#63 - Bats
I'm not especially fond of bats. Not so long ago, at dusk, I was watching some bats in silent and eerie flight as they launched themselves into the evening from their lofty roost in an old barn. We were at some friends’ house for dinner, and I had stepped outside to spend a moment with a lilac bush.
Bats are the stuff of horror stories and gloomy places. Caves, cobwebs and spooky things are the usual associations, and their legendary connection with rabies and dread situations serves to pretty well exclude them from most people’s social register. I remember how, as one of a throng of boys, we used to throw rocks at bats as it got dark. Not only did we never managed to hit one of the little devils, but they defied our purpose entirely by diving in turn at our zinging missiles, thinking they might be food on the wing, and they neatly averted every collision with uncanny precision.
Deep down inside, I know that bats are a wonderfully engineered animal. They look like nothing more than little teddy bears slung between ugly skeletal wings with skin membranes, but they are capable of fantastic flying feats in complete darkness by picking up inaudible echoes of their own voices from objects in their path. They do this with their disgusting looking ears. They catch lots and lots of insects too, which makes some people very happy. But not everyone. Most people don't want anything to do with bats.
At our house, we recently marked the 14th anniversary of the day we moved into the old place and the first night we spent here. In the electric panel box in the cellar is a circuit label which will one day cause a new owner to scratch his head. It says simply, “Batcave," and that label has a direct connection to our first night after a very long day of lugging cardboard boxes and furniture and crushing our fingers against door jambs.
My sister, Phoebe, had offered to help us move, and so she was there for all the unpacking as well as the late evening supper amid all the mess and confusion. It was quite a feeling, sitting there, looking around at our first true home. We talked a long while by candlelight until the effort of the day caught up with us and then decided to turn in for the night.
There was only one finished room upstairs - our room. The so called "guest room" had only an old subfloor with wide gaps between the floor boards, some of which had Roman numerals carved in them. The walls were hung with unpainted beaverboard, and there was a gaping hole in the ceiling, right over the bed.
Before long, everyone was well on the way to a good night’s sleep. I was nearly there myself, when suddenly the house was filled with screaming and then muffled sounds. In a strange new house, it took me some moments to get my bearings and remember where the hell I had left my pants.The only weapon I could find was a curtain rod leaning against the wall. With a very weak flashlight,I followed the noise into Phoebe's room.
Her head was buried under her pillow, still screaming. Through all the feathers and bedding, it sounded vaguely like "Bat! Bat!"
Sure enough, one of those little flying devils fluttered across my face in the gloom.
With the flashlight jammed in one of my belt loops, I started swinging that curtain rod like a fiend, whaling away for all I was worth. To no avail - the bat flapped around and around and dodged my every swing. My suffocating sister was still screaming under her pillow. Finally, I took the sliding screen out of her window. And just like that, the bat was gone.
Phoebe kept right on screaming. She was in a state! So, I whacked the covers of her bed with the curtain rod to get her to stop. "For chrissakes!" I yelled through the pillow, "It was only a bat! Go to sleep." I don't imagine she did for a while, but anyhow, that was how we named the Bat Cave in our new, old house.