North Woods Journal Entry 3.21.21

Tuesday June 20, 2010 5:30 PM

I had to write this down, before the details slip away into the ether.

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Just now, a few hours ago, I was getting ready to climb into the hammock out front, by the lake, for a little afternoon read and maybe a short nap. The weather has been perfection— high 70’s, mostly sunny, breezy, divine. Before I got comfortable in the hammock, I made a trip out back to see Charlie.

Charlie is our outhouse, and it hasn’t been bad at all this year. Last time I was here, two years ago, Charlie felt kind of creepy, inhabited by big wood spiders that sat a little too close for comfort in the 4’ x 4’ enclosure. But this year, the only spider I saw was hiding behind the little "Welcome" sign on the wall, and he only came out because I checked to see whether the spare key was still hanging behind it. So I went about my business, and while sitting there, I noticed a small spider, dead on top of the bucket of lime. When I was finished, I opened the bucket and tapped the lid over the toilet seat that’s affixed to the hole, depositing the spider in with the waste. I sprinkled a scoopful of lime powder into the hole, pleased that this new method seemed to be working well to keep the odor down. I replaced the lid on the bucket and began to head back out front, but then remembered I wanted to remove an unusually large mushroom that was growing right in front of Charlie’s door. It looked like the kind of thing that might get messy if you stepped on it unawares. Grabbing a large stick nearby, I sliced it off at the stem and scattered its broken bits of flesh into the woods. Some of the mushroom had ended up on Charlie’s floor, and I scraped the pieces out with the stick, not wanting them to rot and attract yet more flies. Just then, something caught my eye up near the ceiling. It was a large, dark, wing-like thing stuck to the light brown fly paper that was hanging to the right of the toilet seat. It took a second for my mind to register what exactly I was seeing.

It was a bat. Or rather, part of a bat. I didn’t want to look too closely, but I could see there was a ball of fur attached to the black leathery wing. The other wing, however, seemed to be missing. It was dead, but fairly fresh—I hadn’t noticed any smell, although there were a few more flies than normal today. It must have flown in and gotten stuck last night, poor thing. I wondered what had happened to the other wing—I imagined it thrashing in a frantic attempt at escape, violently enough to rip off its own limb. But there was no detached wing to be found.

I steeled myself, knowing I’d have to somehow get rid of it… I shuddered to think how close my head had been to this creature just moments before, and was grateful I hadn’t discovered it when it was two inches from my face. I grabbed the mushroom-dispatching stick and jostled the fly paper a little.

 Yep—definitely dead.

As the paper twirled around, I could see there was a stump-like appendage where its other wing should have been. Fairly gruesome, but I reminded myself, this is what you get if you want to go live alone in the woods for three weeks. I stood for a few moments, far enough away so that the half-bat was sufficiently out of focus that I could stomach looking in its direction. This is a strategy I developed from living so many years in the deep South, having to deal with the over-sized roaches that inevitably turn up, hopefully dead, and need disposal. I’ve learned that I can handle the situation as long as I don’t have to look directly at the thing, or be close enough to it to make out any visual details. A distance of about 5 feet, coupled with looking slightly to the side, usually does the trick. Scrunching my face in disgust helps, too.

Employing this time-tested strategy, I considered a number of methods of bat removal. Clearly, I’d have to take down the whole fly paper arrangement, as I wasn’t about to pry him off the paper. Equally clearly, I wasn’t going to just walk up and pull the paper down from the ceiling, as that would require my hand—and face!—to be far too close to the gory scene.

I immediately began scheming on a way to extend my reach. There were plenty of sticks and boards around, old lumber and the like. I thought about using two long thin boards as kind of extended, Go-Go Gadget arms, but this lacked dexterity and I couldn’t ensure I’d be able to sever the fly paper from the ceiling. It appeared to tacked up with some kind of string. In the utility room, there was one of those "grabber" devices—the ones marketed for old people that can’t bend over—I’d just seen it the day before. But that was only about 18" long… still too close for comfort. As long as I could reach and detach it, I could just walk the whole situation further out into the woods and leave it amid some underbrush. I needed some kind of 5-foot branch with a razor and a grabber affixed to the end. I started to envision a MacGyveresque contraption, complete with strings and pulleys, but stopped short. This seemed a bit over the top. Then my mind hit upon a brilliant solution—a bucket. If I placed a bucket right under the bat/fly paper, then I could just cut the string and the whole situation would fall into the bucket, which I could easily then dump in the woods.

