A FIELD IN PENNSYLVANIA
A quarter century is long enough for memory to soften into history, and short enough that it hasn’t quite. If asked, anyone alive 25 years ago can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing. I was lingering over a third cup of coffee, half paying attention to the news on television. At 8:46 a.m. EDT, all hell broke loose on the screen as special reports began interrupting regular programming, and a surreal video of a jetliner slamming into one of New York City’s twin towers filled the frame. For a few minutes, it looked like the worst aviation accident in history. Seventeen minutes later, a second plane smashed into the second tower. That gap is worth noting: the first crash was still being processed as a possible accident. The second impact made it clear — live, on television, to millions of people — that it was an attack.
At 10:03, a third hijacked plane crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. A group of passengers aboard United Flight 93 had learned, through scattered phone calls, what was happening in New York and Washington. They had minutes to decide what to do with that information. Rather than let the day be chosen for them, they chose it themselves.
One of them, Todd Beamer of Cranbury, New Jersey — about fifty miles from Philadelphia — placed a call through the GTE Airfone system installed on the plane. He’d been trying to reach his wife but couldn’t get through, and was routed instead to Lisa Jefferson, a GTE/Verizon Airfone supervisor working at a call center outside Chicago. He stayed on the line with her for about thirteen minutes, describing the hijacking, relaying that passengers were planning to storm the cockpit, and reciting the Lord’s Prayer with her before the line went to what would become the day’s most quoted phrase: “Let’s roll.” Jefferson later told the story herself, in her co-authored book Called: “Let’s Roll!” Two of Flight 93’s crew members had Philadelphia roots of their own — purser Deborah Welsh was raised in the city, and flight attendant Lorraine Bay was a Philadelphia native.
In the days that followed, the country did something it hasn’t quite managed since: it stopped keeping score. Blood banks were flooded — nearly 1.2 million units donated nationwide between September 11 and the end of October, by people who had no way of knowing that fewer than 260 units would actually be needed to treat the victims. More than 200,000 units eventually had to be discarded, unused. It was, in its way, a strange and moving kind of failure — a country showing up for a wound it barely had the chance to help heal. Volunteers drove toward New York from Philadelphia and a hundred other cities, not because anyone organized them, but because staying home felt impossible. Strangers who wouldn’t have spoken to each other on a subway platform a week earlier stood together at vigils and meant it. For a while — not long, but real — “never forget” wasn’t just a bumper sticker. It was just what people were doing.
It didn’t last. It rarely does. Within a few years the country had drifted back into its familiar grooves — the suspicion of neighbors, the sorting of people into camps, the quiet return of every man for himself. The passengers of Flight 93 never got the chance to watch that fade. Their forty minutes stayed forty minutes; their choice stayed a choice. It is the rest of us who had the luxury of time, and who spent a fair amount of it forgetting.
Shanksville is not a papular destination like New York and Washington are. There’s no skyline to stand beneath, no plaza that fills with tourists on their way to somewhere else. What’s there is mostly what was always there — reclaimed coal land, a tree line, a long field that goes quiet at dusk the way any field does. Forty people made a choice in the air above it without an audience, without knowing if the country would ever learn what they’d decided, and the place has stayed about that size ever since. It asks something of you that Ground Zero doesn’t have to: you have to already know why you came.
A field in Pennsylvania doesn’t draw the crowds Ground Zero does. Twenty-five years later, that might be the point.
Contact Jerry at jerrgervase@yahoo.com
