“But you can’t know everything,” I say as she does her lying-down while I twist my parrot-head. “Not even about one moment. Not every single species along the road. Not all the trees in the field of view.”
“No harm in trying,” she says from the ground. “As long as you’re stuck in one place you might as well try to get to know it as well as you can.”
I think, Easy for her to say, her head resting comfortably in her knitted fingers.
I think, Come on, old woman, get me down, I know you can, I’ve seen you chop a cord of wood.
2
How I’ve come to be looking at this particular tree and this particular alley is because last night I went on a nature walk led by the bat guy, who wore a fishing vest and a diamond earring. He carried a transistor radio — sized machine tuned to what he called the songs of the bats — the pinging of their sonar. Amplified through his machine, they sounded like kittens being drowned. The group of people who showed up was larger than he expected and gabbed while he spoke. I thought this might have irritated him, because later on he said that if we weren’t seeing bats, it was because we were talking too much. Not that the noise would bother the bats — it was us who were too distracted.
This was down by the man-made lake at the center of town, where a cloud shaped like a falcon hung unmoving in the sky. I was glad for the chance to claim a sidewalk for my wilderness, between lampposts 43 and 44, just north of the bus stop. For a change, nature deployed itself in a spot that I could access easily, though because of the road noise, most of the bat guy’s introductory speech escaped me. I did hear, Bats have no greater incidence of rabies than any other species. When he takes them out of the nets when he’s tagging them, he lets them bite his arm.
Then there came the usual crepuscular minutes when the darkness sneaks up and switches on, and that’s when suddenly the bats came zipping between lampposts 43 and 44. They come to freshwater to feed on midges mosquitoes damselflies, I hear him say, and nymphs emerging from the lake.
Their shadows swatted our cheeks right there on the sidewalk; I could feel the whispery way they stirred the air. Despite my intentions, I shrieked, and maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought the bat guy gave me the stink eye, that I’d think the bats would be so dumb as to hit me. He says that if they can pick out a moth in complete darkness, for god’s sake, they’re not going to hit my head.
They hunt by sending cries into the world and gauging what’s there by the speed with which anything comes bouncing back, and it amuses me to think we humans also operate in this manner, locating each other through the echoes of our screams (bats are less closely related to rodents than primates, the bat guy said).
Most of the group falls away when we leave the bus stop and cross from the lake to the upscale supermarket on the bay. The sky’s gone fully dark now, and I think maybe people were scared by how swiftly and closely the bats approached, rabies or not. I try to imagine the soft unlikely smash of one colliding with my face.
From the waterfront parking lot of the supermarket, you can see the bats slipping around the sea wall on their way to the lake. They disappear into the black crescent between the bay at high tide and the concrete arch of the new bridge. We’re gathered on the boardwalk that stretches along one side of the market, the bat guy using terminology like the matrimonial roost. Like time expansion, which means the way he can slow down the speed of his tape to make their screams sound more like chirps.
I write down: screaming turns into chirping if you let time expand. That’s what happened to me, when I think of all the screaming I used to do whenever I thought about my future. Time expanded, and my screams turned into chirps.
3
Each night, they need to eat the better part of their weight in insects. With their wings unfolded, they are mostly skin, half pornography and half baby bird, and this leaves their bodies exposed to the night air, which means they need to eat a lot of calories. And so they eat to keep flying, and so they fly to keep eating. What we call a vicious circle.
4
A famous essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” was published in 1974 by a philosopher named Thomas Nagel. The essay is not so much about bats as about the problem of imagining any alien consciousness. Nagel chose bats because they occupy a limb high enough on the evolutionary tree that they clearly possess consciousness, and yet they perceive the world primarily through sensory apparatus that’s completely unlike our own. Our attempts to define echolocation in human scientific terms tell us nothing about what it’s like for a bat to be a bat. “Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat,” Nagel says, “nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like.”
Since I’ll never know what it’s like to be a bat — I mean, I’m not an idiot; I know I’ll never know — Sandra and I are free to pursue our game, which is not so much a knowledge game as a child’s game of imagining. Two women lying on a stranger’s lawn — no, that’s wrong: one of them is simply “parked”—trying to see bats, trying to imagine bat-ness. I beam my thoughts into the sky, listening for an echo.
5
A week later, I’m at the matrimonial roost, out at the old log dump on Woodard Bay: the trail here is an old road that’s been gated off, so I can wheel the mile to the water, through darkening woods of sword ferns growing under the ancient mossy trees.
What strikes me first, when I come out at the clearing by the inlet, is the diamond moiré pattern of the surface, a fishnet of black on silver that wobbles as the twilight flexes itself against the bay. Looking north, you can see where the inlet opens into bigger water, and the sky is lighter there.
The bats live under a trestle, on top of which a railroad used to run, hauling logs away after they were floated here by tugboat. Its boards weathered and splintering, the trestle has been surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence from which “Danger High Voltage” signs now hang. At dusk the bats will fly the ten miles to town, where the freshwater in the lake provides a better supply of insects.
The bat guy happens to show up here tonight — I think he thinks I’m stalking him, though tonight he speaks to anyone who wants to listen. The bat club from Seattle didn’t show up for their tour because the freeway was too backed up for most of them to make the drive south. The only person who got through is an older man whose eyes blink as though they’re accustomed to a deeper dark, his pale hair tufted around his ears. He fiddles with his own bat detector hanging around his neck, as he tells me how the bats have sex in autumn but how fertilization of the egg is delayed until the spring. He shows no compunction about speaking of bat sex, even though I’ve come here with my friends’ young boy and the vocabulary makes me blush.
He says it’s a mystery, how the sperm are stilled. How the female lets them know when they’re free, in spring, to storm the fortress of her egg. When he uses the word hibernaculum to describe the winter roost, this new word puts me into a heightened sensory state. I feel as though I’ve never seen such lilac-light before, or at least I’ve never so appreciated being in its presence, as the great blue herons croak from their nests in the trees.