Back in the kitchen, I grabbed an empty bucket (we keep some around to bring water up from the lake) and while I was there, I donned a pair of yellow rubber gloves. The dishwashing kind—they were hanging over the sink. Looking back, perhaps it would have been more appropriate to use work gloves, which were also readily available in the kitchen woodpile, but at the moment, the rubber gloves seemed just the thing.

Back out at Charlie, bucket in place, I just needed a way to cut this thing down. Eureka again: a saw! There were a few long ones in the woodshed and maybe I could somehow attach a piece of wood through the handle so I wouldn’t have to get too close. I went to the shed to survey my options.

While perusing the multitude of tools at my disposal (this was like an episode of the A-Team, where Hannibal and the gang are trapped and facing certain death, but it just so happens they’re in a warehouse, stocked with all manner of vehicles and explosives with which to make their escape), I found a broom leaning in the corner. I remembered I’d wanted one for the kitchen and picked it up, intending to put it inside when I was done with the bat. I located a suitable saw, and played for a minute with a number of possible broom-saw chimeras, but quickly saw the futility in this idea. I retuned to Charlie and stood at my comfortable distance, assessing. The bat still hung there, one-winged and somehow roach-like.

The final cog fell into place when I realized I could use the bristle-end of the broom in my left hand to block my view of the bat, while going in with the saw in my right to make the necessary cut. This worked exceedingly well, and with the visual stimulus hidden safely behind the broom, I gained the courage to move in to saw blade distance and make a pass at the string. My heart quickened as I crossed the invisible 5-foot line, but it was going to be OK. Nearly done now. It took several tries, getting the string between the saw and the ceiling and dragging the blade against the wood, all while keeping my bristle shield in place. Eventually the string frayed and snapped.

I waited, fully expecting to hear the clunk of bat hitting bucket, but none came. The string was caught up in the teeth of the blade, and the whole jumble was still hanging from the saw. Even better, I thought, I’ll just walk this whole thing into the woods, just like this. I took two steps back, the broom still blocking my view, and the string promptly slipped off the saw blade. The bat landed with a soft thud on the floor of Charlie, entangled with the fly paper, right in the doorway. This wasn’t going to be so easy after all.

Quite unfortunately, I needed to actually see what was gong on. With great hesitation, and contorting my face in disgusted anticipation, I removed the broom shield. Thankfully, the details of the animal were obscured from view by the brown fly paper. Now, how to pick it up without getting too close? The bucket, devoid of its intended cargo, once again revealed its utility to my mind. I could prop the bucket at an angle below the doorway, slide the bat into it, and then, the woods. Reaching over the mess with the broom handle, I retrieved the bucket and positioned it just so.

It was only as I tried to slide the bat into the bucket with the broom handle that I fully understood, much to my dismay, the true extent of the stickiness of fly paper. The whole business was now quite firmly stuck to the floor of the outhouse. And then, an instant after this stickiness-realization sank in, it happened.

A squeak.

The kind of squeak that a bat might make.

A dying, one-winged bat that’s spent untold agonizing hours stuck to a strip of fly paper in a small room whose only function is to house a large pile of rotting human waste. Just exactly that kind of squeak.

God, no, it’s alive. I stood frozen.

My mind flashed back to the time, some 20 years ago, when my mother and I found a mouse in a mousetrap in the basement. It wasn’t dead, just pinned in half with a broken back, struggling to get free. I was a young teen, and my parents had recently separated and my father had moved out. Mom and I had often joked in those days, building each other up: Who needs a man around anyway? We’re strong women—we can handle anything! But at that moment, we felt helpless to do what needed to be done to put the mouse out of its misery.

As it happens, a man did arrive, a neighbor. I’m not sure whether my mom called him or he just happened by at the right (or wrong) time, but I do remember him doing the deed—placing the mouse, still in the trap, in a brown paper lunch bag and bashing it with a hammer. I was simultaneously horrified by its violent death and relieved by the end of its suffering.

