Ruth and I had our first run in with varmints the first year we married. We lived in our house on Stockbridge in Kalamazoo. It was a two story Victorian, with a third story attic, that had been retrofitted into two units. We lived in the lower unit and rented the upper.
The exterior needed to be painted, so I painted it in August of 1972. One day, while standing in the shared driveway, I noticed a squirrel on the roof. I wondered what tree he jumped from, but my thought process was interrupted when I saw him enter the house through what appeared to be a hole in the wood soffit. The squirrel lost all his “cuteness” the moment he invaded our house.
There was no YouTube or Google in 1972, so I resorted to old fashion library investigation and a thorough review of “old wives tales”. I bought several packages of mothballs, went up into the attic, threw them around, and waited a couple of days. I went back up, checked the area, and after discovering that the squirrels had “left the building”, I sealed the outside of the house with aluminum sheets and painted over them. Our intruder was sealed out.
A couple of years later, we moved to Reycraft Street, about a mile and a half from Stockbridge. It was a nicer neighborhood. We bought the worst house on the best street and did a bit of remodeling. Most of our work involved painting both inside and out. Ruth installed accent wallpaper in a couple of rooms. Ruth’s dad, Lou, put in new kitchen counters, and he helped Ruth retile the kitchen floor. My jobs were installing a shower and painting the exterior of the house. This was our first big purchase as a couple, and we wanted it to turn out well.
It had a single bathroom with a tub. I retrofitted the tub on Stockbridge by installing a shower, so I planned to do the same thing. I learned a lot from my Stockbridge install, so I thought the second would go easier than the first. My first day’s work involved removing the hallway access panel to determine how best to proceed. I developed a plan, made a comprehensive list of materials, and went to the hardware for supplies. I made the mistake of not having all of the required supplies when I worked on Stockbridge, so I wasted a lot of time. I wasn’t going to do that again.
I procured the materials and decided to wait until the next day to complete the job. Tearing into the plumbing meant turning off the water, and I didn’t want to turn it off for more than a single day. I knew Lou would be around the next day to install the new countertops, so having him in the house was going to be a bonus should anything go wrong. I left the access panel off and went about the rest of my evening.
The second story of the house had three bedrooms and the single bath. Sometime in the middle of the night, Ruth awoke screaming, “There’s a bat in the house!” She pulled the covers over her head as I sat up. Sure enough there was a bat circling the bed. He flew out into the hallway, and I slammed the door behind him. We were safe for the moment, but I needed to determine a course of action.
After gaining my composure, I called the fire department. I heard fire departments sometimes assisted in such emergencies. We had a phone and a phone book in the bedroom . I looked up the number of the closest station, less than a mile away. They answered the phone on the first ring, and I explained my predicament to the dispatcher.
I don’t recall his exact words, but after determining there was no fire, or medical emergency, he offered up a bit of advice. “If you’ve got a tennis racket, go get it. As for removing the bat, you’re on your own.”
Damn!
I took a deep breath and ran down the stairs. I noted a large puff of dirt just above the doorway at the base of the stairs. “He’s run into this wall.”, flashed through my mind. I retrieved my racquetball racket from the basement. While I was safe, I geared up. I put on a pair of snow boots, zipped a jacket up tight, wrapped a scarf around my neck for extra protection, donned a pair of gloves, and pulled a stocking cap down as far as possible. I was a twenty-seven year old commando ready for war.
I wasn’t looking forward to the confrontation, but I was prepared. I searched each room, one by one, while Ruth remained under the covers. I shook the curtains, moved furniture, and poked a prodded my way around each room. I found nothing.
I placed the access panel over the plumbing, closed the bedroom door, threw down my jacket, hat, and scarf to block the crack at the bottom of the bedroom doorway, crawled under the covers, and did my best to fall asleep. The next morning, after Lou arrived, he and I resumed the search. Again, nothing.
The following summer I painted the house’s exterior. It wasn’t as tall as the Stockbridge house, but it did have a single peak that was too tall for my extension ladder. The only way to reach the peak was to place the ladder in the back of a friend’s pickup truck. The extra lift from the bed of the truck allowed me to climb just high enough to dip my brush into the paint can and stretch as far as I could to shove some paint into the uppermost crevice of the peak.
Just as I made the final push, a bat flew out from its lair. It scared me, and I almost lost my balance. Falling would have been the end of me, but I prevailed. I don’t believe the two bat encounters were with the same bat, but I’m sure they were related.
We didn’t see another Kalamazoo bat after that second experience. We lived there for four years before moving to Lake LeAnn in the fall of 1977. That’s when the fun began.
TBC