You Bought It, You Fix It

A drunken sports fan sets in motion a tragicomedy that changes my life.

Everyone is brave until a bat flies into the room. It is an absolute mystery to me what enigmatic power nature has vested in a third of an ounce of brown fur that sends a 6-foot-6, 190-pound man running for cover in his own home. But before I get to the bat, I must briefly explain how we came to call this place home.

It all started with a drunken football fan, and somewhere he’s still out there, cheering on the home team and having no idea that he’s the reason I’m here on this island. As I sat writing at my desk in our Seattle condo one night, this enthusiastic fan stood in the street beneath my window, shouting “Sea-Haaaawwwkks!” at the top of his lungs for six solid hours after the game had been lost and everyone else had gone home. I made periodic appearances on the balcony to reason with this fool, but these seemed only to enliven some inebriated sense of comradery and he chanted louder: “Sea-Haaaawwwkks! Go Hawks!” At some point, he procured a lawn chair and a fresh six-pack of beer, apparently settling in for a long night of cheering. I briefly entertained using my elevation advantage to pelt him with produce, but my wife was away on business and I found no suitable missiles in my bachelor’s fridge (a jar of pickles seemed like a potential felony), so I returned to my desk and jumped on Zillow to search for a quiet place to write.

The next day I hopped a ferry to Whidbey Island—Oh, you quiet, moated paradise, my shining Camelot! No traffic, no sirens, and no sports teams for anyone to cheer, drunk or sober. The last place on my search list was an older home on waterfront acreage priced higher than I wanted to spend. The woman who owned it had passed away (not in the house I was assured) and it had sat vacant and neglected while the estate was sorted out. She had painted the house eggshell blue and furnished it with an assortment of eclectic purple furniture and odd whigmaleeries from her travels (she’d have been fun to know!), but I recognized the hand of a talented architect at work in the dramatic lines and use of clear fir and cedar. I resolved to buy it on the spot. I had just one small hurdle to overcome: my wife.

I presented my plan on the drive home from the airport, straight off her overnight flight from Europe. I figured the jet lag would work to my advantage and it did.

“So, what do you think?” I asked, once we were home.

“Sure,” she mumbled, crawling into bed, “if you like it that much, you should buy it.”

The usual offer/counter offer, title search, and the like ensued, I won’t bore you, but a month or so later we pulled up to our new home with a small U-Haul just as dusk was settling over a fresh foot of rare December snow. A few problems immediately presented themselves. For starters, my wife asked me why it was snowing inside the house. “Just a couple of windows to replace,” I assured her. Also, the power was out—no lights, no heat. “No problem!” I exclaimed. “This happens on the island.” I soon had a fire going and our air mattress inflated and made up for the night on the floor. “This is charming, don’t you think?”

We found candles in a cupboard and headed off to explore. I turned the tub filler on, declaring, as if to make up for the broken windows, “Good water pressure!” Then I turned it off and the handle just kept turning and popped off and a fantastic fountain of cold water shot out and soaked us, flooding the bathroom. It took us five minutes of shouting and running about and relighting candles to find the main water shut off. This done, I suggested we wait until morning for any further exploring. My wife thought this was wise.

When we woke the next day, the fire had gone out and the air mattress had deflated in the night and we were lying in our sleeping bags on the cold hard floor. There were little drifts of snow in corners here and there and frost on the inside of the windows. My wife and I looked at each other and had a good laugh.

“What have we done?” I asked.

“We?” my wife quipped, in her charming way: “You bought it, you fix it. I’ll help unload the truck, but then I’m going back to the condo where there’s heat.”

I spent the morning countering this, I thought, with effusive salesmanship of the virtues of pioneers and back-to-basics living and country life and the like, but my wife remained unmoved.

“You wanted a quiet place to write”—she kissed me goodbye—“and now you’ve got it. I’ll see you when you come to the city.”

Then she drove off with a honk in her car toward the ferry and I drove off in the U-Haul toward the hardware store to buy a generator.

