BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY

Several years ago , Liz was working as a waitress on Washington Island for her summer job the summer after she graduated from high school. We would see her on weekends when we came up to Wisconsin to recreate for the weekend. It was a hard job and she worked really hard all summer and came hone dead tired at the end of each day. This incident happened during one of the week nights while she was staying in our house after working a long hard day of waitressing.

One of best friends on the island was our church pastor- Dale. He was a gentle, low key, happy guy who was easy to talk to and be around. We spent lot of time with Dale , his wife Pam and their children., over many years. They moved to the island to work at our church the year we bought our summer house on the island..so i guess our newness brought us closer together too. It was a blessing to have them in our lives. I knew if Liz had any problems she could always call Dale or Pam for help during the week ,when we were not around as they just lived down Main Road a few blocks.

Well one night Liz came home from the restaurant where she worked, sat down to relax but soon found that she was not alone........ a small black bat was flying around in the house!! YIKES!! Washington Island has a large Bat population and sometimes we would even get them down our wood stove pipe and they would fly out when you opened the door to light the fire in the wood stove but usually you might just find one dead in the ashes (as they could not get out once they made their way in). But we never had one in the house before. Yikes....what to do???? Liz was tired, upset and alone and all she could think of was to call Pastor Dale.

Of course the nice guy that he is, and the father of two daughters of similar ages, he came right over to rescue our Liz. Dale and his daughter Susie came along to help. They entered the house holding two tennis racquets??!! Yup- that was his plan for the ousting of one small black bat... the tennis racquet was his weapon of choice. So, according to Liz who told us this tale later, they proceeded to chase that poor little bat all over the house with the tennis racquet until ...BONG..... yep one dead bat. Well i am sure Liz was forever grateful but they must have all had a bit of a laugh after that Bat attack! Oh i wish i could have been there to see Pastor Dale, an avid tennis player in his day i may add, swinging that racquet at that poor little bat. It was surely beyond the call of a duty for a local pastor to make house calls to kill bats!!