A Million Years with You (5 page)

Nor did I have much sense of drama. Here's the entire last chapter:
Chapler four. One day Shege told her children to stay in the den and they did. After a while they saw it was raining (cats do not like rain) harder and harder. Prytty soon it started to pour. rain. The End
.

My writing has improved since then, my accuracy too, but my spelling has remained uncertain, so much so that my first agent, Marie Rodell, said I was like a ship's captain venturing out on uncharted seas, trying my best to deal with each new difficulty that came at me. Maybe I was dyslexic or something, or school eluded me. I have yet to master spelling.

I kept
Shege
for a while, and when I got tired of it—after all, it wasn't particularly compelling—my mother kept it. When she was in her nineties and came to New Hampshire to live with me, I found it among her papers and realized that my career began on a Tuesday. Although practice doesn't always make perfect, practice certainly helps.

4

W
HAT I LEARNED
from the woods, from dogs and cats, and from visits with Gran to the museum was enthralling. It set me on a lifelong journey. But it was something like reading the first page of a book without reading the rest, or even knowing that the rest existed. From the farm I knew about farm animals, and I was often taken to the zoo as well as to the museum, so I knew what wild animals looked like. I'd also seen how dogs and cats managed their lives, and had glimpses of how wild animals managed. But our human world was overwhelming. People had all the power and made all the decisions. With their indifference to anything nonhuman, the world was at their mercy. So as I saw it, there were two spheres of existence—the one I lived in, which was the sphere of people, and the one I barely knew, which was the sphere of everything else, from amoebas to blue whales, from duckweed to giant sequoias, from the floor of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Everest. Every living thing in that second sphere belonged to what I've come to call the Old Way, keeping the old rules that evolution set out for each species, the rules that helped us stay alive and move our genes into the future. The Old Way put us here, although we no longer respect that. But in the summer of 1951, when I was eighteen, I was extremely fortunate to learn something about the Old Way and that second sphere, the sphere of everything else. It isn't often that a person can point to a single decision and say, “This one made all the difference,” but I know I would not be who I am had my dad not made this decision. He decided that we would go to Africa. I was a college freshman at the time. If metaphor can describe my learning experiences, college was a slowly dripping faucet and Africa was the thundering Victoria Falls.

 

During World War II, Raytheon made radar and other equipment for the navy, so the importance of Dad's work cannot be overstated. During the war years we saw very little of him, and it has often been said that he took his family to Africa because he wanted to reacquaint himself with his children. That notion is touching and often crops up when our family's African experience is mentioned. Even my mother refers to it in her first book,
The !Kung
of Nyae Nyae
.

But it wasn't the whole story—not even close. Dad could have sat on his living room couch and chatted with us if he didn't think he knew us well enough. He didn't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, commandeer years of everybody's life, and take us into one of the world's largest unexplored wild places, hundreds of miles from rescue if anything went wrong. Possibly my brother and I were marginally worth knowing, but nobody is that worth knowing, and who wants to know two teenagers anyway? Isn't it enough that they don't get pregnant or wreck the car? When I was fifteen, my mom told me I was so awful (she said “difficult”) that she wished I were still fourteen. I'd guess there were times when our parents wished they'd never met us.

So no. I'm sure we didn't go merely so that Dad could know us better. We went because he liked wild places. Two thousand acres of New Hampshire forest were not enough for him. He wanted more.

 

At some point in my life, I began to wonder why this was so, and I think it came from his childhood. He was born in 1889 in Medford, Massachusetts, but grew up in Somerville, the only child of parents who were desperately poor. I've wondered if his father was abusive. I've also wondered if alcohol played some role in this. Most people's parents are not erased from living memory, but an abusive alcoholic might be, and that seemed to have happened to Dad's father. I had near-encyclopedic knowledge of my mother's father and her host of other relatives, but I knew nothing about my dad's because he and his mother, Nana, didn't talk about their past. Sometimes I'd question them, but they always changed the subject, and I soon learned not to ask. It was as if Dad's father had never been. When Nana was in her nineties, although she was physically and mentally vital, when a census taker asked her his name, she couldn't remember.

