Bats!

Last night was Perseids night--we had our lawn chairs out, the full moon's light blocked by the garage at our backs. The mosquitoes, our state bird, were scarce enough that we had not slathered on whatever state-of-the-art organic compounds we use to ward off 6-legged critters these days.

Joe Westerberg, Joshua Tree National Park, California, Aug. 11, 2007

We saw a bat, a welcome sight. Then two. Now a third.

We held still, lying on our chairs, watching the bats chase bugs and each other, a spectacular aerial show against the deep gray-violet of the late dusk sky. And we realized that, really, the mosquitoes were remarkably scant.

A bat swooped up from the ground by our feet, no doubt, munching away. We watched the acrobats flip from their invisible trapezes a few more moments, then one swooped inches from our heads.

Now we know that bats tangling in your hair is an old wives' tale, but the few mosquitoes buzzing about our heads was tempting enough to the bats to show off their aerial skill a tad too close, and as much as we appreciated their predation, we scurried back inside.

Though we missed the main event, the Perseids changed our world in subtle ways:

• We spent the whole afternoon outside, as well as a good chunk of dusk. The dust of Perseid micro-meteorites fell on our hair. (Heck, you can catch micro-meteorites at home--really!)

• A few of my red blood cells gulped by a mosquito (or two) ended up in the belly of a bat, now broken down into tiny pieces. Some of it will become part of that bat, some released as carbon dioxide in the bat's breath, possibly captured by the Brussels sprouts nearby, which I will eat after November's first frost.

Communion.

The meteor photo was taken by Joe Westerberg, lifted from Spaceweather.com, used with permission.

The burning tears of St. Lawrence

The stock market tumbled a bit today.

If I were paying attention, I might release some more stress hormones worrying about retirement. But the plants in my garden grew just the same.

The Federal Reserve is buying more Treasury's, and the sky may be falling.

No matter--tonight the sky is falling, as it has each August, as it will--the Perseids peak. Get outside, look up, and watch pieces of a comet fry as they hit our atmosphere.





Oh, you can look at the purty pictures by National Geographic, and you can blather on about radiants and ZHRs and all kinds of nonsense, but none of that will take you back a few thousand generations as a brilliant bolide breaking across a sky we rarely even notice anymore.

You can feel the oxytocin wash over you as the night's cool air reminds you that we are, after all, part of this world, the real one, the one that will exist long after the words "Dow Jones" fall from our vocabulary.

The Perseid photo is from National Geographic here.