Why Every Home Needs A Tennis Racket
One could do worse than select the bat as the ultimate symbol of our epic time. Many of us have watched videos of the researchers in hazmat suits going into caves with nets to catch them and learn how this virus made the jump to humans. The world is full of mythology, from fearful to welcome, about them.
One Bat newsletter notes “While European and North American folklore about bats in buildings generally views bats as portents of misfortune or evil, some benign lore also exists perceiving them as good omens. For example, if a bat lives in a theater, and flies over the stage during rehearsal, the play is guaranteed success. A contemporary local story comes from Indians in California who relate that a bat flying in a house foretells a good hunting season. And finally, miners working in the mountains of Nevada insist that a mine will be safe if a bat remains in the mineshaft after blasting.”
It is popular knowledge that a bat can eat its body weight in insects over the span of one night’s hunting and that they are more and more threatened by habitat loss and pesticides and population pressure. My wife and I have lamented that we seldom see one at twilight anymore and, upon seeing one recently, we rejoiced.
What you don’t ever expect or want is to have one in your house, even though many cultures regard even that as a good omen. I felt something brush against my face this morning in the dark as I walked in here to begin writing and the coffee was brewing. At first I thought it might be an insect. I got out my little flashlight and sure enough it was a bat, flying around in this little space. How it got in is unclear and we’ve never had one in fifteen years of owning this old house. The last time I dealt with one inside a living space, we had a chimney, which might as well have said “Bats welcome, come on down!”
Once I had my breathing under control, I remembered that last experience and how all you need do is hold up a tennis racket in the flight path and the bat will fly right into it because his echolation will not detect it, owing to the spaces in the webbing. Briefly stunned, they will drop like a stone and can be removed and released.
There isn’t much of a straightaway in here, so it was a little more problematic. I thought it was like trying to hit a knuckleball which, as Willie Stargell, the great hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates, once said, came in like a butterfly with hiccups. I made contact once, but it didn’t bother our little guest. Finally, it did run into the racket, with which I hastened to cover it after it hit the floor. I slid a piece of cardboard underneath, lightly scissored them together to avoid squishing (they are so tiny and collapsible) and made my way to the outside door and released it into the morning air. That felt good.
I had another idea to write about today, but that gave way to the lesson from the bat. Nature has a way of intruding on our plans, as we have all been made aware these last few months. We have had to open our hearts to what Camus called “the benign indifference of the universe” and the brutal reality that maybe, just maybe, we as a species are not the measure of all things.
