Simple remembrance best for Flight 93

By MARSHA MERCER
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
SHANKSVILLE, Pa. -- People write tender love notes to the dead they never knew.
With black felt tip pens on parking lot guardrails, they promise never to forget. On the chain link fence, they leave caps, teddy bears and American flags.
It's very American, these makeshift tributes to the 40 passengers and crew who died on United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11. Forty painted folk art angels, each with the name of a victim, are planted in the earth.
The federal government has a very different vision of how to remember Flight 93. That plan is very American, too, in the sense that more must be better. The proposed permanent memorial is grand in scale, imposing and costly.
At 1,900 acres -- 1,200 for the memorial and another 700 under the memorial's control -- the Flight 93 National Memorial will be three times the size of Arlington National Cemetery. Its estimated cost is $60 million. Half is supposed to come from private donations, but so far only $7.5 million has been raised. Last week, Universal Pictures said it would donate $1.15 million from receipts of its new movie "United 93."
One important House member opposed the grandiose plan. Rep. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., chairman of the House appropriations Interior subcommittee, balked at the cost, which he said will rise to $100 million. It would dishonor the memory to start the project and not finish it, Taylor said. A scholarship fund would better honor the victims.
Restraint is not popular when it comes to anything related to 9/11. Taylor buckled under the pressure Thursday and agreed to an initial payment to begin the project.
I came to the temporary memorial to see what people think of all this.
Bob Musser, 75, and his wife Phyllis live on a farm just beyond the woods. It's the Mussers' red barn you've seen in the photo from that day, a plume of black smoke rising beside it. They're "Flight 93 ambassadors," volunteer guides who tell visitors what they're seeing.
"When I started meeting with family members, they all said they just wanted it to be simple," Musser said. The victims "were brave people, and they really deserve to be remembered," he said, "but I think this is going to extremes."
Walkway
He talks about the plan for a mile-long walkway, shuttle buses, a 93-foot tall Tower of Voices housing 40 wind chimes planted within rings of white pines, plazas, 40 memorial groves each with 40 red and sugar maples. And more.
On this day, tour buses bring eighth graders from Ohio and federal retirees from a state convention in Johnstown. Visitors sit on wooden benches carved with the names of the dead. People fall silent as they stare across the peaceful, windswept field. An American flag a couple hundred yards away marks the actual place where the plane cratered. Only family members are allowed there to keep away folks with metal detectors.
Behind the flag is a pile of woodchips made from the trees that burned when the plane slammed into the earth at 580 mph. The trees had been embedded with human teeth. That's how the dozens of visiting dentists identified the obliterated remains, Phyllis Musser explains.
One day, the shock of 9/11 and the sadness will not be as sharp as they still are nearly five years later. Visitors tell me they want people to remember how hijackers commandeered the flight from Newark to San Francisco, apparently intending to fly to Washington and crash into the Capitol or White House. They want future generations to know how the plane crashed into a grove of hemlocks as passengers stormed the cockpit. But do they need 1,200 acres?
"They could just let it stay like this," Phyllis Musser said. "People from New York City come here and say it's so nice, so relaxing. I hope they don't put up any big thing, but that's what they're doing. That's just the way our society works."
There's no litter and no loud voices. Wind whips the flags. The sun is warm. Nobody sells anything. A couple of portable toilets are in the parking lot.
For now, 40 painted folk art angels are planted in the earth.
Marsha Mercer is Washington bureau chief for Media General News Service. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.