A Million Years with You (11 page)

 

The gathering trips that I accompanied were neither easy nor exciting—at least I hoped they wouldn't be exciting, as excitement could mean encountering a cobra or even a lion—but they were fully as interesting as hunting, or so I soon discovered.

Perhaps five women, or six counting me, would go together on a gathering trip. I usually went with two sisters—Di!ai, the woman I was named for, and her younger sister, !U. They almost always went gathering together. With them went their children—Di!ai's two little boys and her ten-year-old daughter from an earlier marriage, and !U's five-year-old son and nursing baby. Her ten-year-old son, old enough to get along without his mom, stayed home. With the two sisters came their first cousins—//Kushe, the woman who brought us to Gautscha, and her older, widowed sister, !Ungka. //Kushe would bring her little boy.

Speaking of female power, these four women and their much younger brother were the owners of Gautscha. Their parents were a brother and sister who had owned Gautscha earlier—a lineage that may have reached far back in time. The husbands of these women lived there at their pleasure.

On a gathering trip, each woman would take an ostrich eggshell full of water. I didn't have an ostrich eggshell and was seldom foresighted enough to take a jar of water, so I often went thirsty. Each woman would take her digging stick, made from a straight hardwood branch about three feet long and pointed at the tip. I once took a shovel to help with the digging, but the shovel was heavy and awkward and I never took it again. Instead, I'd borrow a digging stick and take turns with its owner, usually Di!ai, who had a sore shoulder and welcomed the rest.

We would leave the encampment at midmorning. Why so late? Because by then the predators would have finished their night's hunting and would be sleeping in the shade. Night was for the predators. People used the day. So we'd wait until the day was warm enough to make the predators sleepy, then we'd walk for several miles, passing berry bushes on the way. We would chase off the birds who were eating the berries and pick them ourselves. We would also come upon vines with tsama melons—the little green African melons that are the ancestors of all squashes and melons (and to which all squashes and melons revert if left to pollinate themselves)—and we would pick them too. If I picked berries or melons I'd give them to someone else because our group had our own food—we didn't want to compete for the people's resources. I'd eat a few berries only if someone gave them to me. Then we'd keep walking.

The anthropologist Richard Lee, who in later years also studied the Bushmen, reported that a Ju/wa woman walked about 1,500 miles a year. I'm sure that's true, but I didn't know it at the time. I only knew that we spent lots of time walking, usually most of the morning. Then we'd come to a place where certain kinds of tubers grew, and the women would sit on their heels and start to dig.

So much for wandering aimlessly over the veldt in search of food, as the Bushmen were assumed to do. Those women knew precisely where those tubers were growing. They knew the place because they'd been there before, or perhaps because earlier in the year some of them had seen the stalks or vines of the tubers in passing and knew just what they'd find when they went back later. They shared the information, of course—the Ju/wasi shared everything—but no one would dig the tubers without permission from the people who found them. What would those people think if they came later only to find the food gone? To dig the roots without permission would be theft, and at the time the Ju/wasi didn't even have a word for theft. (How different from us, with our lexicon that runs from
pilfer
and
swipe
to
armed robbery
and
grand larceny
.)

At first I had no idea how the women knew where to dig, because I'd see nothing that showed the presence of anything below the surface. But Di!ai took it upon her generous self to teach me, and if I asked, she'd show me a little pinch of withered vine mixed with all kinds of other little stalks and grass blades—something I would not have noticed. It was, of course, the remnant of the vine put up by the root she had been looking for. To appreciate what kind of observation was required to notice from a distance a tiny shred of plant material down in mixed, dry grass, I'd say you had to be there.

