Wilbo remembers travelling down from New Haven, Connecticut on the Amtrak train the weekend before a business trip to Meriden, Connecticut. He had come out earlier with his friend and co-worker because it was cheaper to fly on the weekends, or so his friend and co-worker told him. His friend desired a little more fromWilbo than his companionship, and she wanted to spend the day in New York City's Soho district, drinking wine and taking in the art galleries.Wilbo remembers visiting a few neat galleries that day, and he remembers feeling comfort each time he saw the limestone towers in the distance, landmarks exuding a raw and eternal power. The time was fall of 1999. He only slept once with the friend and co-worker; Wilbo succumbed once to her seduction. Later, Wilbo was happy to learn that she has married to a man he liked.
Wilbo repeated the business trip to Meriden, Connecticut in the early days of March 2002. He remembered how easy it was to swing down to New York City, and he drove a rental down to Stamford, Connecticut, parked his car in the commuter garage and then rode in on the Connecticut commuter rail. He checked in at the Holiday Inn at Wall Street where the rack rate was greatly depressed. From this hotel in Wall Street, it was an easy walk to the site of the former twin towers, which kleig lights lit up as brightly as day. Most of the wreckage had been trucked away to a landfill called Fresh Kills, located on Staten Island, but the crews were still sifting dirt for debris and human artifacts. A filmmaker with a small video camera was capturing a long shot of trucks bearing off the tainted soil.
Clusters of friends arrived to visit the site, some of whom had connections to the lost of that day, and the policemen on guard allowed them access to the viewing platform that looked upon the deepest pit. Most of all, Wilbo remembered the street vendor selling American flag pins from a card table, and at first, he wished to buy a souvenir to bring home to his daughter. It was this intention and its absurdity that brought tears to his eyes and mourning to his face. There was no need to carry home 911 to his daughter and her hometown. 911 had already left its souvenir upon her six year old soul, and the discord that 911 represented was greater and more mysterious in impact than anything Wilbo had ever known, greater than his power of reckoning or contention. How many destinations do not require souvenirs because of the impact left on ones soul by the destination. As an example, does Las Vegas require a souvenir because good luck or not, it leaves a mark upon ones financial life? More, if a bring a relative a Las Vegas souvenir, the souvenir is too much a clue to Las Vegas's existence. Do we really want our relatives to find Las Vegas because we gave them a clue?
Wilbo bought three American flag pins from the street vendor none-the-less. When he returned to his office, he gave them to the three men from his workgroup, the three he worked with as news of the attacks came over the office television.
THE PENTAGON:
Wilbo didn't keep good travel records during his travels in the early part of the first decade of the 21st century. He found a 150 dollar round trip ticket to Washington D.C. on Northwest Airlines's travel saver program. He found two nights on Priceline at a downtown Holiday Inn for fifty dollars a night, back when Priceline actually helped a traveler beat the rack rate. He is certain he visited Washington a few months before the Beltway sniper attacks of October 2002. He discovered how easy and inexpensive it was to travel from Dulles Airport to the center of Washington by public tranportation, especially the Washington subway.
He does remember it felt very hot on the Smithsonian Mall, so it was probably June or July 0f 2002. Wilbo still wonders what kind of dork travels into a hot, sultry city in summertime when even the congress of the United States had departed for recess? Wilbo is that kind of dork.
Wilbo enjoyed the paintings in the National Gallery of Art, but he realized that his looking at these paintings had no importance compared to the looking of those invited to the circle of art insiders. Wilbo couldn't expect to be invited, nor could he buy his way inside the inner circle. Still, he tried to place the artists into historical context, calculating how long each painter lived, how old each painter was when the work on display was completed, how long each painter lived after its completion, how many years had past since the painter's birth and how many years it had been since the painter's passing. He started making this computations in his head and became surprisingly fast at them. Wilbo is glad that he learned the basics of art history and appreciation in his humanties classes at Michigan State University, but he knew his relationship to the arts was regarded as a quaint acquaintanceship. He was the public, the audience, and indistiguishable from the great unwashed. Only at the Terra Museum of American Art on the Miracle Mile in Chicago's great downtown did he feel differently. Once day he was granted free admission to the collection because the Terra didn't charge teachers admission, and the docent acknowledged Wilbo's ten years in the alternative education classroom as worthy of the free admission.
