Absorbing the memories of lives that went up in smoke
They died in a puff of smoke. One brief, billowing, black cloud against the bluest sky was the only visible evidence that something awful and monumental had just happened in Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands that Tuesday morning 11 years ago.
A photograph of that puff of smoke, hovering like a malevolent storm cloud over a peaceful landscape of red barns and green pastures, was taken by someone living a mile and a half away minutes after the crash. It appears in one of the exhibits at the uncompleted Flight 93 National Memorial
The official entrance is off Route 30 between Bedford and Somerset, out in Western Pennsylvania where it's still called the Lincoln Highway. Unlike the crude, crushed-stone access road I used to visit the temporary memorial several times over the years, the new entrance evokes the terrible isolation of this anonymous place, a spent strip mine made sacred by the courage of Flight 93's passengers and crew. Its three miles of deliberate, serpentine curves reveal the natural beauty that surrounds the man-made desolation.
The site is devastating to behold, its starkness and solemnity leading inevitably to the question: What would we have done? If among those passengers forced to decide how they would die, where would we have been - on our feet or in our seats?
The consequences of that decision are illustrated by the memorial's brochure. On the front is a rendering of the memorial's white marble wall, displaying the names of 40 passengers and crew. On the back is a photograph of the U.S. Capitol, the terrorists' probable target, a mere 20 minutes away by plane.
I was expecting to be moved by the memorial, but I was not prepared to be blown away by a random series of interactions with people intimately connected to the events of 9/11.
The night before our visit, my wife and I went to eat at the Pine Grill in Somerset (recommended by the clerk at our motel, who raved, "The food tastes like food"). On the wall inside is a framed copy of the Sept. 12, 2001, edition of the local newspaper, the Daily American, with the front-page headlines "America Under Siege" and "Terror Touches Somerset County."
Sitting to my left at the counter was a young man named Jake Hayman and his father, Bob. We talked football for a bit, but I eventually got around to Flight 93. "Where were you that day?" I asked Bob.
"I was there," he said.
Hayman, a volunteer firefighter in Somerset (population 6,200), was at his job as a safety supervisor at the Snyder potato chip factory in nearby Berlin that morning. He and others were gathered around a television watching the news from New York when the call came to report to the crash site near Shanksville.
"There was nothing," Hayman said. "Hard to believe that there was an entire airplane that fit into a hole that small. There was this smoking crater and this awful smell."
The smell was from the thousands of gallons of fuel on a fully loaded jet bound for San Francisco, which hit the Earth nose first and upside-down at more than 560 m.p.h.
As we spoke, a woman who had been seated across the bar walked up to us and said, "I heard you talking about Flight 93. My mother was on that plane. She was the oldest passenger to die." Not knowing what to say, I introduced myself and Bob Hayman, telling her, "This man was one of the first responders that day." She immediately hugged him as if he were family.
The woman, Betsy Kemmerer, lives in the small Poconos town of Effort, more than 200 miles away. On Sept. 11, 2001, she had driven her 79-year-old mother, Hilda Marcin, from the North Jersey suburb they lived in to Newark International Airport for a flight to San Francisco, where she was going to stay with her other daughter. "Mom hated the East Coast winters," Kemmerer said.
The next morning, I saw Hilda Marcin's name etched in marble on the memorial wall, which points like an arrow to the crash site, marked by a boulder about 100 yards away. At the end of the wall is a rough-hewn wooden fence cut from the trunks of trees near the impact crater. Visitors could peer between the timbers at the boulder in the distance.
Nearby stood a gray-haired volunteer guide in a green National Park Service jacket. In his left hand, he held an umbrella; in his right, a plastic model of a Boeing 757. He demonstrated how a hijacker rocked the aircraft back and forth, gaining altitude and then diving suddenly to drive away the passengers storming the cockpit. Finally, as the passengers breached the door, the terrorist rolled the plane into a suicidal dive that ended the journey of the only hijacked aircraft that didn't reach its target that day.
he guide, too, had a personal story. He said he lives nearby and works for a government agency he couldn't name. He had arrived at the scene on the morning of Sept. 12 with a canvass team. The terrain was rough and covered with jagged debris. A few steps in, he stumbled, fell to his hands and knees, and noticed a shredded tree trunk a few feet away. Embedded in the bark was a credit card.
"Not until I read the official report on the Flight 93 investigation did I realize that I had found the credit card used by the hijackers to buy the tickets on that flight," he said. "That ended up being the beginning of the money trail connecting the terrorists."
Unbelievable, I thought, this sequence of random encounters. And yet, what could be more unbelievable than what we all saw with our own eyes that day?
On that raw, bleak, windswept October morning, in conditions that would keep most reasonable people inside, I counted 10 cars in the memorial parking lot with out-of-state plates - Michigan, Nebraska, Idaho, California. And on our way back to Route 30 along that winding road from oblivion, we saw a seemingly endless stream of headlights from at least 30 different cars, making their way slowly and reverently to this proud and shattered Pennsylvania field.
Clark DeLeon can be reached at deleonc88@aol.com.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Currents section, Sunday, October 21, 2012, Page D3
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