A downside to the flag-waving, patriotic fervor gripping America is the number of stained, tattered flags you see mixed with litter on the side of the road. Automobile flags, which routinely fought hurricane-force winds as they strained on those plastic flagpoles, in the end to lose the battle against Mother Nature.

Logically, I know that it’s just a piece of cloth, the same material of which my shirts are made, but I found myself gritting my teeth when I’d spy that piece of cloth crumpled in the gutter like old trash.
 
 

I was on my way to the salt mine, typical rainy Monday morning and work was some place I’d rather not be heading. I got caught at a stoplight and glanced out the window at a flowering dogwood tree, some delicate white petals succumbing to gravity and releasing their hold on their branch. They drifted down to the side of the road where they came to rest on what I call my first recovery. The flag and plastic flagpole had obviously snapped off a car and now lay within feet of my stopped car. I opened the door, leaned out and plucked the flag from amid the detritus.

And so it began. While stopped for a light or traffic, I’d pop the car in park, hop out and grab yet another lost flag and slip back into the car. Once, a pickup truck behind me blew his horn as I was jumping back in the car.  “Come on, guy.” I thought. “The light’s still red.” I glanced in the mirror to see the driver leaning over the steering wheel, his face right up against the windshield. Expecting to see an internationally recognized hand gesture of derision and contempt, instead I saw a big smile and a thumbs-up.

The dozen or so recovered flags went out west with MSO and me this year. Under a moonless Nevada sky, filled with more stars then there are numbers to count them, those torn and tattered, stained and soiled pieces of cloth were added to a blazing campfire. With a touch of irony, in the background Barry McGuire’s number one hit back in early Fall of ‘65 was on the RV’s CD player – Eve of Destruction.