At Large and At Small (17 page)

It was good to see George watching the World Series one night. Until then, we had been unable to watch any television programs that did not deal with September 11. Flying above center
field at Yankee Stadium was a torn flag. It was shaped like an oriflamme, the banner the king’s army carried in twelfth-century France, split at one end with flying edges like two flames. The flag, which had flown somewhere inside the World Trade Center, had been found in the rubble and nearly disposed of (Flag Code section 176k: “The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting
emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning”). The Port Authority intervened, and Sergeant Antonio Scannella, a police officer who had lost thirteen
of his squad’s eighteen members, became the flag’s unofficial caretaker, saying, “You can’t throw an American flag in the garbage.” When Max von Essen, the son of the New York City fire commissioner, sang “The
Star-Spangled Banner” (the only national anthem I can think of that is explicitly about a flag), my throat surprised me by catching.

Why did the lopsided flag that billowed across our television screen pull strings that had previously been unpullable? I think it moved me
because
it was damaged, like the city itself. A clean rectangle whose proportions conform precisely to the executive order
issued in 1912 by President Taft—hoist (height) 1.0, fly (length) 1.9, hoist of union (blue field) .5385, fly of union .76, width of each stripe .0769, diameter of each star .0616—calls up less passionate associations than, for instance, the flag flown by the 16th Connecticut Volunteer Regiment in the Civil War. When surrender was inevitable, the soldiers tore the flag into fragments to keep it from
falling into enemy hands. A historian named F. C. Hicks wrote in 1926:

The regiment, some five hundred strong, was sent to a prison camp where most of the men remained until the close of the war. Each piece of the colors was sacredly preserved. When a soldier died his piece was entrusted to a comrade. At the end of the war the weary prisoners returned to their homes, each bringing his bit of
star or stripe with him. All these torn fragments were patched together and the regimental colors, nearly complete, are now preserved in the State House at Hartford.

To read about our nation’s vexillological history—“vexillology,” the study of flags, is an excellent crossword-puzzle word that derives from the Latin
vexillum
, or banner—is to experience a series of bitter disillusionments. Betsy
Ross did not design the Stars and Stripes; she sewed flags for the navy in the spring of 1777, but there is no evidence that the flag as we know it was conceived before June 14 of that year, when the Continental Congress, which had previously been more concerned about designing a national seal, finally got around to the flag: “
RESOLVED
: that the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes,
alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” (Many historians now attribute the circular shape of that constellation to Francis Hopkinson, a delegate from New Jersey, though late-eighteenth-century flags show the stars disposed in a variety of arrangements, including a single vertical line and an X.) George Washington did
not cross the Delaware with flag in hand; the Battle of Trenton was fought six months before the Flag Resolution. The flag’s design did not immediately engrave itself on the memories of all who beheld it; in 1778, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams informed the King of the Two Sicilies that the stripes were “alternately red, white, and blue,” and on a ceramic jug manufactured in Liverpool at about
the same time, an American ship flew a flag with blue and yellow stripes. “The Star-Spangled Banner” did not immediately become the national anthem; though it was written by Francis Scott Key during the Battle of Fort McHenry in 1814 (and set to the tune
of “To Anacreon in Heaven,” a British drinking song celebrating a bibulous Greek poet who is said to have choked to death on a grape), it was
not officially adopted until 1931.

In fact, as Scot M. Guenter explains in
The American Flag, 1777–1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification
, it was not until Rebel forces fired on the flag at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, that the flag, which earlier had been used mainly for identifying naval and commercial vessels, was transformed into a symbol men were willing to die for. If it
took the Civil War to sacralize the flag—as the historian George Henry Preble wrote in 1880, “its prose became poetry”—it took the commercialism of the ensuing decades to turn its poetry back into prose. In 1905, an anti-desecration circular lamented the use of the flag in advertisements for “bicycles, bock beer, whiskey, fine cambric, bone knoll, sour mash, tar soap, American pepsin chewing gum,
theatres, tobacco, Japan tea, awnings, breweries, cigars, charity balls, cuff buttons, dime museums, floor mats, fireworks, furriers, living pictures, picnic grounds, patent medicines, poolrooms, prize fights, restaurants, roof gardens, real estate agencies, sample rooms, shoe stores, soap makers, saloons, shooting galleries, tent makers, variety shows, [and] vendors of lemon acid.” Tame stuff, perhaps,
compared with David Bowie, his face painted red, white, and blue and a miniature vodka bottle resting on his naked clavicle (caption: “Absolut Bowie”), or with the nightmarish ads that clog the Internet (“Render this Osama Voo-Doo doll completely Pin-Laden! 6-inch doll for a Stocking Stuffer
Price of $9.99! Comes with 6 red, white, and blue extra-sharp Patriot Pins”).

In 1989, the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago mounted an exhibit called “What Is the Proper Way to Display the American Flag?” In order to reach the leather-bound ledger in which they were asked to record their responses, viewers had to walk on a flag laid on the floor. “For days,” reported
The Detroit News
, “veterans picked the flag up off the floor, folded it in the ceremonial military fashion and placed it on the
shelf. Their faces were almost always stoic; one was visibly in tears at the sight of grimy footprints on the flag. Moments later, however, the flag was unfolded by supporters of the art, usually students with indignant faces, who shook out the flag like a bedsheet, and then draped it on the floor.”

The same year, in a controversial case called
Texas v. Johnson
, Supreme Court Justice Anthony
Kennedy explained why he had concluded, with great reluctance, that flag-burning is a form of free speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment. “Though symbols often are what we ourselves make of them,” he wrote, “the flag is constant in expressing beliefs Americans share, beliefs in law and peace and that freedom which sustains the human spirit. The case here today forces recognition of
the costs to which those beliefs commit us. It is poignant but fundamental that the flag protects those who hold it in contempt.”