Di!ai would then dig for a while, scooping up the loose dirt with her hand, until she'd gone down about eighteen inches. I wouldn't see anything in the hole except dirt. Di!ai would rest for a moment, and then go on digging. When she had dug down about two feet, removing an astonishing amount of dirt, we might see something brown, perhaps a little darker than the dirt, which would be the top of the tuber. She might chop out a small piece of the tuber and taste it to see if it was too old and bitter to eat (see my mother's note on 24. /
dobi
) and therefore not worth doing the work to remove it. If it was bitter and too old, she'd spit out the bite, sigh, stand up, and move on to another place to start digging again. But if the root seemed good, she'd expose it, pull it up, brush off the dirt, and put it in the pouch of her cape. Then she'd go on to another tuber.

By midafternoon the women would be far apart. Now and then they'd call to each other. A pure, high woman's voice breaking the otherwise perfect silence was a surprising sound. A little later, when the sun was looking down at the western horizon, they'd think about going home. They would collect their children. They'd put the tubers in the pouches of their capes. They'd fish out their ostrich eggshells and drink a little water. Then they'd start walking, all in single file, almost never talking, often stopping along the way to gather firewood, which increased the weight of their loads until their knees were all but bending. It was at this time that I could be helpful. I could carry a child or a load of firewood.

Perhaps digging tubers or picking berries wasn't as exciting as hunting, and perhaps I was a bit disappointed with my role at first. But looking back, I'm content to have done what I did. I learned a great deal about edible plants, thanks to Di!ai, her sister, and their cousins. I also learned about the single most significant aspect of living in the Old Way for our species, because for millions of years, vegetable foods were the mainstay of our primate diet, with a tasty ant or the odd dead animal as an occasional treat. To know this was compelling. I came to the conclusion that the Neolithic was a really bad idea. If I were Gaia, I'd go back in time to find the
Homo erectus
people and make them get back in the trees. As a species, we did best as hunter-gatherers.

 

After my third and last long-term stay with the Ju/wasi, I wrote
The
Harmless People
, a travel book which, however naive, was my first significant literary effort as a full-fledged grownup. But before that, I got married.

6

H
IS NAME WAS STEVE
. He was a friend of my brother. He was also the boyfriend who had earned me the name of Kothonjoro. At the time of this writing, we've been married for over fifty years. We met during our sophomore year in college, after my family's first trip to the Kalahari, when I was at Smith and Steve and my brother were at Harvard. But after that we were together because my parents wanted me to take courses in anthropology and Smith didn't offer any, so for my junior year I transferred to Radcliffe. By then, though, Radcliffe was a college in name only, and all courses were offered at Harvard. I had loved Smith, so I transferred with some regret. But by then I also loved Steve.

I was smitten the first time I saw him. This took place one September evening in my parents' house in Cambridge, in the study where, years earlier, my brother and I had hidden behind the curtains watching the rescue of our imprisoned nanny.

Steve was there to visit my brother. I came down the front stairs wearing a red plaid dress with a full skirt that fell way below the knees, and a wide, shiny leather belt. For those too young to remember, this was called the New Look (by now a Dreary Old Look), but all of it except perhaps the plaid was stylish in the fifties. Normally I wore jeans, and I no longer remember why that day I was wearing a dress. I'm glad I did, though. Steve has never forgotten my descent of the stairs.

He was wearing jeans and a navy sweater. I was enormously attracted to him. This was unusual for me, as I had never before experienced love at first sight. I was even more attracted when I learned that he owned a motorcycle and also was a climber.

The latter resonated strongly with me, because up until that evening one of my most memorable experiences, the summer after I graduated from boarding school, had been climbing the Needle of M in the Alps with the help of a French guide. I'd gone to France with my mom for the chaperoned, precollege travel experience that back then was mandatory in my parents' socioeconomic circles. The Kalahari would have served the purpose, but not until a year later, and at the time we weren't sure that we were going.

So perhaps I was too hasty in saying that falling in love with Steve was my first such experience, because while clinging to the cliff that rose to the summit of the Needle, I looked down and saw an eagle flying far below. It was a large European eagle, I think a golden eagle, but from that distance it looked smaller than a wasp. At that moment I fell in love with everything—with the eagle, with the Alps, with the guide, with France, with climbing. Then I came off the cliff, dropped about thirty feet through thin air, and stopped with a jerk. I was roped, and the guide had caught me. I dangled below him, looking up. His eyes met mine, and his were critical—a fiery blue stare. I had not been paying attention, and if he had been equally careless he would have lost a client and damaged his reputation. I apologized. But I wasn't scared or even grateful. I was too happy.

