Extremely quiet and incredibly empty: a visit to the Flight 93 memorial

A baby kept crying in the Flight 93 memorial visitor center the other day until the mom finally decided to take her, but one of my students wanted to object: "Don't take the baby away! Someone in here ought to be crying."

I'm not naming names, but I know some tears were shed during my students' field trip to the Flight 93 memorial last weekend. They've been reading and writing about 9/11 literature all semester, examining the various ways in which national trauma is represented in fiction, poetry, art, and memorials, so Saturday's visit was an opportunity to apply all that learning face-to-face with a symbol of public mourning--or healing, or heroism, or a number of other possible narratives.

We chose the Flight 93 memorial because it's relatively accessible, about three and a half hours by college van, and it's also smaller and more manageable than the Manhattan memorial and museum. We drove over Friday after classes and spent Friday evening in one of the motel rooms watching the film adaptation of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which the students had read a few weeks ago, and then on Saturday we drove through the extremely quiet Pennsylvania countryside to get incredibly close to the trauma of Flight 93.

I'd been there before, of course, so I knew what to expect--the constant videos of burning buildings, falling towers, and somber politicians trying to make sense of it all, the eclectic collection of items mourners have left at the site, the recordings of passengers' final phone calls to their loved ones. I paused here and hung back, knowing how heart-wrenching those recordings can be and not wanting to push my students beyond their comfort level, but finally one student stepped forward and said, "I don't want to listen to this but I need to so I'd better just do it." 

And they did.

Afterward we walked down the twisting path through fields of dried-out thistle and goldenrod to visit the memorial wall and look at the massive rugged boulder that marks the plane's crash site.  From below, the visitor center looks like the prow of ship run aground on the hilltop, its blindingly white walls and sharp lines forming a stark contrast to the dark, formless boulder, which was chosen by victims' families to mark the spot because they didn't want anything man-made down there.

We talked about that for a while and the students asked great questions: Why make visitors walk a winding trail instead of installing a staircase directly to the memorial wall? Why leave native wildflowers and grasses growing in the fields instead of planting a neat, tidy, cultivated garden? Why does the space feel so empty? Why the giant portal, the giant wind chimes, the black sidewalk following the flight path of the plane?

I asked them to think about Stonehenge or the Indian mounds that dot our area: the people who built them knew exactly what purpose the sites would serve and what meaning they wanted the design to convey, but we don't speak their language so all we can do is speculate. If space aliens who can't decipher human language visit the Flight 93 memorial, what conclusions will they draw about its purpose and significance?

Wind rustled through dried thistle as we stood silent and contemplated the memorial. Is it a site of mourning, a celebration of heroism, an expression of power, or a massive bleeding wound? In the end we agreed that whatever interpretation of the memorial moves us, sometimes tears are the only appropriate response.