A Million Years with You by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

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