What is wrong with this picture?
Succumbing last season to a lapse in judgment, my wife and I attended our town’s annual Harborfest celebration. It is a traditional cluster of over-baked humanity, out on a pre-summer weekend to test parenting skills, purchase mass-produced driftwood gewgaws, and consume deep-fried food before retiring home to the medicine cabinet to commence aloe vera treatments. Variations of this kind of celebration are set off at specified intervals across the country to prevent the citizenry from lapsing into complacency. There is nothing so charming as a mandate from the town elders to initiate a little traffic mayhem.
There was much to take in, some of it pleasant if one ignored the bay, which was sporting a red tide rivaling the silky luminescence of Pam Anderson’s Baywatch wardrobe. There was even a celebrity sighting. Rocky Balboa’s brother-in-law, a fixture in our community, was spotted heading for the dinghy dock with a bag of live goldfish. I have no idea what booth had offered them up for sale (The Society of Impulse Pet Owners?), or what he was planning to do with them, but setting some aquatic thing free seemed like a dubious plan for anything other than anaerobic bacteria that day.
Searching for intrigue, I found myself drawn to the town dock flagstaff. It was adorned with all manner of festive flaggery, and while I’m not a slave to formality, I knew something was slightly amiss. Always game to ask a stupid question, I headed off to locate some knowledgeable official, queries in tow.
The fully decked-out nautical flagstaff is a curious beast, comprised of a main pole, or mast, the top of which is called the masthead, or truck. It often sports a single crosstree, the two ends sometimes referred to as yards, which no doubt intentionally resemble a set of spreaders on a sailboat. They are identified as left and right from the perspective of a landlubber gazing wistfully out to sea. Finally, a gaff rises diagonally up and out, in a landward direction from the mast, starting at or just below where the crosstree makes its transit of the mast. The outermost end of the gaff, called its peak, never rises as high as the truck, and therein lies something of a rub.
At the town dock, what I saw was the American flag flying proudly from the truck. Hung from the right yard was our town flag, and from the left, the tragically anachronistic POW/MIA flag. Strung from the peak of the gaff to the halyard cleat near the base of the pole was a set of colorful markers featuring some of the international maritime signal flags, which I knew to represent letters of the alphabet, numerals, and other sundry codes. I was keen on decoding any message present.
I spotted a suitably uniformed and authoritative-looking fellow, and started peppering him with questions. I could tell it pained him to have to reveal the fact that everything was pretty much wrong with the presentation. The national ensign should have been hanging from the peak of the gaff, the place of honor in the maritime world. Instead, from the gaff was strung the aforementioned and purely festive, which is to say meaningless, set of signal flags. Colorful gibberish.
From our vantage point we could see the flagpoles of two of the several yacht clubs inhabiting our bay, those institutions all playing by the rules. Their three-sided burgees were at the truck, and American flags were properly flown at the honored gaff peak, while flags indicating the presence of commodores and other dignitaries at the club hung from the crosstrees. They were having none of our Harborfest nonsense.
It’s a safe bet a yachtsman doesn’t give a Flying Dutchman what a civilian thinks of his maritime traditions. But at the town dock, official tails were flying between legs as a result of complaints leveled by patriot types irate at seeing the Stars and Stripes skulking below the town’s colors. Here, where storm sewers pump effluent into the bay with startling efficiency, the public had made known its real concerns. Travesty! Put Old Glory up on top where she belongs, goll darn it!
Chapman, that ultimate arbiter of all things nautical, points out that no other flag should be placed “directly above” the national ensign, a rule met by flying it from an entirely different perch, the honored gaff position. Yet our constables had folded to popular pressure, too weary to fight the waves of righteous ignorance.
As further concession to those attributes that make Americans great, the town also refuses to fly storm flags from the appropriate left yard, wishing to avoid potential lawsuits. You can guess the scenario: some fisherman stoked on a bunker report heads out with a green flag sighting his sole weather advisory. When a summer squall lands him on some North Shore blue blood’s patio, forget the Coast Guard. The first calls go out to attorneys.
Wrong
Instead, the bay constables see fit to fly the POW/MIA flag, a sad reminder of one of our nation’s darker periods. It is a shadowy thing, like a painful memory, evocative of, if anything, the forced confession of a vanquished pirate. You’d think there’d have been at least some resistance to its presence, but then doves are easier to fend off than hawks.
Right
I guess it kind of made sense to finish out the pole with a little senseless color. You can buy a festive flag set, a random sample thirty-five or so feet long, for sprucing up the boat or cottage on special occasions. I have to wonder if each purchased set is the same pattern, or if the factory spits out randomly random patterns. In which case I have to wonder if, as one would expect with a roomful of monkeys given enough time and workstations, an interesting message might occasionally turn up. My interest is again peaked, almost enough for me to laminate a code list and start carrying it around in the wallet. Almost.
Author’s Note:
A few weeks after the above was written, I was relaxing at my mooring when I noticed a nearby yacht club flying two decorative sets of flags from the truck, each streaming down to anchor points near the ground to form a festive phalanx. With little else to do but continue drinking, I decoded the grouping with a computer printout I’d recently placed aboard.
The upshot? Again, the message was gobbledygook, but with a notable twist. One of the strands had been hung upside down. Now, the fact is, the yacht club in question is the youngest and most relaxed on the bay, but isn’t that special? Were that to happen at one of the more staid seaside institutions, it wouldn’t surprise me to later see the perpetrator of such ill decorum hanging from the appropriate yardarm. And I’ll bet you there is one so specified for the job. That transgression is surely worse than trailing a strand of TP from one of your Topsiders.
Author Subsequent Note:
I’m so wrong. I’ve now seen the same thing done at the stodgy club, which means they’re all hoisting a long set of flags from the middle. Get it? It’s just a big colorful bunch of nonsense. Still, don’t mess with their starting gun.
