photographed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on October 13, 2006

Behind the lunch counter at Ida’s Country Store at the corner of Main Street and Stutzmantown Road, Tammy was wrapping ham and cheese sandwiches in advance of what passes for the noontime rush in Shanksville, population 250. The lifelong resident of this sleepy mountain town tucked in the Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania is happy to give directions, share a joke or dispense unsolicited advice to strangers, but she won’t give up her last name.
And her age?
“Old enough to know better,” she chirped, drawing a cackle from Missy Brant, 38, who was shaving carrots in the kitchen. Tammy talked to the media a lot in the months after the “incident” that made Shanksville an international destination for pilgrims seeking to understand America by standing at the edge of one of its worst wounds. She has “googled” herself a few times since, however, and unhappily found that her name has been broadcast around the world.
Folks around here value their privacy, Tammy explained, and they are determined to preserve it even as bulldozers and mounds of federal and donated dollars raise the monument that will make Shanksville a tourist attraction rivaling Gettysburg. Swarms of tourists will soon descend on her hometown, most who will neither know nor care what was there before tragedy put it on the international roadmap.
Excerpted from ‘Sept. 11: Ten years later, a nation of resolve‘ by Christopher J. Kelly. Published in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on September 11, 2011.