We kept our flag at half staff longer than President Bush decreed that we should, and then, after raising it to full staff, we continued to fly it after most of our neighbors had put theirs away. Maybe we were making up for lost time. Maybe we needed to see our flag
flying in order to convince ourselves that even though anti-Muslim protesters marching near a mosque in Bridgeview, Illinois, had waved flags and chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!,” we could choose another meaning in Whately, Massachusetts: the one a Chicago flag committee had in mind in 1895 when it called the Stars and Stripes “our greater self.”

I had not looked closely at our flag when we raised it,
so I decided to take it down one day to see whether it was made of cotton or silk. It was a raw afternoon in early December; freezing rain was falling on gray patches of snow. Section 174c of the Flag Code prohibits display in inclement weather, but a handful of local diehards were still flying their flags rain or shine, twenty-four hours a day, so we had followed suit. The flag was sodden and
looked like a shrouded bat. When I lowered it and detached the grommets from the halyard, I could see that it was made of nylon. Black letters printed on the hoist, so faded I could barely make them out, read
DURA LITE
. The red stitching that connected the stripes was beginning to bleed. The embroidered white stars were fraying. As I refastened the brass clip, I tried hard to keep the old, wet,
shabby flag from touching the ground.

mong the many mental games with which my insomniac father whiled away the small hours of the night, his favorite was called I Shook Hands with Shakespeare. He had shaken hands with the actress Cornelia Otis Skinner, who had in turn presumably shaken hands with her father, Otis
Skinner.
He
had shaken hands with Edwin Booth… and so on, down through Junius Brutus Booth, Edmund Kean, David Garrick, Thomas Betterton, Sir William D’Avenant, and Richard Burbage. Finally, as dawn crept through the blinds, William Shakespeare extended his hand. (My father admitted a shaky manual link between Kean, who was born in 1787, and Garrick, who died in 1779.)

I myself have shaken hands
with the arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Our degrees of separation number only two. Aware of my febrile interest in the history of polar exploration, my father once mentioned that, many years earlier, he had been introduced to Stefansson.

“
Stefansson?
” I panted. “What was he like?”

“The only thing I recall,” said my father, “is his unfortunate smell.”

I didn’t hold this against Stefansson;
it was part and parcel of being an explorer. (One of his expeditionary companions once noted that “he considers any attention to cleanliness, hygiene and camp sanitation as ‘military fads.’ ”) In any case, through Stefansson (or, in some cases, through people
he
met), I have also clasped hands with Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, Fridtjof Nansen, Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton—the
men who dominated the great period of arctic and antarctic exploration between 1880 and the First World War. I have spent many nights establishing these bonds (
Let’s see… Stefansson must have met Amundsen in 1906, when they were both at Herschel Island; Amundsen visited Nansen in Norway in 1900—or was it 1899?
), and, like my father, discovered that the handshaking game is far better at keeping
one awake than at putting one to sleep.

The closest hand was the best; it still felt warm. For more than twenty years, I have therefore considered Vilhjalmur Stefansson “my explorer.” During the course of three expeditions between 1906 and 1918, my explorer was the first white man to visit the Copper Inuit of Victoria Island; traveled twenty thousand miles by dogsled; discovered the world’s last
major landmasses, a series of islands in the Canadian archipelago; and set what a colleague called “the world’s record for continuous Polar service” (five and a half years, an interval Stefansson considered nothing to boast about, since many of his
Inuit friends had lived in the Arctic without apparent difficulty for more than eight decades).

What most endeared Stefansson to me was his conviction
that the far north was not meant to be endured; it was meant to be enjoyed. If you knew what you were doing, you could have a “bully time” up there. His favorite temperature was −40°. (Temperatures below −50° were manageable but not quite so bully, since they required you to breathe through your mouth. “Your nose,” he observed, “is less likely to freeze when there is cold air merely outside of
it instead of both inside and out.”) When he was above 66° north latitude, he insisted that his spirits were jollier, his appetite keener, and his wavy blond hair thicker. His most famous book, a 784-page account of his third expedition, was called
The Friendly Arctic
.

T
he Friendly Arctic
? In 1921, when it was published, Macmillan might as well have brought out a book called
The Friendly Pit
Viper
. The previous century had seen a series of arctic catastrophes, from Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage (130 dead of scurvy, starvation, and lead poisoning), to George Washington De Long’s 1879 attempt to reach the North Pole from Siberia (twenty dead of exposure, starvation, and drowning), to Adolphus Greely’s 1881 expedition to Ellesmere Island (nineteen
dead of exposure, starvation, and drowning). It was true that in 1909 Robert Peary reached the North Pole—or claimed he did—but he
would have had a more comfortable journey had he not lost eight of his toes to frostbite on an earlier expedition.

The Friendly Arctic
was an in-your-face title, and that’s why Stefansson chose it. After all, he wrote, everyone knows what the Arctic is like:

The
land up there is all covered with eternal ice; there is everlasting winter with intense cold; and the corollary of the everlastingness of the winter is the absence of summer and the lack of vegetation. The country, whether land or sea, is a lifeless waste of eternal silence. The stars look down with a cruel glitter, and the depressing effect of the winter darkness upon the spirit of man is heavy beyond
words. On the fringes of this desolation live the Eskimos, the filthiest and most benighted people on earth, pushed there by more powerful nations farther south, and eking out a miserable existence amidst hardship.