A Million Years with You by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Read Free Book Online

“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.
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    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