What Is It Like To Be a Bat?
When I got into skydiving (at a practically geriatric 28), I was sure I’d found my tribe.
I’d spent years not really fitting in to any crowd I courted: the sportbike crowd; the crowd working in the Hollywood trenches around me; the music industry; academia. I’d given up, in fact. The first time I made a skydive, I had just left Los Angeles to live in South Africa as one of the first wave of ‘digital nomads,’ that appalling name by which cultural conscientious objectors have come to be known.
When I started skydiving that day in Pietermaritzburg, I found the closest matching resonance to my own. These people were born to fly. And so was I. I was among fellow birds. Goddamn it, I was home.
The pitch, however, was a little off. Ugly-duckling feelings crept in. On the dropzone, something inside me reliably wiggled like unset jello. I moved from DZ to DZ as a function of my itinerant lifestyle, never spending enough time at any given one to really become part of the furniture. And there was nothing to hold me, really. I opt out of formation pretty-much-anything. I have absolutely no interest in training for a record of any kind. I prefer drilling two-way jumps over and over with someone I know deeply and well, each jump like a shared, flying vinyasa. And I straight-up hate wingsuiting. As a skydiver, I’m a total weirdo (a fact I started BASE jumping in no small part to accommodate).
Then, years later, one southern-hemisphere summer night, in some posh hippie’s living room in a Cape Town suburb, among far too many crystals, I ate five grams of mushrooms, met my spirit animal, and figured out out.
I’m not a bird, as it turns out. I’m a bat.
Of course I’m a bat.
I don’t fly like a bird. I don’t roost like a bird. I don’t sing like a bird. The song I sing — whether by the insistent press of questions I ask my companions, or by these little typewritten flurries — isn’t a one-way song of “check out my plumage” or “my bloodline is eminently breedable.” My songs are a call-and-response against the moving objects around me — my only way of mapping the world. I look stupid in a nest. And I don’t get along with birds, or with most other animals. And frankly, I freak most people out. Y’know. Just like a bat.
When I left that living room, I was a little disoriented. But, in time, I’ve come to be proud of that bat-ness.
Once, after the worst summer of my life, days after I got a little bit internet-famous almost-dying on a BASE jump, I was lying on a boat. I was supposed to be on a dream trip — ten days with friends on a sailboat in the ever-so-photogenic Maldives — but I was in the darkest place I’d ever been.
I was deep in mourning for fallen friends, thwarted hopes, crushing loneliness and cataclysmic self-doubt. I was trapped on that boat, immobile in all the ways I could be. My foot, smashed swollen on that recent hard landing, didn’t allow for more than a few steps. My immune system had collapsed under the weight of my depression and I’d cracked a rib that morning in a coughing fit; I couldn’t really breathe. Worse, I’d realized that I was emotional oceans away from the friends around me on that boat; that I didn’t trust anyone there to sit and hold my awful truth with me, least of all on a good-time surfing trip to a world-class destination.
So, as they all drank and caroused on one side of the deck, I slunk off and lay down on the other one, totally alone. Wondering how bad it really would have been if that close-call jump had actually managed to call it. The little licking waves rocked me like a distracted nanny. I sank into the impossible indigo blanket over my wet face, arms wide, exhausted.
And then the bat came.
I’m sure I heard him long before I saw him — that papery quality of leather sails, snapping slightly but without violence. Soon Pteropus giganteus ariel, the Indian Flying Fox, notable for his enormous wingspan and his predilection for fruit salads, emerged from the deepening blue-blackness.
He floated into my view like an animated stained-glass window, full moon filtering through those beautiful panels of velvet flesh stretched from torso to wrist to long-limbed fingers. I am sure he slowed when he was over me, playing the uncanny angel, holding his five-foot-wide embrace over the matching splay of my own body, just long enough for me to drink the view deep.
His flesh against the moonlight showed the masterful tracery of his blood vessels: the same dendritic fractal that births river deltas; lightning; trees; neurons; mycelia; that same road map that has led, inexorably, from void to life since the beginning of time.
His eldritch adaptation, that flesh; beautiful animals aren’t supposed to grow that way, skin springing free of fat and bone to do something wild and different. He’d be much more appealing if his ancestors had decided to stick to the trees, growing fat and cuddly in the crooks of branches.
As it was, they wanted more than that. They wanted to fly.
Just like weird little me.
The next night, he came again. And the night after that. By the final night on the boat, I was waiting for him, asking him to prove I could count on something; asking him to prove that the natural world around me had little dancing rhythms I could be a part of, so that — just maybe — I could find my own. Asking him to prove that there’s more than one way to find yourself in the sky.
And there is. Because, as it turns out, this is what it’s like to be a bat.
Further reading: What Is It Like To Be A Bat? Duke University Press Philosophical Review