Very little writing got done at my writing retreat over the next several months. There were windows to fix, and chainsaws and lawnmowers and power tools to buy. I spent my time hiring contractors and working on the house alongside them, picking up their lingo and occasionally bumming a chew of tobacco and trying not to turn green. In this fashion, winter yielded to spring. My wife had thankfully not abandoned me entirely, and when I missed her I had only to mention my intention to select finishes or furnishings without her and she would quickly appear as if summoned by a spell—design is where she shines. I would impress her on these visits with my handiness as I showed off the remodeling progress, but fortunately for me, I was alone the night my newfound masculinity failed me as I fled the bedroom in fear.

I was awakened one spring night by the rustling of an unnatural breeze across my face. A gust from the one window I’d yet to fix perhaps? I lay in bed, listening, and thought I saw shadows flicking around the room. I eventually made a brave dash for the light switch. I’m not sure if I screamed when I saw the bat, I’d prefer to think not, but I most certainly bolted from the bedroom and slammed the door shut. The hall clock said it was nearly two in the morning, the house was cold, and my clothes were trapped in the room with the bat.

What to do now? What would anyone do? Google it, of course. My laptop landed me on the Island County Health Department website, and their recommendation was clear: because I’d been sleeping in the room with the bat, it needed to be captured and brought in for rabies testing. As with so much found on the Internet, this was unwelcome news.

Somewhere in our security camera video history, there exists footage of me trudging out to the garage in my underwear and returning thirty minutes later clothed in raiment of war: chainsaw chaps and a face shield, armed with a net fashioned from old window screening duct taped to a broom handle. A garage sale Don Quixote plunging into a dragon’s lair. But now where was that bat? A hesitant search commenced. Not in the closet, not under the bed. Perhaps it had gotten out the same way it had gotten in. Maybe I’d imagined it. Maybe it was a dream. Then the bat appeared and flew two swift circles around my head and if I swung my net at all, it was a pure defensive reflex on the way out of the room.

It was a long night. There were additional trips to the garage to perfect my armor, and several more sorties into the room, each ending in a draw. Come dawn, we were both exhausted, and the bat retreated into the unreachable corner of a skylight to sleep, and I retreated into the hallway to laugh at myself. But rabies is no joke, proving almost always fatal, as the website said. Exasperated, I repurposed my broom handle into a spear by taping tenpenny nails to its tip. This did the trick. It was not my proudest moment, and I won’t share the details. I’ll only say that I’m haunted to this day by that bat’s anguished face.

As the sun came up, I held the bat’s tiny body in my gloved hands beneath the skylight—so delicate and soft, the outsized mouse-like ears, the paper-thin membrane wings so perfectly hewn for its purpose, a purpose at no odds with ours were it not for a damnable virus with no apparent purpose at all. I looked at it for many minutes, transfixed, exhausted, and absolutely ashamed of myself now in the light for having been so afraid in the dark. Even worse, it had died in vain.

I delivered my catch in a Tupperware container to the health department. Test result: inconclusive. My spear had damaged its brain. “You should have suffocated it in the Tupperware with alcohol-soaked rags,” I was told. I can only hope they’ve added this helpful bit of information to their website. The final bill from the hospital for a course of post-exposure rabies treatment—an initial dose of immunoglobulin and three total doses of vaccine—was absolutely insane: just shy of twenty thousand dollars! But tackling that subject would be a whole other essay I have no interest in writing. Suffice it to say, I paid; but that’s life, and the bat paid a dearer price.

Much time has passed, and the island house we bought on a whim has become our home. My wife and I often laugh about that first night here, marveling at the many adventures we’ve had since. There have been battles with wasps and toads, as you’ve read, the adoption of a three-legged deer, and even a home invasion by a stinky river otter that I’ll tell of another day; but I’ve yet to encounter a single drunk football fan yelling outside my window in the middle of the night. I finally have my quiet place to write. And though I’ve not retired my tool belt, I am finding time to pick up my pen.

I’ve done my best to make amends to my little winged friends too. I’ve saved a couple of pups from ravens and raccoons and relocated a few adults in their winter torpor when roof work was being done. And on summer evenings now, my wife and I sometimes sit on our deck and watch hundreds of bats take flight from the bat houses I’ve built for them. A few might circle our heads on their way out into the night, but neither of us even flinch. We’re not city people anymore. I’d like to thank that anonymous football fan for that.

And finally, if there is an afterlife at all for things so sinless and small, I hope someday to earn the chance to beg forgiveness from a certain little brown bat.

An audio recording of this essay can be found here:

Audio: You Bought It, You Fix It