Not only is there a current lust for vampire movies, there is now a lust for reading about Vampire Bats of the rabid kind. Recently, I watched a news clip about bats in Hartford, Wisconsin. Two of the rabid kind were reported to the town’s health department.
I know about bats in Hartford, having lived in Sconfinato, a development of funky houses built in a valley just south of that town. It was an idyllic life among the rolling hills where I lived for a decade (1980-1990) in a small cedar-sided home designed by Michael Johnson, who went on to international fame. The last time I drove out to see the property, my former home had been completely changed and was clad in pea-green vinyl siding. So much for modernism.
My bat story began on one fine morning when I gazed upward to the rafters in my living room. Something odd was hanging up there. But what? It looked like a small black golf ball. Whatever it was didn’t belong in my house though, lord knows, I had my share of wildlife on the property, but most of it (except for horseflies from a nearby horse farm and rampaging chipmunks) stayed in the wild, along with a huge yellow feral cat, Ernie, who roamed around with the possums and woodchucks and regularly brought his wife to drop a litter on my back patio.
The Russ Kagan family (he was a potter of note) lived in a thoroughly modernist house (currently covered in vinyl siding), also designed by Johnson. It was directly across the road from my digs. I called Russ and he rushed over and declared, “It’s a bat. They come down the chimney stacks out here.” A former Marine sharpshooter, he ran back to get a gun and forthwith brought the bat down with one sharp shot. “Anytime you need me to shoot one, just call,” he said. The next time I called him, it was because my house was on fire.
Well, I was a newly single and a newly liberated first-time homeowner, so what did I know about building a big fire in my fireplace, fueling it with huge cardboard boxes I had unpacked when I moved in? The interior stack (very Frank Lloyd Wright-like) was metal and it rose up through the roof in majestic splendor. As the fire roared in the concrete block fireplace, I worked in the kitchen unaware of the conflagration about to unfold. Snap. Crackle. Pop. Turning to face the sounds, I was horrified to see the entire stack had turned bright red. I ran outside and took one brief look. The cedar shake roof was ablaze.
I called Russ and he rushed over to spray the pitched roof with a nearby hose I had luckily hooked up to water my plantings. And guess what? It was a Friday and every one of the few “volunteer firemen” was out eating fried fish. It was a good twenty minutes before the truck arrived and not one of the firemen had a tool for removing the cedar shakes, in fact, they asked me if I had a tool! Perhaps I should explain here that Sconfinato was known as the area where the artist/crazies lived like hippies (we did, yes, and it was wild and crazy fun), so most of the men stood around gazing at the space-ship shaped houses dotting the landscape. The name Sconfinato translates to “boundless,” but it might as well have meant “dead end.” It didn’t help when the firemen arrived and found me standing outside with a wooden sculpture and my divorce papers. Those were the two things I figured I really needed to save.
Eventually the braver of the chaps scaled the roof and chopped a big hole around the stack, heaved it out and hurled it onto the ground where is slowly stopped glowing with red hot heat.
They left, but fifteen minutes later they were called back. The fire had re-ignited, or rather, the smoldering remains were still alive and well. This time they did the job and I spent the night sleeping with a big hole in my roof. Fortunately, it didn’t rain and the firemen went home to eat their cold fish.
The upshot was I discovered that what I thought (when I bought the place) was a safe stack, was nothing more than a section of un-insulated culvert pipe. The insurance company replaced that dangerous device with a triple insulated genuine stainless steel stack, and that was the one the bat fell through and likely flew around my little house at night, before I happened to notice it hanging ten from the rafters.
Full disclosure: Russ and I did consider trying to get the bat to fly out the patio doors, but with twenty-foot ceilings and a bat hanging high, there was no way….
