40 Stars Shine Over the Hollow

40 Stars Shine Over the Hollow This Morning

For days I’ve been hearing Don McLean’s lyrics from “Vincent” in the back of my mind “Starry, starry night…,portraits hung in empty halls…frameless heads on nameless walls….” I believe he wrote the song as a tribute to Vincent van Gogh. Instead, McLean’s haunting phrases take me back to a September morning darkened by evil. The lyrics underscore the horror of the deaths of forty beautiful souls aboard Flight 93, spirits who were blessedly released from their suffering in a field only a crow’s flight from my hollow.

Early that morning I had cradled a steaming mug of coffee and walked out into my yard. It was not yet light. Bats still hunted, swirling around the dusk to dawn lantern. I looked up into the deep blue sky above the ridge and saw tiny moving lights that were, in reality, huge airliners. They inched across a field of twinkling planets and stars. A pristine morning. A good lawn-mowing day I thought.

Later, the crew and passengers aboard the Boeing 757 had probably grown restless after languishing on the tarmac at Newark, their departure delayed due to airport construction. Finally cleared for takeoff, they soared westward, bound for the Pacific coast. Their final destination was not one they could have imagined. The United Airlines flight abruptly veered toward Washington,DC, and carried them deep down into the earth near the tiny settlement of Lambertsville, Pennsylvania.

Forty strong characters saved hundreds and not just in DC. Their perfect God-given timing saved many lives in the Shanksville PA school alone, where hundreds of children from preK to twelfth grade had just begun their school day. Add several more hundred residents and workers in surrounding villages, and motorists on the well-traveled Lincoln Highway. Somerset County lost not even one soul. Our amazement and gratitude is truly impossible to put into words, at least words not accompanied by hushed tones and tear-filled eyes.

Since that morning, in my mind’s eye, I often see the crew and passengers emerge from the western hillside across the road from my home where, at 10:06 a.m. September 11, 2001, my windows and storm doors shuddered as if pounded by God’s angry fist. From over the western ridge forty of them come to stand in the cow pasture, as if posing for a school portrait. They are always smiling at me. There is an air of innocence about them and an aura that illuminates their hair, so they appear as children playing in the sun. “Come walk with me,” I say.
“Shadows on the hill,
Sketch the trees and daffodills
Catch the breeze and winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land.’”
words by Don McLean