A Million Years with You

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: Gaia

The Woods

Dogs

Cats

Kalahari

The Ju/wasi

Steve

Marriage

Uganda

Nigeria

Dark

Warrior

The Ice Maiden

Love and Work

Research

Writing

A Million Years with You

80

Notes

Acknowledgments

Sample Chapter from THE HIDDEN LIFE OF DOGS

Buy the Book

Read More from Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

About the Author

Footnotes

Copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

 

All rights reserved

 

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

 

www.hmhbooks.com

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-547-76395-8

 

eISBN 978-0-547-76404-7
v1.0613

 

 

 

 

In loving memory of Pearl

I
LIKE TO LOOK
at the stars, so far away, so steady on their paths through the sky. They've been credited to Gaia, the goddess whose name means Earth and who is best known for managing our planet, orbiting a little star among 4 billion others in our galaxy. Even so, however small, our planet is complex and took 4.5 billion years to reach the state in which we know it, thanks to measures which were also credited to Gaia. Imagine it: The crashing meteors! The chemical reactions! The climate changes! The ever-branching climb of evolution that turned bacteria into blue whales and giant sequoias, not to mention the millions of other life forms that we know today! If she could do all that, could she not have made the stars and written the laws of physics? According to the ancient Greeks she could. She made the earth, then made the universe to be its equal.

While wandering down the road of life, it helps to look for something more meaningful than oneself. Some find it in religion. Some find it in relationships. I find it by keeping my eyes open. I see the stars when I look up and the soil when I look down, where the microorganisms live that keep everything going. And as far as I'm concerned, this can be personified by Gaia.

 

One day my wonderful cousin, Tom Bryant, came to visit me and my husband, Steve, at our home in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Tom, an astronomer, was marvelously familiar with everything now known about the universe, and wishing to show us some of it, he brought a very large telescope. That night, after the moon set, a group of us went to the edge of a field where, in the northeastern sky, Tom pointed out what seemed to be a tiny, fuzzy star, just one among dozens of others, and not all of us were sure just which star we should be looking at. Tom then showed us the star through his telescope. This made it larger, about the size of a grass seed. It seemed to be a spiral and looked something like a snail seen from the rear.

It was part of Andromeda, Tom told us, a constellation of about four thousand stars, nine of which are known to have planets. But the tiny, snail-like thing we were looking at was not an individual star at all, and it wasn't a planet. It was a cluster of a trillion stars, collectively known as the Andromeda Galaxy, three times bigger than our Milky Way and closer to us than any other spiral galaxy. Its light had traveled for 2.5 million years before it reached us. When the light we saw that night left its galaxy, our
Homo habilis
ancestors were figuring out how to make stone tools. By the time that same light reached us, we were modern
Homo sapiens
with telescopes. Wow!

 

With my eyes on Andromeda that night, I remembered an experience I'd had during my freshman year in college, where I'd hoped to major in biology. My dad had given me a binocular microscope, through which I watched the little life forms in drops of water taken from a swamp. One day, as I was following what I took to be a paramecium moving carefully through the algae like a fox hunting mice in a field, an enormous creature suddenly loomed up and charged right at me, causing me to throw myself backward and tip over my chair. It took me a moment to realize that I was in my dormitory room and the terrifying creature was in the drop of water.

But what was it? I gathered my courage and looked again. It was not a protist, then called a protozoan. Instead, it was an animal—very small but an animal nevertheless. It had eight legs with claws, a face with a tiny snout, a mouth, and two eye spots, and a transparent body in which I could see its food as well as some oval shapes toward its hindquarters which I took to be eggs. Whatever it was, it seemed to be a female.

I consulted a textbook. She was a waterbear, a tardigrade, then believed to be a miniature relative of the mites. I was able to lift her up with the point of a sewing needle, and found, as I turned the needle from side to side, that she was just barely visible to my youthful naked eyes, and not visible at all if she was on the far side of the needle. She was that small. I put her in my jar of water so I could return her to the swamp.

Ever since then, I've been enthralled by waterbears. I later found what superscientist Lynn Margulis wrote about them
¹
and learned what I'd already suspected, that they are among the most amazing creatures on the planet. Their many species live in all kinds of places, from the deep ocean to the Himalayas, from hot springs to the Arctic, because they can survive extreme temperatures. Some live in water that's 304° Fahrenheit, and others live at just three degrees above absolute zero, the point at which all thermal energy is gone. In other words, since few places on earth are that hot or that cold, waterbears can flourish almost anywhere.

In fact, there's almost nothing they can't cope with. If a waterbear is injured or starved, it forms itself into a cyst, a tiny roundish lump, in which it contracts its little body and repairs itself. Most waterbears live in swamps or in damp mosses and all of them eat liquid foods, but if the liquid disappears, they form themselves into “tuns,” which look like tiny wine barrels. These tuns, like dust particles, ride the winds to faraway places which, with any luck, will be better than the places they left. And there's no special hurry to find a good place. In the form of a tun, a waterbear can live for about a hundred years.

