Skeeter Eater

My ex-partner, Justin and I spent our first fall as a couple living on a marijuana farm in Northern California. This was the last thing I imagined when we started dating a few months prior. I found myself living in a run-down cabin in the middle of the woods with my new lover, two strange roommates, and a colony of brown recluse spiders. I became accustomed to using a generator for electricity, an ice chest to keep our food cold, and turning on the propane gas tank to actually “heat” our water before taking showers. One thing I never got used to were the spiders.

My experience with spiders was limited to watching Daddy Long Legs totter around like baby giraffes. I’d also been bitten a few times as a kid which included one traumatizing incident during swim lessons. And I could actually feel my skin crawl when Arachnophobia played on the USA Network. I’d never even seen a brown recluse before, and in California I was sharing my bed with them. Along with frightening, it felt unladylike. Every time I excused myself to the “powder room,” I’d have to lift the toilet seat and make sure one wasn’t waiting to bite me in a sensitive area. Taking a shower consisted of shaking out the curtain to ensure no one was hiding in the shadows. Every night we had to lift up the sleeping bag we slept under and use flashlights to make sure there weren’t any tucked in with us.

Spiders had been a fear of mine since I was a kid, along with scorpions, rattlesnakes, flying roaches, and alligators. Growing up in the south, I’d had my fair share of experiences with these creatures. Scorpions with their tails raised, ready to strike. The sound of a rattle nearby while tromping around the Texas desert. Hissing alligators guarding their eggs while my friends and I got drunk and camped in the swamp. And when it came to flying roaches, you’d think the apocalypse was approaching.

I bet you thought this was about marijuana farms, or spiders, didn’t you? Nope. This is about mosquitoes, kind of. Out of all the creepie crawlies I experienced over the years, only one remains a true arch-nemesis, the buzzing mosquito. I hate mosquitos like Saints fans hate the Falcons. It’s not just that mosquitos are a nuisance, always buzzing in your ear like that annoying friend who can never quite finish a story. But they’re dangerous and serve no purpose other than spreading disease and giving your arm a workout while trying to slap them away.

If there’s a mosquito in the house, it’ll find me. I’ll be no sooner lying in bed on the verge of falling asleep and start hearing the sound of a buzz. Growing up, I’d frequently go on mosquito-killing missions. If I heard the familiar buzz in my ear while trying to fall asleep, I’d turn on the light and find the culprit. There were many nights when best friends sleeping over would stay awake with me until our mosquito killing mission was complete. The walls of my bedroom were littered with the carcasses of rotting mosquitos. We left them on the walls in what looked like a vertical graveyard. This was our warning to future skeeters about what the consequences were if they proceeded into our territory.

I’d lived my whole life with mosquitos, and it wasn’t until I moved to California that I realized life could be lived without them. It was one of the more impressive things Northern California had to offer, along with the beautiful landscapes, fabulous marijuana growing capabilities, stinky cheese, and microbrewed beer.

One fateful evening, my ex and I were trimming the raw marijuana plant into buyable buds while seated in the main room of the cabin with Mitch, our coworker. I guess he’d be called a coworker, but he was also like a roommate because other than sleeping in his van, he lived with us in the cabin. There the three of us were, trimming our weed and minding our own business. The only sounds in the air were Frank Zappa on the radio, the generator running the lights, and the swish of our scissors gliding over the buds. My brain isn’t equipped for multitasking, so I kept my talking to a minimum at the trim table. This left plenty of time to ponder the essential things in life like if anyone would hear the fart I needed to let out or what my friends back home were doing. I also thought about how desperately hungry I was. This hunger was far greater than the munchies and I felt it all of the time.

Sitting at the trim table, I was reminded of the rare occasions we went out to eat when I was a kid. On the drive to the restaurant, I would be giddy with excitement, dreaming of the wonderous choices that await me on the buffet line. Eating well past my stomach’s content, I always found room in my pocket for an extra roll, fortune cookie, or packet of sweet and sour sauce.

From the trim table, I found my mouth watering at the imagined next buffet meal when something from above caught my attention. In a split second, I realized something big was flying above us. This was no June Bug attracted to the light but was something mammalian just mere inches above our heads. “Look!” I cried out before jumping from the table. Justin and Mitch followed suit, and we quickly realized that a bat was flying in circles above the trim table. I’d never seen anything fly as fast as this bat. It was like a mini Nascar race suspended in the air, but with only one batmobile.

