Gateway
Park lies just north of Luke Air Force Base, a forty-five minute drive from my
house in good traffic. The October day is cooling a bit but it’s still bug
season on the soccer turf, the moths replacing butterflies at sunset, whirligiging
up and down from the field lights. Over at the skate park, the longboarders
leap and spin in the same motion, and on the playground an eight-year-old
wields a swing like a trapeze. The coach is three feet off
the ground at half-time, “There he is,”
he shouts to the team, “coming in off the side like
gangbusters – what do you do?”
Everything’s
flying here tonight at Gateway, fighter jets roaring
in double-pair sets from Luke, stealthily black against
the black sky but at full volume; on the ground we feel that rock-concert thrill
of the vibration through our bodies. We
search the sky but see only a faint-blue moving blink. Mostly we see the bats,
the glossy silvered membranes of their wings reflecting the lamplight. They
flap in loopy maneuvers, honing in on the cyclone of moth wings. A soccer fan
beside me brushes the top of her hair rapidly with both hands. “I feel like I
walked into a spider web,” she says.
Why
do we still have icky feelings about
these honorable little warriors? Without the bats, this ground would have a layer
of insects as high as the goalposts. The babies are as photogenic as any mammal, and at least, with the exception of vampire bats, they only drink the bodily fluids of their own species.
Bat World Sanctuary
The
same is not true for humans, who feed on the milk of our herd
animals, prompting paleoanthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harbending (The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization
Accelerated Human Evolution) to call us “mampires.” An early gene
mutation gave many European and African human populations the ability to produce
lactase in adulthood; before, people stopped making that enzyme after infancy. I
can now see even more logic in the barn scene in The Little Vampire.
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