Flag Day comes in the middle of June, on the fourteenth, and almost nobody gets it off. It is not that kind of holiday. There is no parade on Texas Avenue for it and no sale at the furniture store. It falls between Memorial Day and the Fourth like a rest between two beats, and if you notice it at all it is because the flags that went up in May are still up, a little more faded, and somebody on your street has added a second one.
The date marks the day the Continental Congress adopted the stars and stripes, in 1777, as the flag of a country that was still mostly an argument. Wilson proclaimed a day for it in 1916, and Congress made it official in 1949, and in between it was mostly schoolteachers and veterans' halls that kept it. It is a quiet holiday for a loud object. That is what I want to write about: the object, and where it flies here.
Because here it flies over fire.
Drive along the channel side of town at dusk — Bayway, or 146 up onto the bridge — and look at the plants. What you see first are the towers and the stacks, hundreds of them, lit like a city that is all downtown. What you see second, if you look, are the flags. There is usually one at the gate. There is one by the office. And sometimes, if you look long enough, there is one flying from somewhere it has no obvious business being: high on a structure, out at the end of a pipe rack, up on a tank, put there by somebody with a lift and a permit and a reason.
I have never asked the reason. I think I know it.
Start with the structure. A flare stack is a chimney built on purpose to carry fire. When a unit in a plant has to let go of pressure — because a pump tripped, because a valve stuck, because the process got ahead of itself and the safest thing to do is send the gas somewhere it can burn instead of somewhere it can gather — the gas goes up the flare line to the top of the stack and is lit there, in the open air, where it can do no harm. It is lit because a small pilot flame burns at the tip all the time, day and night, whether anything is coming up the line or not, so that when something does come it is met by fire and not by a chance. The flare is not the plant failing. The flare is the plant deciding, on purpose, to be safe rather than tidy. A stack like that is engineered for heat and wind and the weight of its own height. It is the tallest, sturdiest, least decorative thing on the site. And it is exactly where, if you were going to put a flag where the whole town could see it, you would want to put one.
Now think about what a flag actually is, as a physical object, because that has something to do with why it means what it means. A flag is a sheet of cloth attached at one edge and free at the others, and when the wind blows across it, it does not simply stream out flat the way you might expect. It ripples. It snaps. The rippling is not the wind being gusty. It is the flag itself: a flat sheet in a steady stream of air is unstable, and the smallest wrinkle in it makes the air on one side move a little differently from the air on the other, which pulls the wrinkle bigger, which travels down the cloth as a wave and lets the next wrinkle start. A flag flaps because it cannot help it. It is a thing that, in the wind, is always in the act of moving and never arrives. That is why a flag looks alive, and why a flag hanging limp on a still day looks like something has gone wrong.
A plant reads the wind the same way. Near the gates and along the units there are windsocks, orange cones of cloth on poles, because a place that handles gas needs to know at every moment which way the air is moving — which way a leak would drift, which way to send people. An operator who has worked a site for years can tell you the wind without looking at an instrument, from the lean of the flare and the angle of the steam and the direction the flag at the gate is pointing. The flag on the pole is a signal before it is a symbol. It says where the air is going. It says, to anyone who can read it, what the plant needs to know first.
So: a piece of cloth that is only itself when it is being worked on by something bigger, flying near a chimney whose whole purpose is to hold the biggest thing there is — fire — where it can be seen and not feared. I think that is what a flag over a refinery is saying, whether or not the person who ran it up the pole was thinking any of this. It is saying: we are here, we are at work, and this is under control.
There is a second thing it says, quieter. A flag is a claim of belonging. It says this place is part of that larger thing, and that larger thing is part of this place. That sounds obvious until you stand at the fence and consider what is on the other side of it. Behind the fence is a machine the size of a small city that turns crude oil into gasoline, jet fuel, and the raw stock for plastic, and that machine belongs to a company, and the company belongs to shareholders, and the product goes onto a ship and could be bound for anywhere on the earth. There is nothing local about a barrel. And yet the flag on the pole is the flag of the country, and at some gates the Texas flag beside it, and the people who walk through the gate at shift change live in this town and vote in this county and send their children to Goose Creek or Barbers Hill schools. The flag is how a global machine says where it lives.
I want to be careful here, because there is a way of talking about flags and industry that is cheap and I do not want to do it. The flag on the tower is not an advertisement and it is not an argument that the plant is beyond question. The town that makes the fuel is also the town that breathes the air, and everyone here knows it, and the flag does not settle that. What the flag does is smaller and, I think, more honest. It says the place is not anonymous. Someone put their name on it.
There is a third thing a flag can say, and you learn it by watching one over time. A flag at half-staff is a sentence anyone can read. The rule for it is written down: the flag is run all the way to the top of the pole first, held there a moment, and only then brought down to the middle, and before it comes down for the night it goes back up to the top. It does not go halfway by mistake. It goes there on purpose, from the top. When a flag on the channel comes down to the middle of the pole, the whole town knows before it hears why. Sometimes it is the country's grief — a death everybody saw on the news. Sometimes it is closer. Plants are dangerous places, run carefully by people who know they are dangerous, and every so often, despite everything, somebody does not come home. A flag lowered beside a stack that was built to carry fire is the plant's way of saying, in the only language a structure has, that it knows.
There is one more thing about the flag on the tower that took me years to notice, and it is the plainest. Look at what it is made of. A flag that is going to live outdoors on this coast, in salt wind and July sun, is almost never cotton anymore. It is nylon or polyester, because those hold their color, shed water and do not rot. Both of them start as hydrocarbons. Nylon is built up from benzene; polyester from a xylene and a glycol made from ethylene; and those are exactly the molecules that come out of a refinery and a chemical plant like the ones on the channel. I cannot tell you that any particular flag on any particular gate contains anything that passed through Baytown. The supply chain does not work that way and nobody could trace it. But the odds are not bad. The cloth that says who this place belongs to is, some of it, the place's own product, spun and sewn somewhere else and sent back to fly over the fire it came out of.
The town's own flags speak the same dialect. The ones in the cemeteries, the ones at the schools, the ones the kids wave on the curb at the Christmas parade, the Mexican tricolor that comes out on Texas Avenue in September beside the stars and stripes, because a town where about half the households speak Spanish at home has two flags in a great many of its hearts and sees no contradiction. A fence says who is out. A flag says who is in.
On the fourteenth of June the ones that are up are up, and the ones that were going to be replaced have been replaced. If you want to see a good one, do not look for it from the bridge. Park across the road from one of the plant gates a little before the evening shift change, when the sea breeze has come in off the bay and is blowing steady from the south. The windsock on its pole and the flag on its pole will be leaning the same way, which is the first thing anyone inside would check. The trucks come in one after another, a badge goes up to the reader, the arm lifts. Behind the guardhouse the stacks are beginning to show their lights. And over all of it, on a pole that is short next to anything behind it, a square of red and white and blue, snapping in the wind, working, never arriving, exactly as it is supposed to.