And that's not all. Waterbears can survive 570,000 roentgens of radiation, when just 500 roentgens will sizzle one of us. It's hard to imagine how they evolved this astonishing ability or why they need it, as 570,000 roentgens might accompany a nuclear disaster but not much else. Waterbears had this ability before we invented the nuclear disaster. But when we did, they were prepared. They seemed to leave little to chance.

Perhaps for that reason, most waterbears are female. Without males, they lay eggs that hatch as females; thus just one she-waterbear could repopulate the planet if things went wrong. And evidently that's just what they've been doing. Creatures so tiny don't often leave fossils, but a few were found in amber from the Cretaceous era, and a few others from the mid-Cambrian era. Long before our ancestors came out of the trees, waterbears were here.

 

On the day I watched the waterbear, I was listening to a radio on the table with the microscope. The music was quite loud, and I wondered what the waterbear made of the sound. I didn't see that she had ears, so I believed she couldn't hear it, although she might have felt vibrations. But these would tell her nothing about the radio itself, nothing about the broadcasting station or the instruments that played the music or the species that composed it, nothing about electricity or power lines or even the electric cord from the radio to the plug in the wall. It's hard to imagine all the things about a radio that my waterbear was not equipped to understand.

Then it came to me that as the waterbear was to the radio, so are we to the universe. For all the characteristics by which we place ourselves above the other life forms of this planet—our language, tool use, and hind-leg walking (now more or less reduced to hind-leg walking, as language and tool use have been found in other species)—we're just another primate, and as such we have our limits. We think we're smart, way ahead of waterbears, but 15 billion years ago there was no universe, and whatever started it might very well be something that our simian brains are not equipped to understand.

We're part of it, though. If the first law of thermodynamics has anything to it, we're certainly part of it, made of atoms formed by forces that followed the Big Bang and have been here ever since. I like to think that some of my atoms once inhabited dinosaurs or even blue-green algae. We may never know more, but I like to think about it.

1

M
Y PARENTS TAUGHT ME
to enjoy observation. They loved the sky and also the life of our planet. My dad, Laurence Marshall, would go out on the porch to see what the sky was doing, and if something exciting was going on he'd demand that the rest of us to come to see it too. He was clearly the head of our family and also our leader, and we always did what he said. So all of us—me, my brother, John, who was a year younger, our mom, her mother, and Dad's mother (both of whom lived with us)—would drop what we were doing and obediently troop out to the porch. Sometimes we saw cumulous clouds, sometimes falling stars, sometimes a spectacular sunset, and sometimes northern lights. Dad was a civil engineer with an awesome knowledge of math and physics, and northern lights enthralled him. They came from the sun, he said.

My mom, Lorna Marshall, was a caregiver to all life forms and a known animal lover to the point that she sometimes found cats in boxes on her doorstep, evidently delivered by someone who thought she'd take them in. She took them in. She never killed mice, although her cats did. And she never killed insects, not even flies. Instead, she'd put a glass over them, slide a piece of paper under the glass, and release them outside. To her, animals were on earth to be cared for. Her cats were so healthy that on one occasion a veterinarian did not believe her when she told him her cat was sixteen. The cat was in such good shape that he could only be eight or nine, said the veterinarian. But the vet was mistaken. The cat had been left on her doorstep as an adolescent, and she'd had him for sixteen years, so he was closer to seventeen. Just about everyone who knew my mother wanted to be reincarnated as her cat.

Everyone flourished who was in my mother's care. Her oldest houseplant was over thirty, and at the time of this writing, a climbing rose she planted is at least seventy-six and was an adult when she got it. My dad lived to ninety-one, his mother lived to a hundred and five, my mother herself lived to a hundred and four, and every dog or cat who came into her life lived well beyond the life expectancy of its species. Wild animals near her also flourished. She put seeds for birds and bread and peanuts for squirrels on the shed roof outside her kitchen window. The squirrels knew her. If she was late with the food, we'd notice a squirrel or two looking in the window to see if she remembered them. Of course she did.

Religion might have had something to do with this, because her mother, our gran, was a Christian Scientist. Our mom was not, due to a catastrophic event when she was six or seven and listening to Gran and some of Gran's friends discussing the power of faith. Fascinated, my mom asked if she could fly if she had faith. They said she could fly if she had enough faith. My mom was thrilled. Brimming with faith and prepared for a great experience, she climbed out a window to the roof of their house and jumped off. What happened next erased her religious inclinations permanently, but perhaps an aura still clung, because according to Gran, everything made by God was good. This, of course, included the flies whom my mother set free and the squirrels who looked in our window.

Gran's sense of global goodness was more extreme and included the famous hurricane of 1938, which she, age sixty-something, and I, age seven, went outside to experience. We were alone in the house at the time so no one was there to stop us. The wind lifted me off the ground and carried me about fifteen feet down a hill, so I got to fly even if my mother didn't. I found it thrilling, and agreed with my gran that a hurricane was good.

But I couldn't agree about gypsy moth caterpillars. The subject of their value arose during one of their population explosions, when these caterpillars seemed to coat the landscape. We could hear their dung pattering down outside our house and see the wide defoliation caused by their chewing.