A classic seal on a blue field, maritime symbols: Portland's flag looks like the administrative crest no one bothers to read. And yet, at its center, a bird rises from the flames, and a Latin word: *Resurgam*, "I shall rise again."
No city has better earned its motto. Portland has burned four times. In 1676 and again in 1690, the Indian wars razed it. In 1775, the British captain Mowatt bombarded and torched it in reprisal, on the eve of the Revolution. And on July 4, 1866, a spark from a firecracker set off the largest urban fire America had yet seen: in a single night the heart of the city went up in smoke, leaving 10,000 people homeless.
The phoenix and the Resurgam are no figure of speech: they are the city's biography, engraved on its emblem.
The blue flag flies, understated, above a harbor that seems to have no history. You have to come closer to read, at the center of the seal everyone overlooks, the most stubborn of promises: to rise again.