Published: August 17, 2006 11:52 pm      

Bikers ride to remember Sept. 11

SHANKSVILLE — A muscular type in a black leather vest and jeans, Navy medic Lance Chennault sat in the sand and gravel before a few memorial stones and before the field where the plane crashed.

Taking medallions out of plastic containers and methodically placing them on three folded American flags, he appeared to be assembling something.

He was making a tribute.

With a shaken voice, he said he was taking tokens to each Sept. 11 site for friends and photographing them.

“I’m taking a piece of something for those who couldn’t be here today,” he said.

Chennault joined more than 700 bikers of the sixth annual America’s 9/11 Ride to the temporary memorial Thursday. The rides, which lead participants to Shanksville, the Pentagon and New York City, began after the terrorist attacks in 2001.

Though he feels that the heroes aboard United Flight 93 likely saved his life, Chennault saw the crash site for the first time Thursday. The 36-year-old was working at the Capitol on Sept. 11, 2001, when he saw the Pentagon-bound plane pass overhead.

“It’s touching,” he said. “I feel especially connected to these people.”

Like the hundreds of others there listening to a brief ceremony, he immediately fell silent when the Greater Pittsburgh Police Bagpipe and Drums bellowed a version of Taps.

While the riders were making their way past corn fields and the little white Flight 93 Chapel, hundreds of community members gathered to eat, drink and listen to bands like Donnie Iris and the Cruisers and Sidewinder and Giants of Science.

The local Fraternal Order of Police organized the gathering to raise money for the Flight 93 National Memorial and to honor the police officers who join and lead the ride annually. The FOP is planning to change its name from the Roof Garden Lodge to the Flight 93 Lodge 98.

Jerry Klue, a police officer from Cleveland, said the gesture for a community event is appreciated. It was his second year to join the trek, but the feelings were just as strong as the first time, he said.

“This is not going away,” he said. “This is not over.”

The trip to Shanksville, for him, is the beginning of a solemn reminder.

“It’s the beginning of all the hard things that happen over the next three days,” he said. “We do this as a reminder, because the people of the U.S. are too forgiving and too forgetting.”

The motorcycle convoy will meet at 7:30 a.m. today at Highland Harley-Davidson in Somerset to depart for Cumberland, Md., en route to the Pentagon.