Firehouse Offers a Refuge to Weigh the Meaning of Madness
This comes to you from the back of the firehouse, courtesy of Chief Terry Shaffer and the volunteer fire company.
As if they hadn’t performed enough good deeds in the last two weeks, the firefighters of Station 627 gave me a chair and a table and made me an office behind the first engine on the scene of the crash of United Airlines Flight 93. This seemed the most appropriate spot to write about what kind of community this is, and how it has been changed by the random, ungodly act of a hijacked airliner falling out of the sky a mile or two away.
The spirit of the town is here, where fire helmets and jackets line the wall. Two little girls are playing on the running board of the pumper, a 7-week-old Labrador named Abbie scuttles around on a slick floor, and Annie Daniels, eight months’ pregnant, is running the operation of collecting and delivering food to recovery workers, as she has in 14-hour shifts since Day 1.
Outside, the American flag rides a slow breeze, and fall has begun to turn the maples red and gold.
There were two reactions in this burg of 245 residents Sept. 11 as they watched the news of hijacked jets crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Oh my God was the first. And then: Thanks be to Jesus we live in small-town America, a million miles from the reach of international terrorism.
“I was on the phone with my sister Jody in Lambertsville, and she said she heard a plane. She said she heard it come in low and real loud,” says Rick King, 37, the assistant fire chief.
He knew in his bones that it had to be connected to the horror on television. He went to the front porch of his house and heard the same wail his sister had described, and then an explosion.
King’s entire universe is one block long. A half-block down from his house is Ida’s Country Store, which he owns, and a half-block up the street is the firehouse. He called his wife, Tricia, at the store and told her what had happened, and then ran up to the firehouse and raced to the scene with a crew of three others.
What they found was a crater and smoldering earth. Debris and clothing hung from the trees like moss.
“What was amazing, though, was what we didn’t see,” King says.
No people. No plane.
“After a while I found a piece of the plane about yay big, but nothing identifiable. And then I saw some charred flesh.”
What King will do with the memory, he doesn’t yet know. But it has changed him profoundly, he says, in ways he can’t even begin to define.
“He’s different with the kids,” Tricia says. “And I saw a tear in his eye during that national benefit show they had on television.”
Shanksville is probably no different than the rest of the country in that regard. At least for a time, we’ll all put aside the petty and the profane, and look upon every breath, every human interaction, as a precious gift.
New York will have to talk it through eventually, the way New York does. Washington will have to rethink policy, the way Washington does.
Shanksville, relieved by this near-miss and yet traumatized by the meaning of the madness, will go to the firehouse.
I sit here now, watching the sky go pink above the line of trees, and town folk still trickle into the station to see what they can do. They offer to sweep, mop and take out the garbage. A woman brings two bags of apples. Another brings a check.
I hear tributes to the hijacked passengers who tried to fight back in the skies above.
I hear a parent say another few seconds of air time would have put the plane over the school.
I hear a boy of 15 say that he tells his family he loves them before leaving the house now.
An unimaginable history has rained down on this town, tragic beyond words, and left it stronger.
*
Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com
