The pole without its flag

An empty flagpole draws the eye more than a flying flag ever does, if only because the mind keeps expecting movement and receiving none. Passersby glance up out of habit, find nothing, and glance away again within a second, a reflex repeated by nearly everyone who crosses the plaza, as though the pole itself were still broadcasting on a frequency the flag used to carry. The halyard, freed of its usual cargo, knocks against the aluminum shaft in any real wind, a metallic, arrhythmic clink that carries further than you'd expect, and that maintenance crews cite, more than any visual complaint, as the reason bare poles get flags back on them quickly. Height is regulated by context rather than law in most municipalities, taller outside courthouses, shorter outside branch libraries, but an empty pole reads as the same height everywhere, since there is nothing on it to provide scale. Rust begins at the truck, the small pulley wheel at the top, long before it reaches the base, since that is where the moisture collects and no one climbs up to check. This reviewer once watched an empty pole for a full lunch hour outside a shuttered post office, and can report that the strangest part was not the absence of the flag but the certainty, shared by everyone who walked past, that something used to be there and should be again.

Arthur Pell