Thus I have no idea where Dad's father was born, or when he died, or what he was like as a person. I only know that his name was George Marshall and he worked as a butcher's assistant in Boston's Faneuil Hall market. Nana washed floors in a nursing home owned by some relatives. Part of the mystery is that two jobs in the family weren't enough. On very rare occasions and without casting blame, Nana or my dad might let it slip that there was never any money, and they sometimes had no food to eat.

 

Dad's reticence about his early years had one important exception—he often spoke of his experiences in a place called “the north woods.” At some point in his early life, he was befriended by a dentist named Doc Parker, who, I believe, was like a father to him. Every year Doc Parker would go to these north woods with Micmac guides and would take my dad with him. For weeks at a time they would hike through the forest and travel in canoes on lakes and rivers. This must have brightened my dad's life enormously. One summer he took all of us there—my mother, my brother, me, and Tom and Kirsti. We hiked in the woods, saw all kinds of wildlife, swam in the lakes despite the leeches, slept in an ancient log cabin overgrown with moss, fished in a stream for brook trout early in the mornings, then fried the fish with bacon and ate them for breakfast. Since several places are called “the north woods,” I'm not sure where our north woods were, but I know what they were like, and thought I was in paradise.

I didn't put this experience together with my dad's abilities because I never questioned them. I never wondered how he came to know so much about the woods, or why he taught us how to say in Micmac, “The moose saw us first,” or why, in Africa, he was such an absolute dead shot with a rifle. He'd see an antelope on the distant horizon, take aim, and fire a single bullet that dropped the antelope in its tracks. He didn't do this for fun, he did it for meat, but most people can't do it at all. To me, he was the wonderful father who could do anything, so I never asked how he came by these abilities. Even so, I'm sure he didn't get them as a poverty-stricken youngster in Somerville, Massachusetts. My guess is that he learned them in the north woods from the Micmac guides and Doc Parker.

 

The north woods were as wild as they were beautiful, but the occasional visit to such a place was not enough for my dad. In the autumn of 1949, he retired from Raytheon and decided to experience wilderness on a much bigger scale. He consulted a map, looking for large, uncharted areas with no rivers or towns or other features noted—enormous unexplored places about which nothing was known. There is no such place on earth today except perhaps parts of the sea bottom. Even the moon has been explored, and also can be examined with a telescope.

Back then, however, there were at least three large unexplored places. One was Antarctica, another was southern Tasmania, and another was most of the western third of southern Africa, except for settled areas along the coast. Our dad chose the one in Africa, approximately 300,000 square miles of wild savannah covering much of what today is Namibia and Botswana. It also reached into southern Angola and the western edge of South Africa.

This was the Kalahari Basin. Around the edges, the maps indicated a few features, mostly small settlements and prehistoric riverbeds, but in the interior were 120,000 square miles where the maps showed nothing. On the map my dad used, there was a line for 20° east longitude and another line for 20° south latitude, and that's all. The first astronauts who set off for the moon had a better idea of what they would find than we did. Today such a place is impossible to imagine. It was known as the end of the earth.

Yet I'm wrong to call it unexplored. Bushmen
¹
lived there, on the shores of seasonal lakes in encampments that archaeologists were later to discover had been occupied continuously for 35,000 years. The archaeologists stopped their work before reaching the lowest parts of the sites, but the sites were deeper, and Bushmen had been there longer. Recent DNA studies show that Bushmen were the first people, from whom the rest of us descended, and recent linguistic studies suggest that all languages may have come from theirs. This puts Bushmen on the “unexplored savannah” at about 150,000 BP, after a glacial period turned the world's water into ice and the forests into grasslands. None of this was known at the time except the age and action of the glaciers, but needless to say, that savannah had been thoroughly explored.

