A Million Years with You (6 page)

While crossing the Atlantic, we read the books, or my mom did. My brother hung around with the first mate, who told fascinating stories about his maritime adventures, and my dad visited with the captain—both had served in World War I, the captain on a warship as a naval officer, my dad in France as a second lieutenant in the field artillery—or he spent time in the hold, checking on our equipment.

As for me, I watched the sea, looking for whales and porpoises. One day I saw two huge fins going in the same direction and took them to be those of two big sharks, one following the other. But, oh my God, these were the tail and dorsal fins of a single shark, a supershark, a shark as big as the freighter! I wouldn't have seen that if I had stayed in college.

One night, near the equator, we saw the Southern Cross. The first mate pointed it out. I found it unimpressive compared to the Big Dipper and the North Star. Dad said it was all we'd have at night to know which way was south, so we'd better remember how to find it. And also, he reminded us, from then on the sun would be in the north, and we'd better remember that too, because where we were going, there would be little else to help us find our way if we got separated.

The freighter was bigger than the town of Walvis Bay, or so it seemed. At least it was longer. When viewing the scene from afar, I saw the town's little buildings in a cluster with the bow and stern of the docked freighter sticking out on both sides. The crane that successfully if scarily unloaded our vehicles stood up above the rooftops.

We packed our equipment into the trucks and drove to Windhoek, which, although a small town at the time, was the capital of South West Africa. There we gathered our supplies, including empty fifty-gallon barrels for gasoline and water, and began the task of finding a camp manager, three mechanics, and interpreters who spoke English and !Kung,
²
the language of the Bushmen we hoped to visit. We had to settle for two interpreters, one who spoke !Kung and Afrikaans and another who spoke Afrikaans and English. We knew our conversations would be something like the game called Telephone, wherein a whispered message is passed around a circle, getting mangled as it goes. Better that we should speak !Kung ourselves, an effort that we began immediately.

When we were ready we set off to the north, where Dad had met a German farmer named Fritz Metzger. Fritz spoke some !Kung. He had agreed to join us for a while, and with him he brought two Bushman men who were laborers on his farm. These men, Fritz told us, had heard of a source of water in the interior. We were grateful to have them.

 

The Kalahari is called a desert, but only because the annual rainfall can be as little as three or four inches. The land slopes gently up and down so that from its higher contours one can see literally for miles, and what one sees is a mosaic of open grasslands with long stretches of sand dunes covered with heavy thornbush or groves of different kinds of trees—most of them thorny, most of them acacias—and now and then a seasonal lake that fills with water during the rains but for the rest of the year is a salt flat.

The Kalahari is not a true desert. But at the time we didn't fully understand it, with its open, sweeping landscape, with its sunlight and long grass. We didn't know, for instance, that the antelopes who lived there didn't need to drink water. I was later to learn that they don't sweat or pant to cool themselves, because their body temperatures can rise with the heat of the day, which would kill us but does them no harm. We saw them often, usually resting in bushes or under a tree. Their bodies store heat, but they can't overdo it, so by day they seek the shade.

We didn't know the names of most of the plants, and we didn't wonder why most of them had thorns. I later learned that thorns are little water-savers, as were the thick, shiny leaves on most of the bushes. My task was to drive one of the six-by-six army trucks, and I remember the strength of those bushes, because I'd have to put the truck in its lowest gear to push through them. How old would a bush have to be to become so strong? I later learned that the roots of these bushes were very deep, going down to places where they found residual moisture.

What we were seeing was a timeless ecosystem complete with flora and fauna that had evolved to fit it, an ecosystem that had been in existence for over a million years. We drove right over it. But we had to. We were not like the plants and the antelopes. We had to keep looking for water.

 

We soon found ourselves in some very rough, very wild country. Our vehicles had blade springs, and often enough we'd break them. Worse yet, now and then we'd break an axle. Dad had foreseen this, so we had more springs and axles. But when such problems occurred we'd need to camp for as long as it took to fix them. So travel was slow. A Bushman on foot would have gone faster.

