St. Benedict instructs us monks in his Rule that “all guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ.” I wonder if all guests include bats—of the sinister-looking, webbed-wing variety? Monday evening and Tuesday morning, you see, one presented himself in my monastery room, and I was not so hospitable. I certainly didn’t welcome the flying rodent as Christ.
I awoke around 11:30 p.m. Monday to the sound of my
window blinds violently slapping against the window panes (my third-floor
windows were closed). Naturally, I turned on the light, and as I did, there was
a dull thump as something hit my window sill. Slowly, a tiny winged claw
reached out from behind the blinds. In another few seconds, he was disentangled
from the blinds, pausing on the sill, surely surprised (as I was) that he was
perched there. Then he took flight, round and round about my room, just below
the high ceiling.
Not amused, I ran into the bathroom and closed the
door to consider the situation and plot my strategy. How did he get in, and how
do I get him out? Not very hospitable, I know, but his was a rather rude
entrance.
Placing a towel over my head, I opened the bathroom
door a crack and peeked out. He was still there, flapping round about the room,
no doubt distressed and dropping guano everywhere. Quickly, I dashed over to
the window. Ah, there was the problem. The top sash had unnoticeably slipped
down over time, leaving a small gap. That explained the strange array of
insects I had discovered in my room the past few weeks. As you know, bugs and
bats don’t need much space to squeeze through after getting a foot in the door,
so to speak—or in this case, a webbed wing in the window blinds.
Surely, this
bat had been foraging outside, and decided to have a late-night snack on some delectable insect near, or on, the outside of my window when he suddenly found himself lodged in
the gap between the sashes. Struggling to free himself and surely disoriented,
he ended up on the other side—my side—of the window instead.
OK, that’s how he got in. Now, how do I get him out?
After lifting the top sash to its proper position (like closing the barn door
after the horses are out, I know), I threw open the bottom sash as well, and
then lifted the screen. After turning off all the lights in the room, I ran
again for cover in the bathroom. My theory was that using his powers of
echolocation, the bat would discover the window space open to the night and fly
out to freedom. More than 25 years ago, living in Galion, Ohio, I had
successfully employed this strategy in my second-story apartment one evening
after I fell asleep on the couch with the balcony door open.
I pondered all this as I sat on the toilet in my
bathroom around midnight, flipping through a magazine while I waited for the
little rascal to depart. Every few minutes, I poked my towel-covered head out
into the room to see if he had accepted my invitation to leave. Nope, still
there. … Nope, still there. … Holy Bat Logic, still there! At one point, I
thought he was gone because there was no flapping movement in the room, but
then I looked up into a corner of the room, and there he was, hanging
upside-down and glaring at me daringly.
As far as I was concerned, I had been more than
fair. Quickly, I closed the window, pulled the covers up over my bed to
guano-proof it (again, closing the barn door…), retrieved a broom from the
closet down the hall and went over to where he was still hanging. I didn’t want
to hurt or kill the thing—but was prepared to do just that if needed. If only I
could swat or steer him somehow into a waiting box, then quickly snap it shut
and take him outside to be let free. It was now past 12:30 a.m., and I needed
to get back to bed. So, I began smacking at him with the wide end of the
broom—no doubt disturbing my slumbering next-door neighbor. Never coming close,
all this accomplished was sending the poor unsightly thing to circling my room
again.
Once again, I retreated into the bathroom to review
the situation. I figured that he did not fly out when he had the chance because
the open window was far below the height at which he was circling, and
therefore could not detect the opening. Either that or he was just being mean.
Then, in one of my more uncharitable moments, I reached out from the bathroom
and opened the door of my room into the hallway. Maybe he would fly out and
become someone else’s problem. Once
again, though I gave him plenty of time, he didn’t respond to the invitation.
Finally—now it was about 1 a.m.—I watched from the
bathroom as he flew up into the air register above the door, remarkably
squeezing through the tiny openings of the grille cover. After waiting a good
15-20 minutes to make sure he didn’t come back out, I decided it was safe,
closed the hallway door, inspected my bed for guano (none detected), turned off
the lights, crawled back under the covers, and mistakenly believed I was going
to go back to sleep. Every few minutes, I glanced back toward the air register.
And just as I was beginning to drift off, around 1:45 a.m., I heard some
metallic scraping and looked up just in time to see a wing appear through the
register grille, and then the whole hairy beast, once again circling the room.
Now I was aggravated. The bat must have sensed this,
because when I switched the light back on, he immediately retreated into the
air register. Can’t say I blame him. It was dark, cool, and relatively safe in
there. So, at 2 a.m., I fired up my computer and sent out a service request to
our physical facilities department so that they would have it first thing in the
morning. “Somehow, I need to get the thing out of here,” I wrote after briefly
explaining the circumstances. “Can you help?”
Since I couldn’t sleep anyway, I also checked a few
baseball scores and news headlines while online. The bat still had not come back
out of the register, so I eventually figured that we had reached some sort of
truce. As long as the light stayed on, he would stay up there and out of my
living area. Of course, that meant I would have to try to get back to sleep
with the lights on (when I had to be up in only a couple more hours).
That’s what I did. In a well-lit room, still a
little wound up, drawing up the covers to shield myself from a sneak-guano
attack, and glancing uneasily at the air register through drooping eyelids, I
finally fell asleep around 2:45 a.m.
Apparently, the cease-fire held. I was not disturbed
for the next couple hours, and when I awoke, the bat was nowhere in
sight—presumably still hanging somewhere just inside the air duct behind the
register grille. Just to be sure, I ruffled all the clothes hanging in my open
closet and inspected beneath all my book shelves. Satisfied that my guest was
still present in the register but not interested in aggravating me further, I
went groggily about my morning of prayer and work, which was full of other—but
thankfully, less intense—surprises.
Later, physical facilities co-workers Kenny Sherman
and Dave Schuetter extracted the pesky guest from the air register with a
ladder, a screwdriver (to remove the grille, not to attack), a thick pair of gloves,
pliers, and a net. The bat was a little grumpy, to say the least, but he was
alive and well—and most satisfactorily from my point of view, now permanently evicted.
My overnight visitor—or any of his friends—is not welcome back. That may seem inhospitable,
but St. Benedict also warns in his Rule
about the “gyrovagues, who spend their entire lives drifting from region to
region, staying as guests for three or four days in different monasteries.” He
seems to suggest that there is a limit to the hospitality one is obligated to
extend to such “disgraceful” guests.
In any event, I
strongly recommend checking and latching your window sashes.
