Pilgrims Flock To Crash Site. . .

You will proabably be interested in this. No further comment for now. Pilgrims Flock to Crash Site September 9, 2002 By FRANCIS X. CLINES SHANKSVILLE, Pa., Sept. 8 - Staring across at the verdant field healed now a year after Flight 93 plunged to destruction, Jim Gaydos presented himself in the morning light as far more of a pilgrim than a voyeur. "This ain't Disneyland," Mr. Gaydos gravely insisted as an endless stream of visitors' cars and vans thickened on the Allegheny backroads leading to this minuscule hamlet of 245 residents, one of the three outlets for the public's grief over Sept. 11. Newcomers were arriving to stare and think, to cry and photograph one another and, even more, to try to leave something - anything - of themselves on a simple rural hilltop across from the hallowed crash site. In a special curiosity mounting here like some relentless work of naïve art, visitors are impulsively contributing personal mementos and any kitsch object at hand to an ad hoc jumble of a memorial 200 yards from the crash point. "This is perfect," said Mr. Gaydos, snatching his beloved "Star Trek" Klingons cap from his head. He respectfully contributed it to the ever-growing eclectic array of Flight 93 mementos rising daily by popular demand and impulsive design, years in advance of any formal memorial. The approaching 9/11 anniversary swelled the crowds this weekend. But the visiting public has been speaking its mind for the last year, spontaneously dropping off more than 5,000 items, along with tens of thousands of jotted messages and signatures. The common sentiment ranges from "God Bless" to "Let's Roll." The hilltop has become a kind of shifting monument of casual but heartfelt leavings. Mr. Gaydos and other visitors were freshening it today in what has become a tireless act of homage at the edge of a singed woodland. Local authorities glean the pile regularly and have pledged to preserve every one of the discarded items in a museum collection, including several frayed teddy bears and a flight steward's crisp uniform, a Christian Motorcycle Association sign and 40 patriotically painted angel icons stuck into the earth with the names of the victims from Flight 93. "The Klingons were warriors who were all about honor," said Mr. Gaydos, explaining the poetry he suddenly saw in making his own donation. "The cap belongs here with the Flight 93 people who died fighting the terrorists." The "Star Trek" cap barely stood out amid a 100-foot-wide billboard bedecked with all manner of items, from firefighters' helmets to a red-white-and-blue birdhouse. There were draped rosary beads, tinkling wind chimes, homespun prayers and poems, dolorous epiphanies scrawled with Magic Marker, a war veteran's coffin flag, a child's pinwheel that momentarily distracted a passing Monarch butterfly tripping across the pristine sky. "Not a cloud in the sky, just like today, when Flight 93 went into the ground," announced Nevin A. Lambert, a 55-year-old cattle rancher who saw the crash from his front window, a half mile away. Mr. Lambert epitomizes the human craving to come to grips with some wisp of the atrocity, for he volunteers now to be one of 18 Shanksville "ambassadors" standing on the memorial hill and offering a tireless narrative of authoritative detail about the day Flight 93 crashed to earth. His performance resonates with the eyewitness excitement and sadness of Americana dating to the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations and beyond. "Like a silver bullet from the sky," said Mr. Lambert to an engrossed summer crowd that included a man from Wyoming in a tailored cowboy's outfit, a woman whose poodle strained at the leash, a loud, cranky child, a bearded biker strutting over from a Port-a-John near ranks of billowing stars and stripes. "This is incredible," said Mark Rose, leading his family into the crowd that clearly awed him for its Bruegelesque display of people and emotion. "Some are just curious, I guess, and then there are lots of people who don't know what to think," said Mr. Rose, a postal worker who soon joined the latter category of people, staring in wonder at the crash site and staring again at one another on the Shanksville hilltop. A necessary part of any visitor's ritual seems to involve close scrutiny of the detritus respectfully left behind. "We are trying to catch the bad guys," a child printed in a message to the victims. Someone scrawled on a flat rock, "We believe in heroes." A man in shorts was simply cell-phoning the moment to somewhere else, talking and walking aimlessly about the scene of green hills and blue skies, part pastoral, part carnival. "That's a de facto memorial up there," said Wallace E. Miller, a funeral director who as the Somerset County coroner has been in charge of the remains of the 40 victims and four suspected terrorists. "Something happens and it's built on and built on," Mr. Miller said. "That's what drives humanity." Some identifiable remains have been found for each victim, but Mr. Miller still has 350 pounds of unidentifiable remains in coffins that will be buried according to the wishes of survivors. Those staring across toward the crash site could not see into the deeper woods where the winds on this balmy day still occasionally stirred tiny pieces of debris down upon the earth from the trees' canopy. Everything is held as hallowed. Burned trees embedded with fragments from the crash have not been discarded but have been turned into special mulch to be spread atop the fenced-in crash site. "Blue is for the sky where the terrorists struck," said Rose Sprock, another volunteer ambassador, explaining to a hilltop crowd the color fields of one of five special flags ordinary Americans felt obliged to create to honor the dead. The need for something tangible led Gene Stilp, an energy consultant from Harrisburg, to design his huge Flight 93 Heroes flag, a variation on the stars and stripes. Visitors needing something extra can fold and unfold it in an ad hoc ceremony every half hour. Awkward at first, strangers soon bow their heads or stare at one another as they silently hang on to the strange flag and are photographed by loved ones. "People want to express themselves," said Mr. Stilp, who has made himself an unofficial greeter. "Look how they want to touch that." No less do they savor hearing potentially mythic details. "A Bible was found 50 feet from the crash," Ms. Sprock informed one gathering. "Not a bit of dirt on it, and it was opened to the Book of Kings." Having left his Klingons cap, Mr. Gaydos headed back on his 10-hour drive home to Merrillville, Ind. "I didn't expect it to be this deep," he admitted, picking up a few Shanksville rocks as his remembrance. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/09/national/09PENN.html?ex=1032584510&ei=1&en=7bf845ff8167af89