 

In the spring of 1950, my dad and brother made a survey trip. Why anyone would want to penetrate that waterless interior to live in camps, not in a house, was a mystery to many. One of my mother's friends said we would get dirty. My mother said, “The earth itself is not dirty.” One witless anthropology professor published a paper in which he claimed that my dad was looking for a lost city. I'm glad I wasn't one of that professor's students—God knows what else he told them. The very last thing to be found in such a place was a city, and the very last thing my dad would want to find was a city. If he had wanted a city, there was a big one called Boston near his house.

Other people thought he was prospecting for diamonds. Rumor had it that diamonds were scattered all over the ground. There weren't any diamonds, at least none on the surface, but this theory had more credibility than the lost city, so more people believed it. Even so, it too was false. My dad went to the Kalahari in 1950 to learn what he'd need in 1951 if he wanted to travel for months through hundreds of miles of uncharted bushland. When he figured that out, he came home with my brother and prepared an expedition. In 1951, he and my brother went back there and my mother and I went too.

 

I've also been asked why I went. Not a few people have wondered why a teenager would want to leave college and all her friends to go somewhere with her parents. I find the question dumbfounding. I did know a boy whom I later married, but we were just friends at the time, and I was so excited to be going that I didn't realize how much I'd miss him.

I knew I wouldn't miss college. My parents had forced me to major in English, so why would I want to listen to some professor droning on about
Pilgrim's Progress
when I could listen to lions roaring in the African night? The slowly dripping faucet did not compare to the thundering Victoria Falls.

I've written many articles and two books about my time in the Kalahari. One of the books,
The Harmless People
, I wrote soon after my last long-term visit there, and the other,
The Old Way: A Story of the First People
, I wrote about fifty years later to review what I'd seen in the light of some of the scientific knowledge that has been gathered since. But one way or another, the Kalahari is in all the books I've written. To put it differently, I always seem to write the same book. Whether I'm writing about dogs, cats, deer, people, or anything else, the lens through which I see them is the Kalahari. With the exception of some jobs I've had—teaching in various universities, teaching in a maximum security prison, and working as an academic adviser for the Embassy of the State of Kuwait—all of which required at least a college degree if not an MA, I could have skipped college altogether.

 

My dad wanted the time and energy we'd spend in the Kalahari to amount to something, so after his first visit, he discussed his projected return with his anthropologist friends at Harvard's Peabody Museum, next door to the museum that housed the stuffed tiger. Bushmen were known to live in the interior, but little was known about them, and much of what was said about them was not true. They'd kill us, some white South Africans had told my dad. But we'd never see them. They'd hunt us down and shoot us from ambush with poisoned arrows and we'd never know they were there. That was the state of knowledge of the Bushmen at the time—they were mysterious, invisible devils.

Dad was not impressed by these claims. When he met with his friends from the Peabody, he asked if an anthropologist would come with us to study the Bushmen. He offered to pay that person's salary and all expenses. But at the time, the world of anthropology was focused in other directions. Not one anthropologist could be found with any interest in people who seemed to lack complex societies. The Bushmen were wrongly believed to be refugees who, it was said, had been driven into the backcountry by white farmers and Bantu pastoralists. I thought this was true when I wrote
The Harmless People
, and for years the concept clung. One anthropologist was later to say that the Bushmen in the interior were a “devolved” people who had once been farmers with cattle but then lost the cattle and resorted to eating wild foods for lack of anything else. Any further knowledge of such uninteresting people we would have to get for ourselves.

Fortunately, my dad arranged for his expedition to be sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and also by Harvard's Peabody Museum, and by the time we boarded a freighter bound for Walvis Bay on the coast of South West Africa (now Namibia) he had acquired a Dodge Power Wagon, two six-by-six army trucks, and an army jeep, all but the Power Wagon being World War II surplus that I believe he had obtained with the help of the Smithsonian. We also had camping equipment, camera equipment, recording equipment, a thirty-thirty rifle, and books about anthropology.