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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.
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    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.
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    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.
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    Dad’s reticence about his early years had one important exception—he often spoke of his experiences in a place called