AP Photo/FILE/Val McClatchey
By Sarah Selip
I was five years old when United Flight 93 flew over my elementary school.
It was September 11, 2001, and I was the new first grader at Valley School of Ligonier, a small school in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania. That morning, my childhood best friend Ashley and I were riding red tricycles around the courtyard during recess.
It was a beautiful, crisp morning. I probably would not remember it otherwise. Then the sky went dark. Everyone stopped and looked up. A massive white plane was flying incredibly low over our school. We had a small airport nearby, so we were used to seeing planes. This was nothing like that.
It was deafening. I remember the wind that followed it and thinking the plane was so close I could reach up and touch it. Most of all, I remember being able to make out the numbers:
N591UA.
The next few moments are harder to piece together. Our teachers rushed us inside and took us to the basement. Eventually, we went back to our classrooms, where the televisions were turned to the news. Then we waited in the auditorium as our parents came to pick us up.
Less than four minutes after we saw it, Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville.
I was too young to understand what had happened. I did not know what the passengers and crew had learned through their calls home, what they were facing, or what they decided to do. I only knew we had seen the plane, and then it was gone.
The aftermath reached our small community almost immediately. People from all over town were called to Shanksville. First responders and investigators went, of course, but so did local pilots, funeral directors, and others who never expected to be asked to do a job like that.
These were people we knew. They were our neighbors, family friends and the familiar faces we saw around town.
Our school custodians had been working near the athletic fields that morning. The FBI later contacted them about what they had seen. Our neighbor Ron, a former pilot, was asked to help investigate the crash site. The adults told us never to ask him about it.
We never did.
Ron died a few years ago. I don’t know, and never will, what he saw that day, or what it cost him to spend the following weeks doing that kind of work in a field a few miles from where I was riding my tricycle. He carried it the way a lot of people in our town did — quietly, and mostly alone. At the time, his silence just seemed like one of the rules of being an adult. I think about it differently now.
Even the photograph accompanying this piece was taken by one of my father’s patients. In a small town, there always seems to be a personal connection. It is still part of my life today. Almost every time I drive home, I pass the Flight 93 National Memorial, along with the smaller monuments that have gone up nearby. They sit along roads I know by heart, surrounded by the same mountains I grew up looking at.
I do not only think about Flight 93 on September 11. I think about it when I pass the memorial. I think about it on the drive home, at the bend where the trees open up and it comes into view. Sometimes I still think about the girl on the red tricycle. She doesn’t know yet. She’s just watching a plane get smaller, and then the sky is empty. Twenty-five years later, I know the names of the 40 passengers and crew. I know what Ron did that Fall, even if I never knew what it cost him.
I still don’t know everything about that day. But I know where the trees open up on the road home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Selip is a powerhouse in political communications, with nearly a decade of experience shaping narratives, building coalitions, and driving media strategy.
