Escape from Grombiton

One day two bats landed on the ground. Why they did this, I cannot tell. But they landed in a grassy place, and found it to their liking. The grass was soft and cool, so they were discussing whether or not to stay. Soon, however, they discovered that they could not leave, even if they had wanted. Bats, they found, cannot take flight from the ground, since they cannot raise themselves up and spread their wings.

Everyone knows, bats are made for hanging up-side down. But on the ground, bats can only drag themselves around on their little back feet and their hands. In this posture, they can only look down or straight ahead. The cannot look up into the sky.

So, with some sadness, they set out to make the place their home. As the weeks and months passed, the two ground bats reproduced, and their offspring reproduced, and soon a whole colony of bats came to live on the ground in the grassy place. All the other animals began to call them the Ground Bats, and the colony became known as Ground Bat Town, which eventually was shortened to Grombiton. The place seemed like home to all the Ground Bats.

Of all the bats in Grombiton, only two could speak of the joys of flying. But the idea of flight—even the idea of "sky"—remained a mystery to the generation that had never flown or looked up into the evening sky. For the original two could not very well describe how it happened, only that it did. They could not describe the sky, only that it was large, and it was "up there." They could not explain to the others the mechanics of flying, for when they were flying bats, they never gave consideration to what it is that makes a bat able to fly. They simply grew up flying almost from the day of their birth. So, naturally, now that they were Ground Bats, they were at a loss as to how flight could be accomplished. Flight came to be something of a myth to the flightless Ground Bats.

Over time, the flightless generation taught themselves to do many things bats were never supposed to learn. Like hole-digging, and worm-finding, and grub-growing, and mushroom-hunting. They became quite good at these things, but always, there was a sense inside them that, they weren't made for this. Of course, they could not completely shake this sense, for they were bats.

One day, a young bat wandered from Grombiton. Why he crawled away, I cannot tell. But he set out in a certain direction, and kept crawling until he reached the end of the grass. After the grass ended, the ground became very smooth, for it was bare rock. Still he continued to crawl, until at last he reached the end of the rock around evening time, the time of day when flying bats take flight to hunt for food. And at the end of the rock, there was—nothing.

Now, the young bat had never been to a place where there was nothing under him, for he had never flown, nor had any of the bats from Grombiton ever been up "on" anything. None of them had experienced the sensation of looking down farther than the ground underneath them. The young bat peered down over the edge, but not being able to see very far, and being unaccustomed to the effects of gravity on a body, he simply tumbled right over. It was a long way down, and he began to fall. It seemed a long time to him, but in a moment, and without thinking about it, he spread his wings and took flight. Up he went, and over, and round and round, darting this way and that. Flying, as well and as nimbly as any bat had ever flown!

"How can this be?" he thought. He squealed with delight, and to his surprise, he discovered that by squealing, he could 'see' flying bugs everywhere, and he filled his belly with them. This shouldn't surprise us, for he was a bat after all—flying and eating bugs is what bats do.

After he was full, he decided he would return to Grombiton and tell his friends what had happened. It took him only a few seconds to travel back to the colony, and as he landed, he tumbled over and over, rolling right into the middle of a small gathering of Ground Bats.

"I flew!" he said.

The Ground Bats crawled nearer to him, and looked at him closely. "You have a great imagination," was all they said to him. The more he tried to explain how it had happened, the less they believed him, and the more they pitied him. And because he, like the two original bats, could not explain how it had happened, he failed to convince anyone that he had actually flown.