Let me make myself clear here – I’m not a criminal.
And I’m not particularly superstitious.
But when a bat begins flying around our indoor living quarters, totally uninvited, well friends, THAT’S when I find myself immediately aligning myself with that proverbial cowardly lot Bruce Wayne once pondered about so long ago!
Bats! Ugh.
It was the night before last, y’see. Lynn and I were in the bedroom, watching TV. In preparation for inviting a trio of gal pals over for an unusually modest birthday celebration this Friday – an annual event – daughter Julie was next door, cleaning out her room (also an annual event…). Suddenly, she came running into our room and blurted out that a bat had swooped past her when she’d gone out to the kitchen to dump some debris in the trash can.
A bat. It had been a full ten years – and an entirely different house – since we’d last had to contend with one of those unnerving critters. I really thought we were safe here – unlike our former domicile, there was no second floor, no attic window that wouldn’t quite close entirely. And even the doors here measured up less expansively, seeming to guarantee far less of a chance that an unwanted winged intruder could sneak in late at night when cat brothers Mario and Luigi rotated themselves in and out. But after a full decade of peace, Julie brought us the alarming news that – oh geez – there was a bat in the house.
I don’t like bats. I’ve NEVER liked bats. But I had no choice – I had to leave the comforting glow of the tube to try and flush the creepy li’l pest out of our house. So, I grabbed a plastic laundry basket that was lying nearby, took the broom from Julie’s room, had the ladies close the doors to all the rooms in that well lit, currently bat-free portion of the house, took a deep breath, and then set out on a hunting expedition that I truthfully wanted absolutely no part of.
And when we got to the kitchen dining room area, there it was, wildly flying around in that crazily erratic manner bats are infamous for. Despite the fact that Julie will turn sixteen years old tomorrow, she shrieked like a little girl, one a third her age – and despite the fact that I’m way, way older than that, I shrieked even LOUDER! The only one who kept her wits about her was wife Lynn, our savior during previous bat encounters. But that was years ago – Lynn’s knee isn’t what it used to be, and besides, the layout here is significantly different from our old house. If there was any hope of getting rid of the airborne rodent, it was pretty much entirely up to me!
Yup – we were in REAL trouble…
After the initial shrieking subsided, we lost sight of our uninvited guest. Where exactly he landed, we just plain didn’t know. I went downstairs, plastic laundry basket in one hand, broom in the other like some demented warrior, swatting at every nook and cranny, trying to determine if the vermin had fled to the lower level. Once I was satisfied he hadn’t gone in hiding down there, I closed up the entire area so he wouldn’t get the chance during his next fly-around.
Meanwhile, upstairs, Lynn and Julie opened the back door, hoping against hope that, given the chance, he would just happily fly back out into the wild. Initially, they had opened both the front and side doors as well, but being the paranoid type, I objected. What’s to keep OTHER bats from coming in while we searched for the one we were already inadvertently providing housing for, I protested? We soon reached a compromise – only the back door would remain open, and only if one of the ladies would keep a keen eye on it the entire time. Three entrances demanded just a bit more vigilance than we were capable of providing at the time.
Eventually, I made my way into the big room, the one that was built onto this house (before we moved in) as an addition. This is the room that has the stereo, the half-dozen chockful CD racks, the big TV, the two couches, the exercise bike, the wood stove, my drawing board, my art equipment, and – wouldn’t you know it – piles and piles of books! Oh, and did I mention the fifteen foot ceiling and curtained windows running across two walls? Well, when I banged my broom against one of those curtains, I hit pay dirt, at least figuratively – our prey darted out, and quickly reprised his flight of the damned.
Julie and I then reprised our blood-curdling chorus of shrieks, even as I tentatively swung my broom ineffectively at the loathsome creature whenever he swooped nearby, always careful to keep the basket up over my head! It was quite the picture postcard.
And after a few more minutes of this madness, we lost sight of him yet again. We knew he most likely was somewhere in the big room, but we just didn’t know where. So, we decided to turn the lights off, go back into the bedroom, watch a little more TV, and hope that when we came out, he’d once again be performing his unholy aerial maneuvers, and we’d figure SOME way to be rid of him.
After about fifteen minutes, I decided it was time to go back for another turn at the bat, and so I once again slunk into the breach, broom and basket at the ready. We flipped the lights on. Nothing. Another careful but cursory time around the perimeter revealed nothing, and Lynn, tiring of watching my ineffective Frank Buck imitation, declared that the time was overdue for taking a shower, so off she went, leaving me and Julie to our own devices.