In the dunes the trucks got stuck. We had a winch and would winch them out if we could, but as often as not we'd have to dig them out with shovels, laying brush under the tires for traction, then getting behind the truck and pushing while the driver roared the motor and spun the wheels. In places the thornbush itself was very thick, and I well remember thorns showering through the open window of my truck. It was too hot to shut the window. I just put up with the thorns.

Looking back, I regret the ecological damage, but ecology drew less attention then, and anyway, there were 120,000 square miles minus the width of our track that we didn't damage. I console myself with that thought.

 

I also loved every minute of it. The following is from my journal. (All italicized passages henceforth are from the same, unless otherwise noted.)

 

It was very cold last night. The south wind blew from the Antarctic all night long, sweeping the haze out of the sky, leaving the brilliant, hard, white moon. We moved on shortly after dawn, through this gorgeous dry rolling veldt, by little forests, over outcrops of rock. We went through valleys and burned areas, and over plains so long you could see the trees in the haze miles away, like a distant shore, until we came to a dry pan where we hoped to find people. We found no people's footprints on the edge of the pan. A little way into the veldt, which here is yellow pinkish grass like old bloodstains, we found high spring-bushes with karu vines on them. We then walked all around the pan and found high ant heaps all grown over in a tangle with bushes. We climbed the ant heaps and looked around. And we found a tree full of weaverbirds' nests swinging in the wind but all empty, and we found a shoulder blade, all white, bleached, and dry, of some large antelope. We even saw a little round mouse nest, also empty, hanging from the branch of a thornbush. We walked farther but found no signs of people, so we got back in the vehicles and drove for the rest of the day down a series of vast, long, narrow plains. There we saw the smoke of a veldt fire on the horizon which might have been lit by people, so we left the plain and drove toward it, through heavy, low thornbush, until we reached the fire. We found a way through the wall of flames and found our way to the source, where we looked for a sign of what set the fire, but the burned area is very large and it is hard to be sure. The fire has run on and on and is now far away against the evening sun like the smoke from a train traveling far away. It is very quiet and lonely here. We called for people but there is no answer. We have searched through about 100 square miles of veldt and tomorrow we will search some more.

We slept all night under the frosty moon. We got up from time to time to feed the fire, and when it got light we cooked the remainder of last night's meat. When we woke we could see our breath, but when the sun came, it suddenly got warmer. We are on a rise of ground and you can literally see for miles. A range of mountains, which are about 13 in number, are far away on one side, and on the other, towards the south, the land falls away and away and away, down and down, much farther than anything I have ever seen before, until all the trees are obscured, on and on, until the horizon looks like the ocean seen from miles away, just a blue line a little darker and hazier than the sky.

 

When we'd camp in the evenings we'd take care of the vehicles, brushing grass seeds out of the radiator screens, topping off the radiators with our precious water, filling the fuel tanks with our precious gasoline, and checking the springs and axles. We'd also pull up grass to make a large, snake-free clearing and on it we'd build our fires.

Then it would be dark, and the world of the night would open. The night sky looked as it did when
Homo erectus
saw it. There were millions of stars, many more than I've ever seen since. Under the trees the darkness was complete until, far away, the moon would lift from the horizon, erase the stars, and fill the world with its pale light. We'd listen for sounds such as a rock striking something as someone cracks a nut for the nutmeat or a bone for the marrow—a sound which in that silent world travels for miles—but we heard no sounds made by people. Instead, we'd hear guinea fowls calling as they flew, one by one, to their roosts in the trees. We'd also hear the predators calling—basically the only animals who vocalize at night. From the enormous, darkened veldt we'd hear a faraway jackal calling, or we'd hear far-apart lions roaring to tell each other where they were, or we'd hear spotted hyenas making the
hahahaha
calls that were known as laughter but really are signals of agitation, usually because the hyenas are upset with each other. I didn't know that at the time, though. I just listened to their calls with excitement and wonder.

