It could have been a short, sweet story: planes get diverted, local people pitch in to help stranded passengers. Polite thank-you letters and gifts follow.

What happened in Newfoundland in one terrifying week in September was all that. But in the next two months, the story continued to grow. Here and in scattered hamlets for miles around, everyone has a part of it to tell -- how half a dozen or so isolated communities have been embraced by strangers who dropped from the sky and changed their lives.

Greg King was there when it started. An air traffic controller, he was on duty on Sept. 11 at Gander, once the hub of North Atlantic air travel, but now an airport that sees few commercial aircraft on the ground while still directing them overhead. Late that morning, when he was preparing for the daily ''wall of airplanes'' from Europe heading for arrivals in New York and other cities, Mr. King suddenly received an order to shut down the sky.

Thirty-eight planes were told to land immediately, and for a couple of hours Mr. King barely had time to call his wife and say he would be bringing strangers home for the night. At some point, he recalls, he also registered a fleeting image of an Air France Boeing 747 ''bigger than the airport terminal.''