Walking through Bats

Hiking at night in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks

Drawing by Ann Brantingham. Used with permission. May not be reproduced.

I come into our camp as the darkness is falling to see the campfire going with that quality of orange that firelight has on tree trunks when there is still a little blue left in the sky and you can still see between the trees, but it’s a little hard. My friends gather chairs or cook food, chat, clean, and prepare themselves against the coming darkness. They are busy enough with the necessary chores that for the moment, they do not hear what I do, the near silent, squeaking conversation of bats who have come out for the evening.

The bats of course flit above us and around us. The bats dance near the fire and above my friends who have attracted mosquitoes. The mosquitoes are attracted to me too, so the bats dance around me.

I can see the bats in their dance in the fire light above my friends, swooping in and out, but it’s nearly impossible to watch them when they’re near me. I can hear them squeak. They speak to me. They remind me of the past.

My mother introduced me to the bats when I was a child, and we walked around a meadow at night. I thought they were birds because for me bats didn’t seem like real things. They were the stuff of cartoons and vampires. Watching them circling around, chasing after a meal, they didn’t seem sinister. They weren’t frightening in the ways that I imagined.

I sat on a boulder on the edge of the meadow and watched them in the last moments of light forgetting that it would be dark soon and that we weren’t carrying a flashlight. When their show ended, I stood up to see we didn’t need one. I could move through the forest by moonlight, and it felt safe and easy knowing that the bats had gone back to sleep in their trees or caves for the evening.

They remind me of my journeys underground, searching caves and mine shafts. When I was young enough to be immortal, I would seek these places out in the desert and climb down inside them. One time in the Saline Valley, a few feet inside, I looked up to see a clump of what seemed to be a hundred or more clinging to the ceiling and sleeping. There were a couple of guardians awake and flying about, but most of them huddled together hanging upside down and swaying together in a rhythm they understood. It was as though they’d been caught in a breeze, but there was no wind. They were pulsing together in the cool of the mineshaft despite the hundred degree weather outside.

When I saw them again that twilight, I thought of Mom and how she taught me that they were kind. It was like seeing friends and I waved to them. I could hear them squeaking around me telling me the secrets that bats know, and I do not.

This night, remembering that evening in the forest, I decide to watch the pageantry of the bats, the whole show. I imagine the microdecisions of those creatures. How in the moment they must be, how unconcerned with geopolitics. I think of Mom in her home now in the city. I wonder if she misses the bats.

They were there for me in the Lake District in England too when my wife and I wandered through the evening. It stays light for so long in summer there, but when the darkness finally came, I could hear them searching around on the same journey as their American cousins. We were leading a group of students from Los Angeles, and while the country was foreign to them, the countryside was perhaps more so.

That morning I’d taught one of my students how to skip stones. She’d never heard of that before. Another one saw a sheep for the first time. There was water everywhere, creeks, rivers, lakes, things that people in Southern California don’t see. If that was magic during the day, the twilight bats made the evening more so. We talked to them about how much these bats fed, what good they were doing for us, and we stayed outside until the moon lit our world. I felt a little of what my mother must have, all those years before.

Tonight, the bats end their show as they always do, disappearing into nowhere and nothing, one moment here and the next just gone, little magicians of the forest, and somehow I’m still not hungry. My friends have finished their cooking and are laughing around a fire, sharing a meal, but I’m not ready. Tonight, I feel like disappearing into the woods, wandering around in the starlight and reliving a life of walking through bats. I feel like thinking about my mother hiking through the woods in the dark. I feel like chatting with the bats.

The image and essay are a part of a memoir in flash that my wife and I wrote called *Kitkitdizzi: A Nonlinear Memoir of the High Sierra.*