 

After many days of travel, we heard only insects and the wind in the long grass. Unlike the Kalahari antelopes, the predators had to drink. The silence meant that we were far from water.

We hoped to find a place that the two Bushman men called /Gam. It wasn't on a map and we had no idea how far we would have to travel to find it. But it was the only possible source of water that we'd heard of. If this was so, and since it was the dry season, we hoped to find not only water but also Bushmen.

After we had traveled about two hundred miles—which is a very long way through heavy bushland—the Bushmen with us thought that /Gam was near. They probably would have found it more easily had they been on foot, because sensing the landscape from inside a truck can be confusing.

By then we had used almost half of our water. My dad's plan was to travel until we used half of our supply, at which point we would follow our tracks back to the nearest settlements, refill our fifty-gallon drums, and try again. The time was coming when we might need to do this. But one day the guides saw smoke and realized from its appearance that it wasn't a wildfire but a campfire. We went in that direction and found /Gam.

We had hoped to find a Bushman encampment. But as we came near we saw several cattle, then several small, round Tswana-style dwellings made of poles with grass thatches. Two Tswana
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men wearing shorts, shirts, and broad-brimmed hats came to meet us. We were to learn that they were the relatives of a cattle-rich man who lived about a hundred miles away in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. Tswana people divided their large herds into smaller herds and distributed them among different relatives to take to better pasture. This was why these cattle were at /Gam. They had come there about eighteen months earlier, or so we were told, during the rainy season.

But how did their owner know of /Gam? He had learned about it from Bushmen. That certainly told us something. We had learned about /Gam from Bushmen two hundred miles to the west. The rich man had learned about /Gam from Bushmen a hundred miles to the east. It would seem that the Bushman community, sparse though it was, reached right across the interior.

 

One of the men who came to meet us was clearly in charge, so we asked his permission to camp nearby and take some water. He graciously welcomed us and granted us permission. We set up our camp and filled three of our fifty-gallon drums. That was a hundred and fifty gallons of water, but the water level in the water hole hardly went down. Where, in that dry country, did it come from, with only a few inches of rain a year? I wish I could answer that question, but all I know is that it wasn't fossil water from one of the prehistoric lakes that are found at great depths in places like the Kalahari, because the water hole itself was dug by hand and wasn't deep enough for that. Perhaps the water hole was in some kind of basin that collected water from the rock ledges above it. We were later to take three hundred gallons and more at a time without worrying anyone, because overnight the water in the hole would return to its normal level.

We were also to learn that the water at /Gam was the most plentiful of all the Bushmen's sources. So /Gam was unique. But /Gam no longer belonged to Bushmen. Thus the Bushmen at /Gam were something like the two Bushmen who came with Fritz Metzger. Their people had lost their land to Fritz's father. They didn't “use” it, according to the occupying farmers, and they didn't have a deed. Nor could they resist the farmers. Their groups were too small. They became farm laborers.

The same thing was starting at /Gam. The Bushmen performed some services for the Tswanas, such as collecting firewood and herding some of the livestock. They also hunted and gathered to feed themselves, and were free to leave /Gam if they didn't like it, because all of them had relatives at other water sources, so they lived in the Old Way, to be sure. But they were tasting their future.

 

As we set up our camp, the headman's young wife came to see us, carrying a baby. Our camp manager, Philip Hameva, told me that she was Herero, not Tswana, and that her name was Kavasitjue, which means “submission to the will of God.” Kavasitjue wore a headscarf and a long dress, and, as I was thrilled to learn, she spoke a little Afrikaans.

I did too. Soon we were chatting as best we could, each of us glad to meet a female age-mate whom she could at least try to talk with. I'd been a bit lonely, as by then I was missing my boyfriend. Kavasitjue was lonely too, as she was a six-day walk from her family. We both saw an opportunity for friendship. But where to start?