Imagine yourself a tree. A Douglas fir that has grown for perhaps 200 years—two or three human lifespans—in a hillside stand. You don’t have eyes or ears, of course. What use would they be, deep rooted to the earth as you are, unable to move except to sway when a strong wind blows and to grow, straining up into the light and down into the soil?
Would eyes and ears help you survive? Or would they make survival a misery, a torture? Wouldn’t sight and hearing make you envious of all the mammals and even the insects that could fly, crawl, slither, and climb into your branches, up your trunk, and into the soil beneath you? Not only that, but you’d be able to see danger approaching and not do a thing about it: forest fires that would scorch you, woodpeckers that would rat-tat-tat at your hide, human beings with axes and crosscut saws.
You do have senses that resemble taste, smell, and touch, though. How else could you worm through the earth, your roots infinitely more sensitive than fingertips, in their ceaseless search for nutrients? How could your cones be responsive to the season’s warmth, dropping seeds at just the right time?
Like most every living thing, you are an immense colony of cells—trillions of them, each specialized for a task, each responsive to the whole in ways other creatures cannot begin to fathom. Does that constitute a sort of ‘consciousness’? Are you somehow aware of the life force flowing through you? Surely not in the same sense as human beings. You aren’t proud, envious, happy, sad, desirous, greedy, kind, or murderous—all those things that constitute humanness.
Your strength is silent, unerring endurance.
You would never have chosen to be The World’s Tallest Flagpole. You were selected for that role by men who knew exactly what they wanted: a tree that towered straight and unflawed over its companions, which could be felled and skidded to a logging road then transported down to the sea, which would become a monument celebrated by all who saw it amidst the wonders of The Kew Gardens.
“A giant erection,” as it was referred to by one of the less than reverent riggers who raised you in 1959, to commemorate the Kew’s bicentennial.
And there you stood for almost fifty years until the ‘woodpeckers and rot’ got in, and you had to be taken down. But that wasn’t ‘you’ anymore, was it? It was your remains, stood up there for all the world to marvel at, decaying.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Harry pronounced. As for his memories, they lived on in Mural #43—The Kew Gardens Flagpole, which got relocated to Chemainus Drive after they tore down the old fire hall.
“Like the rest of us, the mighty must fall. The juggernauts just make a bigger thud when they hit the ground,” is how he summed up its fate. “And the scattered bits and pieces are reduced to particles smaller than dust. Phtt, gone.”
He’d always known that, of course. And the knowledge haunted him, always being a word that vaults over the fantasies of childhood, and the hubris of youth, and the reluctant musings of adulthood—an elixer healing the palsies of old age with acceptance of the ever-present oblivions before and after memory.
“There’s things we know in our bones,” he believes, “but can’t get into our heads. Things way beyond the reach of our fancy words… wonderful and terrible things.”
What Harry means is: There are ideas we can define, but never comprehend—Like The World’s Biggest Flagpole.
“Facts don’t tell the story,” Harry claims. “It’s what that tree stood for, what it represented, more than its dimensions, age, or composition that counted.”
Harry could cite the facts of the case. He was there when they lowered that gigantic Douglas fir to the ground—all two hundred and seventy feet of her. They couldn’t just undercut and backcut, sending her crashing to the forest floor, like every other tree that gets skidded out of the woods. The Kew tree had to be lowered like royalty to its temporary resting place, tended by a swarm of chosen loggers.
“Every step of that procession down Copper Canyon to the log dump in Chemainus had to be thought through, planned, and re-planned,” he recalled. “It reminded me of the kind of ritual you’d expect in a church, a high Anglican or Roman Catholic church. We weren’t dealing with an ordinary tree; it was a sacred pole and had to be handled with all due reverence.”
There’d be other special trees taken out of the Mid-Island forests over the years: some bound for Montreal and the 1967 World Fair, more for the Osaka World Fair in 1970. But none of those operations matched the rough hewn ceremony that sent the Kew Gardens pole on its way across the Atlantic, then up the River Thames to its place of honour.
Not everyone celebrated the event. “Flagpoles don’t have no roots,” was how Harry’s buddy Jim put it. That was twelve years later, during Mac Blo’s annual 25-year Service Awards dinner. “You stick ’em in the ground, 5,000 miles from where they grew up, and they’re not connected to the land anymore. They’re dead. But the Guinness World Record seekers, they won’t even let that tree die properly, decomposing on its forest floor, a nurse log, feeding its young.”
Harry would come to accept Jim’s commentary. The World’s Biggest Flagpole didn’t decay in its natural cycle. Nor would its memory echo in the mausoleums of archeology, a thing rediscovered like the ribs of Viking ships, or the carbon-dated beams of ancient villages. But that anniversary night, he’d bridled at the criticism.
“What about your totem poles?” he challenged. “They don’t have any roots.”
Jim laughed at that, the way only he could, as if everyone in the room—including himself—was a child. That’s something else Harry had come to appreciate more deeply over time—Jim’s laugh. “You look at a Haida totem, and tell me it hasn’t got roots, man,” he responded. “Look at the raven, the bears, the orca, and the eagles, then connect them to the clans they represent, and think how the people of those clans walked barefoot on this earth, and tell me those poles don’t have roots!
“Your Kew Garden pole was shaved and polished till there wasn’t nothing left of its true nature. Then up went a flag, flapping from its tip. Rule Britannia! A tree taken from sacred ground to fly the flag of a bunch of pillagers.”
The disagreement had been occasioned by the official invitation to their recognition dinner, which featured a picture of the Kew Garden Pole, loaded onto a train of two logging trucks in 1958, crossing a trestle bridge during its tortuous journey down Copper Canyon. There was still lots Harry wanted say about Jim’s criticism, but even half a century later he clamped his jaw shut.
“Sometimes accepting truth’s like eating slug-stew,” Jim had grinned. “Believe me, I’ve been choking on your recipe since I was a kid.” He patted Harry’s shoulder sympathetically. “You’re a good man, Harry. If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t have said what I just did. Remember, I’m a logger too.”
Harry never saw that pole again after it left Copper Canyon. Didn’t think much about it either. Queen Elizabeth and the Kew Gardens were too far from home for him to wonder at. The 25th annual Service Awards were the second-to-last time the tallest flagpole in the world had been brought to his attention. It was Bernice who raised the topic the first to last time, in 2008, as they were preparing to visit her brother and sister-in-law, Robert and Gladys, ‘back in the old country’.
“One last time,” she said. While Harry could still get around town without a walker to keep him from tipping over.
“Let’s go see our flagpole in the Kew Garden’s,” she’d suggested.