My eldest sister wanted the old flagpole taken down. This surprised me a bit since she, of my three sisters, is the least likely to dream up chores for me to do, but it was even more odd that she noticed something like that rusty old flagpole. I would have expected as much from the nearest of my siblings because she had to avoid the thing every time she mowed the grass down there which, this time of year, was just about once a week. And she wouldn't hesitate a nanosecond to submit a work order if the thought had occurred to her. "Maybe Michael could do it… earn a few dollars," not realizing that my eighteen year old was way over-booked with the incessant demands of the summer between high school and college. In point of fact, a reconnoitering of the relic revealed that it really was an eyesore, but one which had so gradually become so that I never noticed. Down it would come.

This is not just any flagpole. My father conceived it, perhaps 40 years ago, at the height of his passion for sailboats. I have figured out by now that a man's passion for expensive toys peaks before the object of his desire is obtained, and often requires some outlet to avoid a disastrous slip into depression or poverty. Dad's boat was a decade away, and in the meantime, we had to endure, every summer, wandering through every marina from Connecticut to Maine while he indulged in vicarious research. So the flagpole was supposed to look like a ship's mast, although it was constructed of iron pipe. Its base consisted of two four-foot high 3-inch diameter pipes set about two feet into a block of concrete the bottom of which looked up at the deepest frost. In between these two pipes was fastened the mainmast, er... the flagpole, by means of two stout bolts that went through all three pipes. Overall, the thing reached about 35 feet, but about 20 feet up there was a yardarm with a span of about 10 feet, supported by wires stays running from the tips of the yardarm to about five feet below the top of the pole. Each end of the yardarm also had a pulley attached with lines to raise smaller flags. The idea was that Old Glory would fly at the peak, while the yardarm would display pennants made from the appropriate Scottish tartans of whatever clan members that might be in residence or visiting at the time. I don't know if it was ever considered that we night have revered guests who, alas, had no clan affiliations. We had flags for the MacLeods, the MacLeans, the Douglasses, the MacDonalds, and followed this protocol religiously for what remained of the flagpole's first summer.

High atop this whole contraption was a wind vane in the shape of a thistle, lovingly cut by my father out of ¼" aluminum, along with the appropriate directional letters which were attached to the center by brass rods. Regrettably, the thing was too heavy and after the initial lubrication weathered a bit, a rather ambitious breeze was required for it to find the wind.

The whole bit with the yardarm and main mast and the stays meant that things occasionally got fouled, in the truest nautical sense of the word. I was invariably appointed to free up the SNAFUs while negotiating the, um, flexible ladder - white-knuckled left hand grip on the yardarm or pole, right hand fiddling with the obstinate pulley.

A few years after we erected the flagpole ("stepped" might be a more appropriate word), we planted a three-foot high pin oak tree about 15 feet away. Little did we realize that this would be the eventual undoing of our nautical/partriotic display. Pin oaks grow a lot faster than flagpoles, and within a decade, its branches were hopelessly entangling the upper reaches, pulleys, stays, wind vane. By this time, it had been a long while since the Stars and Stripes had risen, and the sad truth is, no one really noticed. Eventually, the thistle succumbed to corrosion and a gust of wind landed it amidst the branches of the oak, where it remains to this day.

I engineered the situation. A hack saw to sever and extract the upper bolt should allow the pole to fall gracefully, pivoting on the lower bolt. Plenty of clearance in both directions. I took Michael along partly to share the blame if something went awry, as it usually did with projects like this, but mostly because he can pull on a hack saw way longer than I can. We cut the nut off one end of the upper bolt and spent about 10 frustrating minutes coaxing it out through all three pipes. "Which way?" he asked. "Let's go that way; maybe we can snag the thistle out of the tree on the way down."

We pushed, we rocked, we cajoled, but the tree was stronger. So we went the other way, slowly at first, and then with a delightful out-of-control acceleration that would have severely disappointed my father, who would have engineered a scheme to gently lower the thing to horizontal, the tip of the yardarm resting on a board the location of which would have been precisely calculated well in advance. This would have involved at least one vehicle with a trailer hitch or stout bumper, a major capital investment in rope (not "line;" it was, after all, on land), and a means of getting it looped around the flagpole high enough to do any good, which would probably have involved me, since Michael weighs about twice as much as I do. Thank the Lord for small favors. I had a very clear vision of this in my mind as the flagpole gathered momentum. The thought of burning in Hell occurred to me.

As it happened, the starboard tip of the yardarm ended up submerged about two feet into the ground, and the top 10 feet of the pole snapped off with a satisfying clang, saving us the effort of cutting it up. We then severed the lower bolt, yanked the yardarm from the Earth and hauled the pieces up under the horse chestnut trees, where the old wrought-iron front gate has been laying for about four decades.

We gathered up the tools and the old bolts, and as we walked off, I noticed that the thistle wind vane was still held securely in the embrace of the oak tree, pointing faithfully to windward.

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© Frank Burnside Jr. 2002