musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

The antic disposition


I don’t know what it is about bats that unnerves me. I mean I suppose they’re cute and everything -or at least they would be if they sat in the trees in my garden and sang, or maybe visited flowers like butterflies in the afternoon. But I’ve never seen them engaged in everyday domestic chores -never seen them in the daytime, for that matter. No, they’re the things whose flapping wings I hear when I’m sitting in the hot tub at night; I’m told that they’re the things that keep the mosquitoes at bay.

Still, although their little underfed mousy parts look sort of cuddly it’s really their teeth that bother me I suppose -I keep thinking of Dracula. I realize that’s silly, of course -apart from Bela Lugosi and his wannabes- I’ve never actually seen a Dracula. The same goes for zombies, and Triffids… Anyway, once a fear is implanted, it sends down roots even if it’s seldom watered.

Thinking back, I’m pretty sure it started with my mother. Whenever we were on the two-day train journey from Winnipeg to Vancouver (my father was Railroad, to coin a metonym) my mother would regale the prepubescent me with warnings about walking around outside the house her father had built when he and her mother had immigrated to Canada at the turn of the last century.

“Never go out in the garden at night, G,” she would warn. The garden was totally blackberry-thorn-ridden as bespeaks a garden as old and overgrown as the house, so wandering there at night -moon or not- was not something she needed to caution me about.

Still, she felt compelled to spell out the reasons why her parents wouldn’t allow her into what I began to call the ‘secret garden’ at night. I have to assume it wasn’t as overgrown then, but the pupils in her eyes always dilated into dinner plates at the thought of nocturnal visits. “Bats will get into your hair, G,” she would whisper for some reason despite the noise of the rails and the creaking of the cars on our journey westward. “They think you’re an animal trying to capture them, so in their panic they try to bite their way out if they get caught in your hair.”

But you can’t fool a ten year old from Winnipeg, that easily. “I thought they used sound to find their way around, like radar… Their eyes are just for decoration, our teacher told us -she said they were like buttons, or something…  Anyway, they’d have known it was just your hair, right?” I’d added, as I crossed my arms over my chest for emphasis.

At that point, she’d usually clasp me by the shoulders and soup-plate her eyes at me as she slowly shook her head to demonstrate how foolish a young boy could be. “Do you really want to take that chance, G?”

So, you can see that mistrust of bats is almost genetic in our family. But it’s a gene that rarely got dusted off where I lived. Until, that is, I moved to a little island in Howe Sound near Vancouver where I had a well-treed hobby farm.

A hot tub on the wooden deck that stood like a decaying rampart guarding the house was my only reward for the hard days of both full-time work in the city, and part-time work when I got home. The tub was the death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, as it were. And I could access it through a sliding glass door from my bedroom.

The winter was my favourite time to use it: sprint through the snow, pull the top off the tub, and slip into it. But, despite the heat of the day, I often used it in the summer months as well: turn on the ceiling fan in the bedroom, and stroll out to the deck and into the tub. It’s how I used to watch the Perseid meteor shower in early August, and the Leonids in November You just lie in the tub facing skyward, and wait.

The Perseids were the best, I think, but they occurred in the hottest time of year, so I’d prepare the room with the ceiling fan on full blast so it would be cooler when I finally went to bed in the never-quite black of night. What my mother hadn’t told me about bats -because she didn’t know- was that fan vibrations are probably much like insect wings in the air. And each time I opened the glass door to exit or enter, I opened a bat-trap.

I love my bedroom, it has rough cedar wooden walls, with knots scattered randomly; this was handy if I pounded in a nail to hang a picture but misjudged the position or height. I could just pull the nail out and smash it in somewhere else. You couldn’t tell. Of course the flip side of that was that a bat could easily cling to the wall and, even with a flashlight, and a fishing net, I could never see it -well, at least until the morning.

But have you ever tried to sleep with a bat clinging on a wall somewhere near you, just waiting for the vibrations of both fan and frightened human to settle? You see why the teeth bothered me? I mean bats that eat mosquitoes are hardly vegetarian. Blood is blood, right? Well, mosquitoes have something else called hemolymph that transports oxygen around, but I bet hungry bats are not picky. Spend a night clinging to a foreign wall and you’d get a bit peckish, eh? Any neck in a storm.

But I realize my mother was right. I can still see her wide, wide eyes following me across the deck at night; I can still hear her warning me not to go gentle into that sweet night -so I’ve drained the tub.

Now I watch the meteor showers through the skylight in the bedroom, but like late-night movies, I seldom watch the whole program anymore; at my age, it’s hard to stay awake on a bed for long…

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gozzter

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