JANUARY 22, 2024 – In our part of the country, a family tradition is owning a lake cabin (Minnesota) or cottage (Wisconsin) “up north.” It’s where we urban folk can fish, swim, marvel at sunsets, watch the stars come out, and roast marshmallows for s’mores. It’s where we commune with nature and, ironically, where we go to fight it to the mat . . . er, moss.
Every cabin/cottage owner has been in the fight and knows the outcome: you can win a skirmish but never the war. Just when you’ve adjusted to one downside of nature—swimmer’s itch, for example—another, such as Lyme disease comes out of the woodwork . . . I mean wood tick; oops! Wrong brand. I mean deer tick. And speaking of deer, just when you’ve patted yourself on the back for planting lots of white pine seedlings to help combat climate change, the deer come along and eat the shoots of the young branches. You’ve got to fight nature in order to save it.
Recently, my own retreat to the family’s version of Walden Pond was abruptly disrupted by every cabin-owner’s nightmare: a bat flitting about in full Halloween mode—inside the cabin. Blame it on Bram Stoker, comic books, horror movie producers or just some evolutionary instinct, but we humans are geared to freak out at the sight of a bat in erratic flight, especially in close quarters.
In nearly 30 years, we’ve had only two previous encounters with a bat inside the cabin. Fortunately, each time we battled a solo bat, not a fleet of them. Nevertheless, the lone bat was creepy enough to create abject panic.
* * *
Given a bat’s flight patterns, you’re convinced the winged mammal will wind up in your hair. Moreover, based on what you’ve heard, you worry that the bat is rabid, and you know what that means: you get a rabies shot or you die. So, you grab a helmet (the one that your dad wore when he used a chain saw to fell a tree), a full face shield (the one he used when sharpening an ax on an electric grinder), chopper mittens (the same set you’ve worn since you were a teenager when winter temps plunged below zero Fahrenheit), and the weapon of choice—a long-handled broom from the back room.
Fully equipped, you charge into battle, except you feel a bit like a Medieval knight ala Quixote squaring off against an X-wing fighter ala Skywalker. And instead of “charging,” you wind up stumbling into walls and furniture and banging the broom-lance against a suspended light fixture, nearly busting a bulb.
At the end of the first round, it’s bat 1; man 0. Round two . . . There is no round two, at least there doesn’t appear to be. You can’t fight an enemy that goes into deep hiding—in one of a thousand possible nooks, crannies, blanket folds, cabinet tops, bookshelves, et cetera ad infinitum. You lean your (Quixotic) lance against a wall and proceed to close off as many rooms as you can—reasoning that in so doing you’re either blocking access by the bat or confining the enemy to one closed-off space or another. You then stuff rags, towels, blankets into spaces under the doors to outsmart your adversary from sneaking in . . . or out. Finally, you hold the back door wide open, trying to keep one eye on alert to witness the creepster flee and the other eye focused on the threshold to make sure mice don’t take advantage of your predicament.
After a good half hour of this phony war, you get feisty. You unleash a full-on F-bombing campaign until you realize that tactic is wholly ineffective. You catch nothing except sight of the wall-mounted bird clock—still on daylight time—and see that it’s 8:00. It’s a reminder that you haven’t eaten supper yet, and now, suddenly, you’re starving. You shed your combat gear, search the cupboard for whatever appears, grab a can of split pea soup and empty the contents into a stove-top saucepan. While things are warming up, you draw the broom closer, just as a precaution.
An hour passes, then another without any further appearance by the bat. You begin to think it’s hiding in an upstairs bedroom. You don the face shield and the mittens to search the bedroom where you plan to sleep. You shake every garment hanging from the row of wall pegs, the clothes tree, every conceivable space above and beneath the bed, sofa, cabinets. You declare the room bat-free.