But this couldn’t be. The bat hadn’t moved this whole time, and it had lost a wing and maybe more of its body—I mean, there wasn’t much left of it, really. It was a half-bat. I willed myself to believe I had misheard the sound. Maybe it was a cricket or some other insect that was underneath Charlie. That must be it. There are all kinds of strange bugs around here, making all kinds of strange noises.

Even so, my brain picked up speed to Sind the necessary solution to the problem of the sticky mess. My pace was quick as I went to retrieve the grabber tool from the utility room —just the thing. On my way back out to the scene, I saw for a moment how this must look, a woman alone in the deep wilderness, wearing a peach frilly strapless sundress and yellow rubber gloves, approaching an outhouse with steely determination, armed with a plastic grabber from the dollar store.

It couldn’t be alive, I told myself. If it was, oh God, I’d have to kill it as soon as possible. And I couldn’t do the hammer. I couldn’t.

I took a deep breath and grabbed with the grabber. I pulled up on the fly paper, un-sticking it from the floor, and then the squeaks began in earnest. My heart simultaneously dropped into my stomach and lodged into my throat. Oh God, oh shit, no, oh God, no it IS alive… Heart pounding in both its locations, I tugged at the paper in one fast yank, like a band-aid, and put the bat, screaming in what must have been unimaginable fear and pain, into the bucket.

My mind switched into urgent, emergency decision-making mode. Drowning. It had to be drowning. Not as fast as a hammer, but it shouldn’t take long. I calculated as I ran to the front of the house, bucket hanging from the grabber at arms’ length, in turn held out my by yellow-gloved hand. A few seconds, really, is all it should take. Just Sill the bucket with water from the lake. My face was all horror, and I was crying out to the invisible humanity of the woods. The squeaking and trashing carried on.

I placed the bucket on the dock, not wanting to risk plunging it into the water and the bat floating out into the lake, half-drowning and not able to die. I flew inside to get another bucket, and returned, chest heaving and heart racing. I filled the new bucket in the lake and poured the water over the bat, desperate to end it. "I’m so sorry, oh God, won’t be long now, it will all be over in a few seconds…"

The bat, still stuck to the paper, floated to the top and started struggling. My face contorted even more and I wiped my forehead on my upper arm, staring in disbelief. Every second that passed by my heart was breaking.

I needed a weight to keep the bat under water. I stepped into the lake and pulled up a cinder block that was acting as a step. Too big. I searched frantically for a large rock, and splashed a few yards away to pull one up. I heaved it to the dock and let it fall into the bucket, praying it would take the bat down with it as it sank.

It did. The bucket went still.

I stood over the watery death for a long moment, unmoving. I couldn’t fully sort out the feelings Slowing through my body. Some muddy mixture of relief, sadness, strength, disgust, compassion, horror, and remorse. Merciful, cold-blooded murder. I thought about the nature of fly paper, and the pain that humanity inflicts for the sake of its own convenience. What those with power do unto those without. I turned away to clean up my trail of chaos.

A little later, when I was sure the bat was dead, I dug a hole by a tree stump off to the side of the house. While digging, I unearthed four small stones, which I stacked into a cairn on the stump, as a reminder. I went down to the dock and brought the bucket, heavy-laden with water and rock and death, over to the stump. I pulled the rock out and set it aside, the 5- foot rule somehow no longer in effect. Slowly and gingerly, I poured the bucket’s contents into the hole. As the water gently seeped down into the earth, I filled the hole with dirt. It only took a few shovelfuls. When I was finished, I placed the large rock on top of the grave. Walking away, I looked back. The rock looked like it might have been there for centuries.

I took down the other strip of fly paper, the one hanging to the left of the toilet. I couldn’t bear to think of another being stuck there, dying a slow and painful death in the outhouse. The paper was dotted with flies that I had never given a second thought. Maybe because they were small—so small that I didn’t need a broom to block out their detail. Or maybe because they don’t scream in the throws of agony; they die quietly.

But now they seemed to me, each one, worthy of compassion and respect, solely on the basis of their being alive. And seeing them elicited the same sense of urgency and motivation as I had felt for the tragic creature that, at long last, now rested peacefully under the earth nearby.

How different the world could be, if we felt this driven to relieve the suffering of all beings.

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It’s taken me longer to write this than I thought. And now that I’ve finished, it seems something all together different from what it was when I started.

Outside, the sun has set, and the loons are wailing in the darkness.

Wendy Hasenkamp