Hundreds, maybe thousands, of 9-11 memorials have appeared in city parks across the U.S. over the past five years. Some are elaborate, some are very simple. But the one that's just gone up in Buena Vista, Virginia, is almost certainly one of the largest. It's made of two metal storage containers, each 40 feet long and weighing over 4 tons.

Buena Vista is near the home of Mark Cline, fiberglass sculptor, who thinks big.

"I was driving down I-81," Mark remembers, "and I saw two tractor-trailers on the other side, side-by-side. I was headed down into a dip, and they were on the other side, headed down into the dip, and it was like they were vertical. Like the Twin Towers standing up. And it just kind of clicked."

Minutes later, still in his truck, Cline saw a friend who was a Buena Vista city councilman, out mowing his lawn. Mark ripped off a piece of paper bag ("Among the many items of trash in my truck."), scrawled a sketch with a marker, handed it to the lawn-mowing guy, and the memorial was on its way.

Cline's other nearby creations, including Foamhenge and Dinosaur Kingdom, have given him a self-confessed "reputation" among the locals, but he feels as if this latest project has broadened his appeal. "I was very sincere about it," he said, "but I think everybody else was biting their nails, thinking there was gonna be some kind of joke, like I was gonna sneak a big King Kong onto it in the middle of the night."

All of the labor was volunteered, and all of the materials were donated, including the storage containers. "Every door I knocked on was open," Cline recalls. He organized a committee to decide what color the towers should be painted. "We thought about gold, but that suggests money and greed," he said. "Red white and blue? We didn't want it to look like a gas station." It was finally decided that the color would be white, because it is "pure, innocent." Cline tied large yellow ribbons around each tower and topped them with American flags.

Cline calls the memorial "Eleven," "because it's shaped like an eleven." And he doesn't consider it a memorial. "It's a sculpture," he says. "The memorial is in people."

Whatever it's called, or whatever it is, it will stand in Buena Vista into at least December. "We're gonna see if the community wants it there longer, or needs it there longer," Cline says. "We're just gonna feel it out."

April 2007: Mark Cline tells us that this Twin Towers memorial will come down this month. "Who knows," he said, "it may go back up on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Hopefully I won't have a reason to build any more tributes to fallen Americans in my lifetime."

[09/23/2006]