You rationalize that the Halloween creature is more scared of man than man is of critter. You ease into writing your daily blog post. Midway you decide to edify your zone with a little music from the CD player up in the loft. Boldly—leaving your knight’s armor and lance behind—you mount the stairs. As you turn into the loft area, you see . . . what by all measure could well be . . . the bat. It’s inanimate on the floor, black with wings (?) spread. You’re all but certain you hadn’t observed it on your previous three or four passes through the area. You consider the likelihood that having been stuck inside the cabin ever since your cabin trip a week before, the bat spent its last BTUs on scaring the daylights out of you. Having failed, it surrendered after “round one” and died an ignoble death on the Plain of Loft—after its final flight up the staircase, you recall, right smack toward you. You ducked in the nick of time and now figure you didn’t see the critter drop from exhaustion.
Either that or the damned thing is rabid and “acting funny” by going “still” there where it now lies.
You race down the staircase and grab a plastic bucket from the same area where you’d pulled your combat gear. You charge back up the stairs—then back down to suit up again. Seconds later you’re ready to make the “capture.” With the stealth of a fox you edge toward the lifeless creature. Through the scratched-up face shield you can’t make a positive identification, but being the quick-thinking human that you are, you decide not to take any chances. As you draw a deep breath, you lift the upside down plastic bucket . . . and in coordination with forced exhalation, you smack the bucket down over the . . . whatever it is . . . and press the bottom with all your might. You then unleash another F-bomb as you realize that in your hurry you failed to bring to the site some kind of weight to hold down the light-weight plastic pail. While pressing your left hand on the pail you stretch your right arm out as far as possible to let your fingers pull the edge of the Scrabble box out from under the Hoosier cabinet five feet away. In a few deft moves the weight of the box on the pail has secured the prisoner. You can dispense with the captive at your leisure—optimally in the morrow’s cool light of day.
In victory you take your time combing through your collection of CDs stored in the corner of the “lofty” prison grounds. To the low-volume strains of an upbeat Beethoven symphony (No. 6), you casually decamp to your writing space downstairs. Safe from nature’s unwelcome intrusion, you polish off your daily writing effort.
But how do you know with confidence that you captured the bat and not an errant black sock, for example? Hmmm. Because you could swear you hadn’t seen anything there. Or so you tell yourself. The thing of it is, however, you wanted to believe it was the bat. If you can convince yourself it was the bat, you’ll have a much easier time writing, and more to the point, a much easier time crawling into bed an hour or two later and falling asleep without bats flitting about inside your dreams—or around the outside of your head.
You laugh out loud at your application of the raw power of denialism—the very human trait that you attribute so facilely and arrogantly to people whose politics you disdain. Certainty that you captured a bat in the loft vs. denial of election results in the face of no evidence: “What is the difference?!” you ask yourself. –“None,” you answer in a moment of painful honesty. You believe what you want to believe—or is it what you need to believe?
Despite knowing better, you sleep like a rock.
The next morning you rise early and enjoy a long woodland walk—surrounded by nature in winter beauty. You eat breakfast in peace, do some writing, attended to some legal work. At 10:00 you decide to act like the brave person you’d like to be and dispose of . . . the bat. From the storage quarters you retrieve a thin metal sign, a faux vintage wall hanging featuring antique fishing lures. Cleverly and skillfully (so you convinced yourself), you slip the sign under the plastic bucket to ensure that the bat won’t escape. Pressing one hand against the top of the pail (in place of the Scrabble box) and the other against the sign, you march your prisoner down the staircase and around to the back door. You stuff your feet into your shoes, and with your left elbow you push down and outward on the door handle to open the door enough to wedge your right foot into the space and draw the door all the way open. After passing through the doorway, you quickly use your right elbow to pull the door shut—against the threat of vigilant mice seeking refuge from the elements.
Safely clear of the cabin interior, you walk 20 paces from the back steps, and with the force of a full-court chest pass, you cast the prison cell—and its inmate in solitary confinement—into the open air of the great outdoors.
Metal sign and plastic pail fall randomly some meters ahead of you. The prisoner? It flies into the chilly air and . . . drops unceremoniously onto the snow. As you knew you knew from the very beginning, the captured critter was nothing more than . . . a black sock.
But what of the actual bat? Stay tuned—to an exceedingly high frequency, as it turns out, which is how these extraordinary creatures, which are under extreme environmental pressure, navigate indoors and outside.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
