Today I drove local roads through the mountains of southwestern PA. I saw a fat shirtless man with a prophetic beard riding his lawnmower into town, I saw happy families in khaki shorts and pastel polo shirts playing beanbag toss on a sloping church lawn, I saw a young man with nose piercings glumly watching the road from the the patio of his parents periwinkle house, I saw wide amber streams lined by sycamore trees and I saw an old man wistfully slow his car beside them to ponder what the fishing's like, I saw a township where american flags are hung from every other telephone pole, and I saw a roadsign for the Flight 93 National Memorial---3.5 miles off this obscure mountain road. I saw the wall of names, and the field where 44 people died on September 11th, 2001, and the signs narrating the heroism of the passengers onboard, and the children with toy cameras strapped to their necks still running and playing among the silent adults, and the cranes and excavators bent toward the incomplete grounds of the memorial glade like surgeon's tools attending to an open wound, and the other sign explaining that the memorial's completion is being overseen by a corporation that the government has paid to construct this memory of national tragedy. And overhead two jetplanes cut transverse contrails through the bluewashed sky like meteorites.