The Case of the Mysterious Yellow Flags

They cropped up overnight. Literally. One day they weren't there, and the next...there they were, little yellow flags stuck all over our lawn, indicating the gas lines from the street into our house and lamp post.

I had no idea they were even there until Tim called the other day on his way to work, asking me if I knew anything about them.

Perplexed, I rushed to the window, and sure enough, there they were, along with spray-painted yellow lines that had not been there the day before. Actually, they had not been there the evening before when Tim got home from work. So, sometime overnight, our lawn had mysteriously sprouted these nasty yellow indicators.

Uh oh. This could not be good. I looked to see if the infestation had spread to any of the other yards on the block, but we were the only one. Great, and I had garden people coming to plant some flowers within the next couple of days. Why, oh why, were they picking on us? And, more importantly, who was behind this dastardly deed?

Whoever it was knew they were not going to receive a warm welcome, as evidenced by the fact that they had snuck about in the dead of night, too cowardly to show their faces in the light of day.

Worried about how much of our front yard we were going to lose (Hey, it may not be much more than an intricate network of weeds, but they're our weeds), I decided to investigate.

Digging in my files for our last bill, I looked to see if there had been some sort of notification that I missed warning they were going to make my life a misery for the foreseeable future. But there was not so much as a word from those spineless jellyfish known as the gas company.

Okay, so I would have to broaden my search. I got onto the website, looking for news of any upcoming projects planned for our neighborhood. Once again though, I came up empty. So. They wanted to play it that way? Fine. Two could play that game, and I am not without resources.

Everybody knows that any detective worth his salt always has a snitch. Didn't Starsky and Hutch have Huggy Bear? Well, I have not one, but two neighbors who make Huggy Bear look like a mere cub. I knew that if anybody had the 411 on the yellow flags, it would be one of them. I would have been willing to bet that when the craven sneaks had slipped in during the dead of night to carry out their nefarious scheme, at least one of the two had seen and possibility interrogated the perpetrators.

After all, they were the best at ferreting out details. I'm pretty sure Ian Fleming used them for a role model when he created his 007 character, and I'm almost positive Woodward and Bernstein used them to conduct some covert operations on the whole Watergate scandal.

So, over the course of the next day or two, I struck up casual conversations with my sources and worked the yellow flags into the conversation. Shockingly, I came up dry. Even they, as good as they are, knew nothing about the flags.

Reeling from the shock of the two of them coming up empty (Had the world stopped spinning on its axis? Were pigs suddenly flying?) I began to consider other possibilities such as Martians, Leprechauns or Fairies. Surely this had to be the work of supernatural beings if my two neighbors hadn't seen or heard a thing.

Maybe, instead of indicating gaslines, the stripes and flags were really marking a landing strip for an otherworldly invasion. Hey, this could be the new Area 51. I wondered if I should look into a line of ET shirts and coffee mugs. I could make a fortune!

Or maybe these were the new, updated version of crop circles. New technology is constantly making things smaller. If personal computers no longer fill an entire room, maybe the little green men decided their mysterious markings no longer needed to fill an entire field. Yeah. I could be onto something here.

Before I could fully explore my new theories though, the mystery resolved itself.

Tim had been urging me to call the gas company directly and ask them what was going on, but, subscribing to his motto that it is better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, I put the call off until after the gardening people put in my spring flowers (so I'm a little behind this year. That's okay, we'll celebrate Christmas in February to make up for it).

When the plant people arrived, I called their attention to the flags, explaining that I had no idea why they were there. The woman just laughed and told me she knew why they were there, because she was the one to call and tell the gas company they were going to be digging around in our yard.

Mystery solved. And yet, that left me with a new mystery altogether, which was this: exactly how deep did they need to dig to plant a few petunias?