Joan Marie Nagy
Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2002

Events and places also touch our lives with varying degrees of persuasion. For myself and countless other Americans, the story of Flight 93 has had an unforgettable and compelling lure. It invokes an uneasiness that captures both our intellect and our emotion. It inspires thought, because it forces us into the scenario played out by the passengers. It asks us questions of ourselves we may not have the answers to or answers we may not want to face. It solicits an emotion that time won't spend.

We will carry the feeling that Flight 93 invokes into the future when we may someday have to cash in the lessons learned upon its reflection.

On September 11, after so many Americans had been violently murdered at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, passengers of Flight 93 had a very small window of opportunity to do what every deceased victim would have loved to have been able to do. They had the chance to fight their attackers.

Flight 93 had the chance to fight for their freedom, their lives, and to save the lives of other Americans. To their remarkable credit, they seized the occasion with a spirit of great American gusto. They knew the extent of the personal danger facing them, and they knew that if they chose to do nothing many more innocent American lives would be taken.

I spent so much time in quiet contemplation of the tragic, but heroic, events of Flight 93, I decided I needed to visit the crash site. I needed to be where a group of ordinary Americans, with precious little time, achieved the quintessential, selfless Christ-like perfection in their last earthly moments. I needed to be there as much for myself as for them, if not for the "moment in time," then, at least, for the "moment in place."

So, in the early morning hours of a beautiful late summer Sunday, I drove the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania toward the small town of Shanksville. I followed the red, white and blue signs from Main Street, several miles out of town, past farmland and a hundred-year-old covered bridge toward the temporary memorial near the actual crash site. Seeing very few cars on that road, I wondered if we would be the only visitors to the memorial in those early morning hours. I turned off the highway onto the newly paved, formerly dirt road and drove the long, gently upward sloping hill. In my rearview mirror, I spotted a second car, then a third, following.

It reminded me of the scene in the move "Field of Dreams," where a steady stream of cars takes visitors to a baseball field in the middle of an Iowa cornfield for, as one character puts it, "... reasons they can't even fathom."

The terrain of Western Pennsylvania, a continuous series of gently rounded hills, usually gives drivers a several-mile view of every forthcoming hill and valley. This road afforded us no such view. It was a steady upward climb. Seeing only the sky ahead, it was as if we were in a plane during takeoff.

I wondered how much further the memorial would be when suddenly we descended a short hill and spilled onto the gravel parking lot of the memorial. Much to my surprise, there were at least a dozen cars in the parking area and about 20 people already milling around the site.

The largest structure of the temporary memorial was a large wooden billboard about the size of a movie screen, which was propped up with two-by-fours set at a 45-degree angle behind the board. There were other structures of varying sizes and degrees of refinement, everything from a large, rugged wooden cross to an extremely large marble headstone professionally engraved.

I knew this would not be an ordinary experience even before I had walked away from my car. Carefully opening my car door against the metal guard rail around the parking lot, I noticed that every square inch of space on those metal rails contained a written message from previous visitors. "Thank you," "God bless you," "God bless America," a name, a date, uncountable.

At the large billboard, every inch of board was covered with American flags, flowers, articles, pictures, prayers, poems, angels of every sort, everyone respectful, nothing overlapped. There was an article in a local small-town paper about the Holy Bible found in the plane's wreckage. The area of the crash site burned for hours, yet only the Bible's cover was singed, its pages untouched. There was a color photograph of a rainbow taken over the crash site where the rainbow's end seemed to pour directly into the earthly crater made by the crash.

At the billboard no one spoke. Visitors walked around following their own pace and drinking in with their eyes a level of emotion seldom witnessed in our everyday lives. There existed a natural churchlike reverence. The outpouring of love, gratitude, respect and grief could not be measured with mere words. These memorials are clearly a cathartic exercise for visitors to purge the grief from their souls.

The only sound heard was the rustling of the many American flags in the wind and the ringing of a three-bell wind chime hung on the left top edge of the billboard. On the bottom of the wind chime a note attached read "Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings."

Standing between the left edge of the large billboard and the tall, rugged wooden cross and looking out onto the rolling hills a hundred feet or more toward a downward slopping field, there stood a second large wooden billboard emblazoned with the American flag. A hundred feet beyond that was a chain-link fence that encloses the actual crash site. You can still see from that vantage point where the earth was pushed up from the violent impact of the plane.

I hope the permanent memorial maintains the evidence of that violent impact and preserves that hallowed ground forever. Americans need to remember the price paid in that Pennsylvania field. When I remember September 11, I will feel grief, then anger, then pride. The overwhelming thought or feeling I will forever associate with September 11 will be that, when given a chance, most every ordinary American will still fight to the death to preserve the lives of other Americans.

Ms. Nagy can be contacted by e-mail at JoanMarieNagy@aol.com