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MacFries,  n. pl. (mac-FRIZ)    1.  Fast food items best eaten piping hot. Usually start to congeal upon cooling. Often found under the front seat of cars.   2.  Slender strips of Macintosh-related ephemera, occasionally satisfying and sometimes not even Mac-related.   3.  The part of this Web site where I get to run off at the mouth.

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Citizen Soldiers

Shanksville is neither the most remote nor the most God-forsaken town in the world, but it certainly feels that way when you're trying to find it with only a AAA map of Pennsylvania. "I think we should have turned left onto Stoysville Road in Friedens". "Let's go back".

Eventually, though, Joanne and I find ourselves driving into Shanksville. Sort of. More accurately, Shanksville manages to position itself in front of our car, the first of many things we find to be grateful for on this late-summer Sunday.

With a population of about 250, Shanksville is referred to as "a small town". A better description might be "a group of houses and stores clustered around a bend in the road". Like many rural American towns, this cluster is nestled among rolling hills, with a couple of quiet little streams thrown in for their picturesque value.

We come out the far end of the bend in the road and find ourselves on a newly-paved two-laner dotted with well-kept ranchers and DirecTV dishes and wire fences. I'd never heard of Shanksville until an extraordinary group of people decided to drive a Boeing 757 into the ground nearby. I'm guessing the folks hereabouts liked it better when the world had never heard of them.

After about seven miles or so, we make a right. What, you wanted a road sign? We later learn this is Skyline Road, which strikes me as being a little pretentious. In fact, giving this road a name at all strikes me as a little pretentious. It's a hilly, rutted, just-sorta-paved kind of thing, and toward the top of the first hill there's a 30-foot pile of rusting Pepsi vending machines. Maybe they're going to be used to help reclaim the strip mines.

As we crest the hill, we see half a dozen cars pulled off along the side of the road, and a small parking area just beyond. It's surrounded by the kind of rail you see on the shoulder on the Turnpike, and sports three porta-potties, one of which is marked "Handicapped Only". Like a handicapped person could even get to it, over the gravel parking area.

We amble across the road to the Flight 93 Temporary Memorial. Basically, it's a duplicate of the gravel lot we parked in, porta-potties and all, except it's paved. That, and every square inch of the rail surrounding carries personal messages left by people from around the world.

The whole place looks and feels handmade. Mostly, it is. Except for the turnpike rails and the porta-potties, it's a handmade memorial. About the size of a largish trade show booth and without the professional graphics, it's covered with an assortment of things that can only be called unusual. People apparently feel compelled to leave something personal behind, some remembrance, some momento.

Mentally, I'm kind of torn. I've seen the Tribute In Lights that's been built next to Ground Zero, and I have to think that just one of the light bulbs used there cost more than this entire Shanksville thing. On one hand, it doesn't seem right -- all the money and attention going to New York and Washington, and Flight 93 being the "poor sister".

In another sense, though, it almost seems appropriate. This is a handmade memorial for a group of people who took things into their own hands.

Stop for a moment and think back to September 11th. The World Trade Center. Washington, DC. And, oh yeah, somewhere in rural Pennsylvania, that plane that crashed. Forty people on a hijacked jet who made cell phone calls and found out that the twin towers and the Pentagon had been attacked and decided to drive the aircraft into the earth with the throttle wide open to prevent an even bigger disaster.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine?

They made a conscious decision. As I stood there, I imagined they were terrified, that they cried, they prayed, they thought about the wives and husbands and mothers and fathers and kids they'd never see again. I'm not sure I would have the strength to make that same decision.

But they did. And they died.

Our history tells the story of all sorts of battles and wars. Some were noble, some were not. I suppose most Americans would like to think they're all noble, but it doesn't work that way.

Shanksville, Pennsylvania is the site of one of the more noble ones. Like Valley Forge. Normandy. Bastogne. Ordinary citizens made a conscious decision to stand and fight. And ordinary citizens have built a memorial, by hand, to honor this sacred ground.

We return to the car and back away from the porta-potties. The nice lady who lives in Shanksville and works at the Memorial as a volunteer has given me directions back to the main highway. Apparently, it's only about a mile and a half away. Who knew?

I stop the car a couple of hundred yards down Skyline Road and get out to look back. It's nothing more than a big, open field with a handmade memorial, and a couple of enormous strip mining machines for a backdrop. A peoples' memorial, if you will, to a bunch of unwitting but enormously willing people.

Citizen soldiers.

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