IT’S 10:32 ON SATURDAY MORNING. The temperature hovers around 35 degrees, and the wind fans a hard, beating rain across the snow-covered field where Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001. Donna Wilt has just put on her badge and pulled her information kit together when three carloads of visitors pull up. She tugs her knit ski-cap over her ears and goes to work. Mrs. Wilt is one of Flight 93’s Goodwill Ambassadors.

IN ITS 9/11 MEMORIAL MODE, the media have fixed their attention on the World Trade Center site in New York, for understandable reasons. But this rural town has watched a different kind of memorial-making take shape: the steady, intense pilgrimages of visitors who travel hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles–Shanksville is far off the beaten path–to look out on the crash site. The ambassadors are Shanksville’s own stewards of the site and of its pilgrims.