Justin’s the type of person who’ll pull over to help a squirrel if he thinks it’s in trouble. Me, on the other hand, let’s just say I’m an animal lover, but self-preservation gets the best of me. While he put his work gloves on to try to catch the thing with his hands, I ran into the kitchen and reached for the cast iron skillet. I’d recently lived in Texas, where I worked as a lunch lady, and one of the local kids had died after getting rabies from a bat. This was still fresh in my mind as I yelled at him to stop what he was doing.

In a split second, I was in the doorway of the trim room standing in my poorly postured batter stance. I wasn’t a newbie when it came to stepping up to the plate, but one could say I was the worst player on the team. However, my coach liked to call me the most improved player. There stood my nature-loving boyfriend, horrified and yelling at me from across the room to put the frying pan down. And before you go any further, please note that there were no animals hurt in the making of this story. I realize that now it is, in fact, illegal to kill a bat and experts say you are more likely to get bit by one if you try to kill it.

Thinking back to this moment, I wonder what I expected to happen to the bat if I actually did hit it with the pan. Would it have been like when the coyote hits the roadrunner, making that distinct “pong” sound before falling to the ground stunned? Would my arms have been so shocked from the weight of the skillet that I would’ve accidentally let it go, only to watch as it violently crashed through the window or into Mitch? I also wonder what this said about my character to Justin and Mitch. Were they wondering what sort of animal hating maniac I was, trying to play baseball with a living creature? Or worse, did they think I was the type of southern hunter who had to eat all their kills, and with the frying pan in hand, I would essentially be killing two birds plus a bat with one pan?

I placed the frying pan down and ran outside onto the porch with Justin and Mitch. The cold air offered relief to the stinging shame I felt from Justin’s scolding, but I couldn’t dwell on it at that time; we had bigger fish to fry. We stood on the other side of the sliding glass door, watching as the bat kept flying around and around, not at all phased by its lack of audience. After several minutes of wishing I’d remembered to bring my beer with me, Mitch had an idea.

His plan was simple; he would enter the room, take one of the paper grocery bags we used for storing the still damp weed in, stand up on a chair, and swing the bag through the air catching the bat. His suggestion was a happy medium between Justin’s civilized idea and my redneck approach. But, nevertheless, I hated Mitch’s idea. It seemed reckless, going back in there, and I much prefer to say screw the bat and sleep in my car at that point. But, his plan was all we could come up with. And there was no telling what kind of trouble that bat could cause if left unsupervised for hours alone with the weed.

The drama queen inside me was disappointed when Mitch was able to pull it off. He caught the bat on the third try, quickly closing it before joining us back outside. He set the bag on the end of the deck and nudged it open while standing back. We all watched silently for what seemed like an agonizingly long time waiting for it to emerge from the bag. I was beginning to wonder if flying into the bag had actually killed the poor thing, then I quickly remembered the frying pan and felt shame all over again. This emotion vanished as the bat finally appeared from the bag and flew straight up into the night’s sky as if it’d been called to another batmobile race somewhere in the distance.

It would be a decade later before my appreciation for bats came full circle on a sticky Austin night. Justin and I were there to celebrate our anniversary and decided to take an evening paddleboard tour. It was summer, which I’ve always equated with mosquitos. But, despite being back in the south, the mosquitos never came, which was a relief. What I didn’t realize until our tour guide told us is that mosquitos are a significant food source for bats, which can consume up to 1000 of the annoying bugs per hour. Had I known this growing up, I would have begged for a pet bat rather than a bunny rabbit.

We watched as the other water tours made their way to the Congress Avenue Bridge, while the crowd above us grew thick. When it got dark enough, we laid back and readied ourselves as the world’s largest bat migration in a metropolitan area began. The air was thick with the earthy smell of bat feces, also known as guano. This scent brought me back to those long days on the farm in California, as we regularly used guano to fertilize the plants.

Witnessing the bats swarm together forming what could’ve been a wicked Death Eater’s sign, I was reminded of the bat I almost beat to death with a frying pan. Staring up at the sky in wonder, realizing I was the only audience member to not be defecated on, I knew the bats had forgiven me for nearly killing one of their own. I saw this as the Glitter-Shart in both the possible shitty situation I was currently faced with and the one I had endured long ago in the California woods. Remaining free of the feces and urine raining down on everyone else seemed like both an act of forgiveness and an apology for the actions of one lone bat years before.