Really didn't know what to write about this week, so here’s how I caused a minor rabies scare in rural Ohio.
I started out attending uni at a shit school in the shittest state in the entirety of America: Ohio. I only went because they gave me money and I will never forgive them for it. In fact, the best thing that I ever did at that school was drop out. Anyway.
While I was there I worked at the carpentry shop. It was the kind of place that was filled with southern accents even though it was very far north, where I was once served raccoon stew at a potluck dinner. I’m a vegetarian. But no matter; I realised it was raccoon when a vertebrae floated to the top, and my boss told me he’d “picked it up this morning” from the side of the road. Nice place.
At the end of my second year I was going a bit insane. Sick of repairing student doors and windows and the like, I asked if I could work on a personal project. I wanted to build bat houses, these little wooden boxes that you drill into trees. Like bird boxes, but for bats. Not a hard concept, really.
If you’ve never been to the states, you may not be familiar with the concept of rabies. Maybe you’ve been to Indonesia or whatever and heard about it there, but rabies in the states is a whole ordeal. If you so much as come into contact with a wild animal, that’s enough to warrant a trip to the hospital, depending on your parents’ paranoia levels. Some animals are worse than others: raccoons, for example, or bats. Definitely bats. That’s the classic.
If you’ve ever had a rabies shot, you know how absolutely barbaric the process is. The needle is enormous, and it goes in your stomach. They’re expensive without insurance (#freedom) and they are incredibly painful. They’re also encouraged in any situation where you can’t capture and test the animal for rabies which, in the case of a tiny bat at nighttime, is pretty difficult to do.
I built enough bat houses to house 400 little brown bats, an endangered species. I installed them in the last month of my second year, before I decided to travel to New Zealand for a semester. I literally never went back. There is still a bunch of my random shit in rural Ohio because I got the fuck out as soon as I had the chance.
But I did leave a legacy. I was still on the local Facebook meme page and, soon enough, right about six months after I left the page was flooded with posts about bats. Bats, everywhere. Bats in every single attic on campus, bats dive-bombing students on the night time streets, bats running into windows, bats, bats, bats! Nobody could figure out what had happened, but seemingly over one summer the local bat population had exploded. But I knew. I knew exactly what had happened: the bat houses worked. They’d worked much better than intended, leading to a population boom that overflowed out of the boxes and into the halls of residence. Nice!
I am very pleased with myself. I have a deep well of spite to empty for that entire state and institution and, even if it was an accident, I couldn’t think of a better parting gift.