Our flag pole broke a few months ago. We meant to get it fixed so we could rehang our American flag and our rainbow Gadsden flag. Yes, you read that right we have a Gadsden flag with it’s rattlesnake curled up and threatening with the declaration, “Don’t Tread on Me”, but instead of the orignal yellow background it’s glorious rainbow colored. I came to the LGBTQ late in life. Polyamorous in my late thirties, bisexual in my forties, but as they say, better late than never. The flags we had to take down are neatly folded in triangles waiting to go back up and join our neighbors as they put up the red, white and blue bunting and line their walkways with tiny flags. On one of the last walks my husband and I did before this hellish heat wave hit one of those small flags had fallen over. He stopped, let go of my hand and went to put it back, sinking the thin stick deeper into the ground, because our flag is never supposed to touch the ground. He came back to me, we joined hands and finished our walk. I’ve never seen so many flags up in the neighborhood, but then it’s the 250th anniversary or is it birthday, of our nation.
We had to get our first flag out of the closet where it has been kept, because its hard to fold a flag that is permanently attached to a pole. We bought this flag when we first moved into this house over twenty years ago. It was our flag for quite awhile, but we wanted to put up both the regular American flag and another flag and two flags wouldn’t fit in the one bracket. We love American history, I had a serious thing for Colonial history starting in high school, so we looked at the early flags of our country and decided on the Gadsden flag. My husband found it in rainbow colors which was perfect.
The snake on the flag is a rattlesnake. It’s a very American snake, in fact its range is only in the Americas from Southern Canada to central Argentina. I even have a book in my TBR pile entitled, “America’s Snake,” by Ted Levin. But more than just geography, if the flag had used another snake without the rattles, it could have been mistaken for an European adder, and we were fighting to become a new country with its own identity. The rattlesnake was exactly that. Those aren’t just lines at the end of its tail, like the beautiful diamond pattern on its skin, but pieces of keratin just like our hair and fingernails. When the rattlesnake vibrates its tail it makes a very unique high, buzzing sound. If you’ve ever heard it in the wild it is one of the most chilling sounds ever. It ranks right up there with the sound of a bullet being racked into a gun so its live to fire, the lip-twisted growl of a large dog behind you before you turn around and see just how big it is, all those sounds will freeze you in place. The difference with the snake is, if you don’t move too suddenly and scare the snake more, it probably won’t bite you. Rattlesnakes, like all predators, are all about conservation of energy. It would rather save its venom for a nice juicy mouse that it could eat than waste it on us. And that, I think, is another reason that the rattlesnake was chosen for the flag; because what most Americans back in the 1700s wanted was to be left alone, not to fight England. There were also plenty of Americans that wanted to stay as part of England. But for those who didn’t, no one wanted to fight against one of, if not the, greatest military force on the planet at the time unless we absolutely had to. But if forced, we would bite, we would fight. And we did.
Happy 250th America.
