A Letter to the Bats Under Congress Avenue, Who Are Leaving Without Paying for Anything

"The bats are included in the experience," the host said, as if the bats had signed something.

I was on a rooftop near the bridge because a friend's cousin had a birthday, and the birthday had a reservation, and the reservation had a minimum. The minimum was $60 a head. That bought a stool, a laminated card explaining what a bat is, and a cocktail called the Emergence that tasted like a lime had been told bad news. Below us, on the bridge, a few hundred people stood on the sidewalk for zero dollars and saw exactly the same thing.

So this is for you, bats. You'll be gone soon. You always are by about now, give or take a cold front.

Dear Bats,

I know you don't read. I know you're Mexican free-tailed bats, more than a million of you, most of you mothers who came up in the spring to raise pups in the crevices under the bridge, and you have no interest in my opinions about parking. But you are leaving for the winter, and before you go I want you to know that you are the last attraction in this town that still works the way attractions used to work.

You show up at dusk. You don't sell anything. You don't have a merch table. You don't have a waitlist, a QR code, or a "soft opening." You don't put a velvet rope across the sky and charge extra for the side of the sky with the better sunset.

You just leave the bridge in a long brown ribbon that goes on so long people stop filming and start actually looking. Then you go eat about a zillion bugs over the farmland east of town and come back before sunrise without asking anybody to like and subscribe.

You are, financially speaking, the most stable tenants in Austin. You have never once been priced out.

What You've Been Spared

I want to brief you on the market, because you've been up there in the concrete with no idea what's going on.

When I first came down to watch you, sometime when I still owned a pager, the cost was a parking spot and a willingness to smell you. You do smell, by the way. Everyone's too polite to say it. It's a warm, ammoniac, barnyard smell that drifts up from the water on August nights, and I've come to love it the way you love the smell of a relative's house. It's honest. Nobody bottled it and sold it as Notes of Cave.

Back then you stood on the bridge, or you sat on the grass down by the lake, and somebody had a cooler, and somebody's kid asked whether you'd get in his hair. Nobody knew when you'd come out. That was the show. Twenty minutes of a crowd pretending not to be bored, then one bat, then nine, then the whole sky going sideways.

Here's what that same twenty minutes costs now if you let the city help you:

• Parking downtown at dusk: $22, paid to an app that has renamed itself twice since you last migrated.
• A "bat cruise" on the lake: enough to make you wonder if the boat comes with a bat. It doesn't, of course. You're the bat. You're working for free and somebody else is holding the deposit.
• The rooftop with the laminated card: $60 minimum, plus a "sunset service fee," which as far as I can tell is a charge for the sun going down. The sun has been going down free for several billion years.
• A spot on the bridge railing: still free. For now. Do not let anyone near this information.

I watched a man on the rooftop ask the server whether the bats would "be out on time tonight," and the server said, "They usually hit around 7:40," like you were a band with a curfew. I wanted to stand up and say they're wild animals, Kyle, they don't have a stage manager. But I had paid $60 to sit on that stool and I was going to get my $60 of sitting.

The Lawn Situation

You may have noticed things are getting tall around your bridge. You notice everything, with the echolocation and all.

There's a grassy spot down by the water where people have spread blankets to watch you for years, next to the old newspaper building. That whole stretch has a redevelopment plan now, with towers and a new park and a lot of renderings. In the renderings the sky is always lavender, the trees are always fully grown, and the people are always holding a single glass of white wine at a 45-degree angle. Nobody in a rendering has ever brought a cooler. Nobody in a rendering has ever smelled you.

To be fair, the plan does promise to keep a place for people to watch you. I believe that the way I believe a lease that says "minor renovations." Someone in a fleece vest will absolutely put in a public bat-viewing lawn. Then someone will put in a bat-viewing lawn with "elevated seating." Then the elevated seating will get a beverage program. Then the beverage program will need a minimum. Then I'll be back on the bridge with the cooler people, which, frankly, is where I wanted to be all along.

I'm told one of the towers going up around here will have a "sky lounge." Bats, you have been running a sky lounge since 1980, when they rebuilt the bridge and accidentally made the most successful affordable housing project in the history of this city. Nobody cut a ribbon. Nobody issued a press release about a "vibrant, bug-forward community." You just moved in, raised your kids, and never once asked the city for a tax abatement.

You should be on a panel. You'd hate it.

A Few Requests Before You Go

When you get to Mexico, please don't tell anyone down there how much we charge for things up here. They'll think we've lost our minds, and they'll be right.

If somebody approaches you about a "branded emergence partnership," pretend you're a different species.

If a startup offers to put tiny GPS tags on you to "optimize the guest viewing window," fly directly into its marketing department.

And when you come back in the spring, if you find that the bridge has been renamed something like the Congress Avenue Bridge Presented by a Regional Credit Union, please do what you've always done. Show up at dusk, ignore the sponsor, and go eat bugs.

On My End

I'll be here. I'll keep paying too much for everything else. I'll pay $14 for a sandwich that used to be a $5 sandwich with a better attitude, and I'll pay rent to a management company whose name is just two nouns glued together. I'll sit in traffic with my blinker on and quietly die a little at a parking kiosk that wants me to download something.

But one night next summer, I'll walk out onto the bridge with a folding chair I am not technically supposed to have. I'll lean on the railing between a family from Pflugerville and a couple of guys from out of town who have no idea what's about to happen. Somebody's kid will ask if you'll get in her hair. Nobody will know exactly when you're coming. The air will smell like you.

And it'll cost me nothing, which these days makes you the most exclusive event in Austin.

Safe travels. Don't sign anything.