Flight 93

 After South Carolina  we stopped in Maryland to see my brother and his wife. Knowing we were headed for Kane, Pennsylvania, she recommended a stop at the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville, PA. I found it deeply moving.

From the National Park Service brochure:

September 11, 2001, morning: Four commercial airliners are hijacked by al Queda terrorists in a planned attack against the United States. Two are flown into the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York City. A third is flown into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. A fourth plane, United Flight 93, a Boeing 757 bound for San Francisco, California, from Newark, New Jersey, is delayed 25 minutes before takeoff.

After 46 minutes flying, when over eastern Ohio, hijackers in first class attack at 9:28 am, incapacitating the captain and first officer. Hijackers turn Flight 93 southeast, headed for Washington, DC, most likely the US Capitol.

Just before 10 am the plane is seen flying low and erratically over southwestern Pennsylvania. At 10:03 it crashes, upside-down, at 563 miles per hour into this Somerset County field. There are no survivors. All 33 passengers, seven crew members, and four hijackers are killed.

It’s a sobering story, told with TV news clips, photos, artifacts from the crash site, and even recorded voice messages by crew and passengers trying to send one last message of love to their families.

The courage of those forty people is awe-inspiring. They were just regular civilians, taking a routine cross-country plane trip. They hadn’t been trained for combat. The crew’s training against hijacking focused on negotiating and deescalating a tense situation. No one was prepared to deal with suicide pilots.

But these brave men and women, in a matter of minutes, responded to the unprecedented situation. Forced to the back of the plane, they made a plan and voted to storm the cockpit. Again, from the NPS brochure:

Recovered from the crash site, the cockpit voice recorder captured the shouts, thumps, crashes, and breaking of glass and plates. The 9/11 Commission reported that the hijackers, although remaining in control of the plane, must have judged that the passengers and crew were mere seconds from overcoming them. To continued sounds of the counterattack, Flight 93 crashed into this field.

The crash site is 18 minutes flying time from Washington, DC. The action of unarmed passengers and crew thwarted and defeated the terrorists’ plan.

May they rest in peace.

Honeybees

 Our niece keeps bees. It’s an admirable occupation. Sherlock Holmes kept bees in his retirement on a small farm upon the South Downs.

Our apiarist relative established a hive about three years ago, at the outside corner of her parents’ house in Charleston, South Carolina. She has about three pounds of honeybees, or 10,000 little winged creatures.

We recently visited Charleston and as I was lugging luggage to the front door, I heard an angry buzzing around my head. I walked all around the front yard to escape but the insect persisted in circling my head. I finally starting waving my arms around my head, beginning to feel crazed by the incessant buzzing. I felt my right hand hit something fuzzy and larger than a housefly and then that unique and familiar sharp pain that bee venom inflicts. A little whitish stinger was lodged in the proximal phalange of my right index finger. (Yeah, I had to look it up on Johns Hopkins’ anatomy chart. It’s the finger part nearest the wrist.)

Jim scrapped off the little stinger (remarkable pain from such a small puncture caused by a tiny bit of organic material) with a credit card. I knew enough not to try and pull it out: it has a sac that can release more venom if squeezed.

Over the next day. instead of improving, the swelling moved from my finger to the back of my hand towards my wrist until my knuckles and veins disappeared and my skin grew taut. The worst of it was the itching. I trained myself years ago never to scratch an injury, but I was sorely tempted. We saw Beethoven’s Third Symphony that night and I struggled to concentrate fully (we were in Charleston to enjoy the annual Spoleto Festival USA). The next day the swelling was even worse. I remembered that I had some steroid cream from a previous poison ivy rash. It took another day to take effect, but over a few more days the swelling subsided.

As I understand it, the symptoms we experience after an injury or illness are caused by our own immune system reacting to the invasion. I’m sure it would be worse if we had no defenses against microbes and poisons, but I wouldn’t mind a little downgrade tweak to my system.

The beehive, after three years of growing, is finally producing honey. Our niece gave us a little jar, which I will enjoy when we return home. My attacker will not enjoy home: when the stinger is lodged in the victim the bee suffers fatal internal injuries.