they cherished their privacy. “We would rather not have been put on the map this way, or any other way,” says Miller. But since the crash, they have embraced the role thrust upon them, as custodians of a suddenly hallowed piece of American history.
As the Reales returned to their car for the drive home, Sue Strohm was preparing for her 4 p.m.-to 6-p.m. Saturday shift as an Ambassador. Strohm doesn’t know what she will do when the formal park is built, but like Miller and the other Ambassadors who take daily turns at the once and future memorial, she says she would gladly continue to volunteer. That’s a prospect Hanley finds deeply moving. “Any park superintendent would do anything to have a volunteer force of 40 to 45 willing to staff a site eight to 10 hours a day, 365 days a year,” Hanley says. “It’s an amazing thing. But if you have spent any time with the people who live here, you know they are amazing people. They are so committed.”
Sometimes, after a long week at work, Strohm wants only to stay in her cozy home at the edge of nearby Indian Lake and not make her way up the hill one more time to volunteer. But she goes anyway and is invariably revived by the curiosity of visitors and by how far they’ve come, and especially by the questions they ask. By the end of her shift, she says, she has forgotten how tired she was. “I don’t know whether I’ve gotten to everybody and answered all of their questions, but I’ve tried.”
This article appeard in the Premier issue of Parks Magazine.
