Now that I had a new house to look forward to, I needed to fly back to Australia to arrange for my household to be shipped over.  It was easiest to leave out of Nashville, so I headed back down.  On the way, I decided to stop at the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania.  It was a cold and frosty morning at my camp site in Shawnee State Park..

I couldn’t help thinking as I drove there that this country has far to many sad memorials to recent events.  It’s one thing to visit an old Civil War battlefield and think about history, but it’s a much worse feeling to remember how I watched these events unfold on TV that day.

The site where Flight 93 went down was open country near the town of Shanksville, PA. There’s an interpretive centre and observation deck near the top of the field, and down below in the cleared area is a large boulder that marks the site of impact.  The field between is where most of the debris was found, and is now planted with wildflowers (not in bloom when I was there).

The interpretive centre explains the events of the day and the recovery efforts afterwards.  The 40 passengers and crew on the plane were able to talk to friends and family by phone, so were aware that the Twin Towers had been hit by aircraft in a terrorist attack.  When their plane was hijacked and turned toward Washington DC, they took a vote to decide what to do.  They decided to act and try to regain control of the plane from the hijackers.  They knew that their lives might be lost no matter what happened, so decided to try to save others if they could.  What an impossible decision to have to make..  Looking at the flight path, you can see it become erratic when they stormed the cockpit.

Only 200 lbs of debris was found at the crash site, including only 8% of the expected human remains.  There were no burials.  Looking at some of the items recovered, it’s amazing how the most mundane objects become shocking by their context.

The majority of the debris recovered was from the plane itself, but even that was very little, most disintegrated on impact.

There’s a wall of honor, showing pictures of all those lost.

What I found most moving was the screen below that wall, where you could select any of the victims, and get to know them more personally through pictures, objects they owned, and tributes to their lives.  This seemed to bring them back from being a number of victims to being complex and vulnerable individuals, like any of us.

I walked down the path below the wildflower debris field to get close to the impact site.  The cleared area is designated sacred ground, and only family members are allowed to visit there.

In addition to a ring of trees circling the debris field, there’s also a memorial wall, with the names of all the victims.  In the picture below you can see the wall, and the interpretive center above, with the debris field between.  The impact site was behind me when I took this photo.

The Flight 93 Memorial was serene, moving, informative, and very well done.  But I couldn’t help thinking as I left… that I hope we don’t have any more reasons to need memorials in the future.  We have enough.  Let’s stop now.