Steve would know about things like that. In fact, on the very day we met, he had climbed the famous tower of Harvard's Memorial Hall. It may not have been a first ascent, as others had also tried it, but Steve's intention was to summit, which he did. The tower has since burned and was not rebuilt, so his triumph will never be repeated.

The campus police nabbed Steve when he came down and there was some trouble about it, but he didn't get expelled. On the contrary, he was invited to join the Harvard Mountaineering Club and some of its prestigious members for an ascent of Mount McKinley (now Denali). Steve felt honored. He joined the club but did not accept the Mount McKinley invitation, as his climbing experience had been limited to buildings and to such places as Cathedral Ledge in North Conway, New Hampshire, and the Shawangunks in New York State. This was serious climbing, to be sure, but it was rock climbing, not mountaineering. Neither he nor the people who invited him had coped with a whiteout blizzard, or detected a crevasse, or rescued someone who had fallen into a crevasse, or predicted an avalanche, or escaped a falling rock or serac—all of which could be expected on Denali.

Years later our son became an International Mountain Guide, the first American guide to work legally in France. He lived in Les Houches in the Chamonix Valley and worked mostly in the Alps, but he also climbed and guided in the Andes, the Rockies, the Himalayas, and other formidable mountains, including Denali. He could navigate in whiteout blizzards, predict avalanches, avoid crevasses, and rescue people who fell into them. When he learned that Steve had declined the invitation to join the Denali expedition, he commended his father's discretion very strongly.

 

At first my romance with Steve seemed star-crossed. One day I asked how old he was. He said he was eighteen. Gosh. I'd thought he was older. But after all, I was also eighteen—my nineteenth birthday was still a few weeks away—so it was hard to find fault with him for being the same age. But then I asked the date of his birthday, unaware of the disaster that would follow. He said he was born in July. Horrors! He was nine months younger than me. And we had been getting along so perfectly! But back then it wasn't possible to date a younger man. Sophisticated college women like myself did not acknowledge their existence. A relationship with Steve would be out of the question. But there I was, stuck with a powerful attraction to him.

Steve and I spent much time together, which was lucky for me as he was an exceptionally good student and he also knew which courses were easy—not that he took them. He just told me which ones they were and I took them. I found this helpful because, having so recently transferred to Radcliffe, I knew nothing about the Harvard courses. Nor was I in Steve's league as a student. So Steve served as my adviser. Perhaps I also had a faculty adviser, but no one told me, and I didn't know to ask, so I never met that person.

I learned that Steve led a fascinating life when not in college. He worked in the summers, at first on an oil rig in Texas, later laying the Transco gas pipeline, and later still constructing I-95. A veteran hitchhiker, he would hitch to the job site, work all summer, and hitch home in the fall with so much money that his father could no longer claim him as a dependent. This was in marked contrast to my other boyfriends, most of whom spent their summers at play on Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket—just what my dad had wanted me and my brother to avoid, and part of the reason he bought the land in New Hampshire.

Steve's experiences were enthralling—the enormous machines he had handled, the men he had met, the adventures! While laying the pipeline, for instance, angry men with shotguns stood nearby to be sure no worker set foot on their property. One of his tasks while laying the pipeline was to assist an Italian stonemason in rebuilding the stone walls that had been the property boundaries of the angry men and had been taken apart so the pipe could be put in the ground. The stonemason was so skilled that he had only to look at the pile of rocks to know which rock would fit, and he'd point to it. Steve would carry it to him; he would place the rock, then scan the pile again and point to another rock. The stone walls were rebuilt to perfection in no time at all, and the skill and artistry of this man is one of Steve's favorite memories.