ShareThisSTOYSTOWN, Pa. - Ralph Blanset, 83, sits on his tractor near his hillside garden of 120 tomato plants. His son-in-law, Calvin Maluchnick, swings by to pick him up for dinner. First, they reminisce.
"Right here is where she went over," says Maluchnick, 55, a retired cop in this community of 385. The jet "was flying way too low. ... Then we heard the boom and seen the smoke about three seconds later."
Just that fast, history scarred this sleepy corner of Pennsylvania. This is where a passenger rebellion prompted 9/11 hijackers to flip United Flight 93 upside down and plow into a remote coal-mining area lined with hemlock trees.
Known as the Laurel Highlands, this stretch of the Allegheny Mountains has served as a retreat from East Coast intensity. Residents slip into a more relaxed life in the rolling hills and quaint towns of Shanksville, Stoystown, Indian Lake and Lambertsville.
"From that day on, it's been traffic and bus tours. ... Peace and quiet are gone," says Valencia McClatchey, who lives nearby.
Blanset writing out a check for his son-in-law to take to their garbage haulers when United Flight 93 roared over the tomatoes.
They had watched on television as planes tore through the twin towers and crashed into the Pentagon. It had seemed so far away.
Then Blanset's fire whistle sounded. The chief of Stoystown's volunteer fire department zoomed to the crash scene in his specially equipped pickup with his son-in-law.
"We were looking for a plane wreck, but when we got there all we saw was a crater, a hole in the ground 30 feet deep," Blanset says.
One smoldering wheel from the jet was the only hint that a Boeing 757 had disintegrated. The fireball consumed bodies of the five flight attendants, two pilots, four hijackers and 33 passengers. Five vertebrae would be the most recognizable human remains ever found.
No one knows exactly where Flight 93 -- bound for San Francisco from New Jersey's Newark airport -- was headed after hijackers wrested control over Cleveland and turned the jet around. It crashed going 580 mph, only 20 minutes by air from Washington, D.C. Some believe it was intended to hit the White House or the U.S. Capitol.
Val McClatchey had her Hewlett-Packard 315 point-and-shoot camera sitting on her coffee table at 10:05 a.m. that morning, as she watched the "Today Show" at her house on Indian Lake.
"Then I heard a surge of an engine and, man, was it loud," she says.
The explosion a couple miles west nearly knocked her off the couch. She instinctively stepped out on the porch and took one shot of a massive plume of gray smoke filling the sky next to her neighbor's red barn.
Her photo popped up in publications and websites around the world. She hired a lawyer to copyright her image, which she titled "End of Serenity."
"Another blink of an eye and it would have hit the Shanksville school and all those kids would be gone," she says. "After a while, it gets overwhelming just to think about it."
Ten years later, as grandchildren play in the driveway, McClatchey says she's had enough. She's trying to sell her acre on Indian Lake after 25 years. With the economy sputtering, McClatchey says the market "stinks."
Her famous photo, which sells for $20 at a nearby general store, "has been a blessing and a curse," she says.
The FBI confiscated her camera immediately and she had to leap through all kinds of hoops to get it back. Conspiracy theorists hound her on the Internet and even come to her door, claiming she faked the shot. She's burned through five lawyers, trying to protect her copyright. She keeps the memory card in a safe deposit box.
Tiny Shanksville, population 219, is the name most often associated with Flight 93's crash in a field almost two miles to the north.
The town boasts two homespun memorials. A sculpture at the school has a tree with 22 flame-shaped leaves pointing to the heavens. Next to the volunteer fire department, a cross fashioned from World Trade Center steel beams has a 9 11 01 in the center and an American flag draped behind it.
At the actual crash site, efforts to memorialize Flight 93 have been anything but simple.
The temporary Flight 93 National Memorial Site is housed in a rusty tin mining shack the FBI used for its investigation after 9/11.
The 2,700-foot hillside, over which Flight 93 roared, is one of the highest points in Pennsylvania. The growl of earth-moving machines, preparing a circular road for the eventual permanent visitors center, interrupts the pristine quiet. A fence laced with flags and handwritten notes keeps the public away from the zig-zagging memorial wall, built along the path of the doomed flight and engraved with the 40 victims' names. Family members will be the first allowed access when the memorial is dedicated on Sept. 10.
Some have complained that the memorial's design honors Islam with its crescent shape facing Mecca. Donnie Zeigler, a National Park Service ranger, calmly explains the road is circular and faces southwest.
Zeigler was a 13-year-old in math class on Sept. 11, 2001. He's now 23, and the memorial is the only place he ever wanted to work.
He and fellow ranger Brendan Wilson tell the Flight 93 story, recounting the tragedy in stark numbers.
The plane was only about 20 percent filled, with 33 passengers instead of a potential 183. It took off 20 minutes late, just four minutes before the North Tower was hit. A longer delay and it might have been grounded. Had it taken off on time, passengers might not have learned, via phone calls, about the other hijackings and rushed the cockpit.
"This isn't a park that people stumble upon," Wilson says. "They come for a reason, and a lot of people say they feel they need to be here."
(Contact Curt Brown at curt.brown(at)startribune.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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