That’s right – suddenly, we were operating without parental supervision!
And wouldn’t you know it, that’s when I found him! I pulled back the curtain from another of the large wall windows, and there he was, hanging stationary on the window’s inner screen! We had him! Because unlike a house fly, you can sneak up on a bat, and he’s not gonna move! I immediately surrounded him with the laundry basket, and called for Julie to get me a large piece of foam board. The creepy thing made no move, but I knew once I attempted to slide the board behind the basket, I’d knock him from his perch, and as much as I dreaded the thought of it, there’d be some unavoidable activity on the bat’s part to follow. So, I took another deep breath, and began the task at hand. Sure enough, as soon as I knocked him free, he began to squeal, and desperately fly about inside the laundry basket.
UNTIL, THAT IS, HE PULLED HIMSELF THROUGH ONE OF THE MANY ONE INCH SQUARE OPENINGS RINGING THE BASKET AND FLEW AWAY!!!
Gee, I didn’t know bats could do THAT?…
It helped explain how he most likely got in – earlier that very day, I had noticed that a small tear in the screen on the front door had somehow gotten a bit larger than I remember it, musing, “Gosh, I sure hope a bee doesn’t get in?” After seeing this Houdini act close up – TOO close up, trust me – I realized that bees were the least of my worries! (Thank goodness for Homeland Security recommendations – I’m not sure how well duct tape will serve us in keeping terrorists out, but it certainly turned out to be a palatable solution to our clear and present bat threat!….)
So, once again, our bat adversary flew about, and rudely avoided the beckoning open door to freedom, and once again – yup – we lost track of him.
It was turning into an awfully long, long night.
We needed a break. So, after informing a freshly scrubbed Lynn of the comedy of errors she’d just missed, I made myself a cup of caffeine laced iced tea, grabbed a video tape of that evening’s edition of Countdown With Keith Olbermann, and settled into Julie’s room to watch it while she continued to clean up things. Maybe a good forty-five minutes of darkness would give the bat a chance to rest up, and subsequently give us yet another shot at shooing him from where he clearly wasn’t wanted…
It was almost midnight when I went back out. Once again, there was no outward sign of the bat, and once again, I went around, tapping my broom in every place he conceivably could be hiding – and given the depressing amount of clutter I’ve blithely accumulated over the years, that could’ve been any of a hundred places! I could just see the Animal Control folks giving the place a once over: “He’s not behind the Elvis figure, and I don’t think he’s nestled down between this pile of Warren magazines – maybe over by the Elton John box set?…” No, that wasn’t gonna work – clearly, I had to find him, and for everyone’s sanity, it’d better be soon!
And then I looked up and realized I’d been giving the varmint too much credit – he wasn’t hiding at all, he was hanging there in plain sight! But in the dim light, his dark inert figure blended in easily with the wall of bricks surrounding the wood stove. The only problem? He found himself a nice cozy spot about a foot from the ceiling – the fifteen foot high ceiling!
What else could I do? I called for back-up, Julie got me the step-ladder, and Lynn provided me with a smaller, escape proof plastic salad spinner bowl and a matching piece of cardboard to slip behind it. This time I figured I’d better get it right – I didn’t know if my heart would survive a third try! So, with makeshift weapons in hand, I slowly climbed the ladder, Lynn holding it steady all the while as Julie watched in breathless anticipation (fully ready to shriek should circumstances call for it).
I was up on the top step when I carefully reached out to trap our intruder, praying that my hand remained steady and that the bowl wouldn’t somehow inadvertently shift.
Success! But that was the easy part – now I had to slip the cardboard behind the container, put my hand securely over it, and then carefully descend the ladder.
Happily, I was able to do perform all three of those monumental tasks properly, but, sensing the rapid beating of my overexerted ticker, Lynn quickly and calmly took my prize from me and swiftly exited through the back door, Julie at her side, where she walked a decent distance out into our back yard, and let our unwanted batboarder flap his wings free and into the night – but hopefully, NEVER again back into our house!
Bats – I hate ’em! Maybe that’s why I’ve always been more of a Superman guy than a Batman acolyte. After all, I’ much prefer that a tiny Kryptonian member of the Superman Emergency Squad from the bottle city of Kandor fly dizzily around my living room than a bat any day, y’know?
(The rest of the evening was uneventful, save for when that cute little moth landed on my shoulder in the kitchen, and I jumped a foot! What – and you WOULDN’T?…)
Hembeck.com – no need to have bats in YOUR belfry to visit my home site! Stop by, but please – no sudden moves, okay?…
Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck
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