It didn't occur to Wilbo at first that his trip on the Yellow Line allowed him to view a 911 attack site. However, the Yellow and Blue lines daily delivered passengers to a special station for the geometrical sandstone headquarters of American military power. So Wilbo deboarded on a Sunday morning at the stop, and he walked as close to the sandstone outer walls as he was allowed to walk, close enough to study one of the massive entry doors. The plywood panels and chain link fences of a construction site still dominated the site, but Wilbo could detect no damage to the northeastern facing sides of the complex. It is possible that repair efforts had already brought the walls back to their pre-attack magnificence by the time he arrived there. Unlike New York City and Shanksville, Wilbo didn't see any sign of a public display of items left in memory of the fallen.
SHANKSVILLE:
On day in the office, Wilbo tried to look up the crash site of flight 93 on the topographic map. He wondered how he would ever happen to be in southeastern Pennsylvania for a stop at Shanksville. Shanksville became an attack site largely due to unpredictable factors, unless one believes a group of theorists who believe the planes were under remote control. There's a hundred ways to arrive at New York City. There's a hundred ways of arriving at Washington D.C. There's maybe two ordinary ways of arriving at Shanksville, by the Pennsylvania Turnpike and by US 219, the Buffalo - Pittsburg Highway. Wilbo couldn't find an onramp onto the turnpike when he left the memorial.
Wilbo doesn't call US 219 an expressway because it rarely has a posted speed higher than 45 miles an hour. Congressman Murtha has a great plan to make it a royal road from Buffalo and the Niagara frontier to Miami, but who in congress besides Murtha is interested in building a freeway in a day of tollways.
Wilbo was travelling to Norfolk, Virginia on business, and he chosen the non-freeway route there when mapping on Google maps. This is how he learned of Highway 219, and it wasn't until he was holed up in DuBois, Pennsylvania waiting on a repair to his truck that he learned that Shanksville was about 100 miles due south of Dubois. So even though the repair had delayed him a day, Wilbo resolved to visit the site.
Donald Rumsfeld made the pilgrimage in March of 2006, a visit that Wilbo read about in the New York Times. According to the account, Rumsfeld placed one of the official secretary of the defense coins among the badges and coins and tokens left by visitors to the makeshift shrine. According to a picture taken on the day, his coin rested on the upper right hand corner of a rock at the base of a flag pole. Wilbo had searched that rock looking for that prestigious coin, but he saw nothing like the coin from the picture.
Where is Rummie's Coin?In fact now the flat rock is covered with coins and tokens far more sparsely than in the picture. Rummies coin isn't there anymore. It is possible that the National Parks Service has collected it for the permanent archive. Wilbo wanted to flip a coin with a crossed pair of arrows to see the ornamentation on the flip side, but he didn't want to commit a faux pas. Surprisingly, no man or woman in the uniform on the National Park Service kept watch over the sight. Who would have yelled at Wilbo had he touched a coin in the collection? A crew of volunteers from the Shanksville neighborhood are daily on the site, offering interpretation on the confusing landscape. It takes a while to see the fence where Flight 93 impacted the earth 20 minutes of flight time from Washington.
Wilbo mourned at the Two Towers. He felt dry and unable to access his feelings at the Pentagon, where no one was there it seemed to observe the wounds upon America. However, when Wilbo read the routered names of the 40 inhabitants of Flight 93 on the homemade benches and considered where he wished to sit, he felt the sorrow arise in his face and tears well up in his eyes. He noticed fellow pilgrims noticing his expression. And then Wilbo sat down on a backbench and read the interpretive brochure from the National Park Service.
In Sacred Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Wilbo Completes the 911 Pilgrimage
The Consolation of Art
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