Monadnock, NH Profile: Out of Africa, into Peterborough

By Casey Farrar
Sentinel Staff
Published: Saturday, September 19, 2009

Decades ago, sitting with her mother, father and younger brother in a Jeep surrounded by a vast expanse of African desert, 19-year-old Elizabeth M. Thomas could not have been more out of place.

It was 1950 and Thomas, now 78 years old and a best-selling author who lives in Peterborough, had taken a year off from college to move with her family to the Kalahari Desert.

Thomas’ father, Laurence K. Marshall, founder and president of Raytheon Corp., made the decision to pack up the family and move after his retirement from the company, which manufactures defense systems and formerly was involved in aircraft.

“My dad wanted to go someplace where there was nothing on the map, and there were three places,” Thomas said. “One was Namibia, one was the Antarctic and one was Tasmania, so he chose Namibia.”

Their new home would be a 120,000-square-mile stretch of grasslands and sand dunes that reached into Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.

There, the family would get to know each other better and spend their time studying the Bushmen, native hunter-gathers who lived a life so isolated from the outside world that most had never seen a white person, let alone met a Westerner.

Until that point, Thomas had divided her time between Cambridge, Mass., and her family’s more-than-2,000-acre property in the Monadnock Region that would one day become the Wapack National Wildlife Refuge.

But she was up for the challenge.

“I thought it was wonderful and I was thrilled to have that opportunity,” she said. “It’s hard nowadays to imagine.

“You were completely on your own in a place that no people who had kept records had ever been.”

With the help of interpreters, the Marshalls ventured into the interior of the desert and joined up with a group of Bushmen that called themselves the Ju/wasi.

The experience had a profound effect on Thomas.

“I’ve seen everything since through that lens,” she said. “It made me very much more aware of what is going on in the world around us and what it takes to live that way.”

After a year in Africa, Thomas returned to the U.S. to finish her studies at Radcliffe College, a former women’s liberal arts school attached to Harvard University.

She returned to the Kalahari during the summers until she married and had a son and daughter.

Her parents continued to live in Africa for many years and her brother, John Marshall, lived there for most of the rest of his life, working on a six-hour documentary about the Bushmen called “The Kalahari Family.” He died in 2004.

Her mother, Lorna J. Marshall, a former college English instructor and homemaker, would reinvent herself as an anthropologist, documenting the Bushmen’s culture and behavior.

Thomas also wrote about the family’s experiences in the Kalahari in her first book, “The Harmless People,” published in 1958.

She also worked for publications including The New Yorker, National Geographic, The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books.

In 1960, she was asked by an editor at The New Yorker to go to Uganda to report on a story. The experience became the inspiration for another book, “Warrior Herdsmen,” about the pastoral people living there.

It was also where she met Idi Amin, who was then a military officer. He would go on to become commander of the Ugandan military and take control of the country in a military coup in 1971. He held the presidency until 1979, when he was ousted for civil rights abuses.

Thomas, who had brought her young children along on her research trip, was camped about 50 miles from the nearest town when Amin approached the camp, told her he’d killed a man and said he wanted her to take the body into town in her Land Rover.

“So what do you do?” she said. “Do you leave your kids behind with Idi Amin or do you take your kids in the car with the corpse?

“And I told him that I’d love to do it, but I couldn’t because the road was so muddy my vehicle wouldn’t make it. And he was angry, but he didn’t kill me.”

Her work also took her to Nigeria during a two-and-a-half-year civil war in the late 1960s. What she saw horrified her and she said she has not been able to write about the experience.

“Someday I will,” she said. “I’m going to write an autobiography someday and I’ll write about it. I can write about things I can’t talk about.”

Later, Thomas’ work shifted to writing about the animals that surrounded her in her everyday life in her native Peterborough.

She’s written books about dogs, cats and deer, which are featured in her latest book, “The Hidden Life of Deer.”

She began studying deer in the winter of 2007, when about 25 deer began coming to a meadow on her 350-acre property to eat corn she’d put out for turkeys.

She could watch the deer from the large window in her office that overlooks a vast meadow, and she typed notes as she observed their behaviors and interactions.

Over time, she learned the groups the deer traveled with and began to be able to identify many deer as individuals.

“Then you could see who they were to each other, what they were doing with each other, what they did with other groups,” she said. “It gave a very good picture of deer.”

The shift to writing about animal behavior sprang naturally out of the deep connection she made to nature in Africa and the way she observed the culture of the people she was living with, Thomas said.

“I write the same book over and over,” she said, laughing.

Her interest in nature and community has also led her into a role as a town official.

More than 10 years ago, she decided to run for the board of selectmen when some large chain stores made proposals to come to town.

“I thought, would this be destructive to local businesses and also do we want great big malls in Peterborough?” she said. “And I thought we might not.”

She is also a liaison to the Peterborough Conservation Commission and serves on the town’s Open Space Committee.

Selectman Chairman Barbara A. Miller said working with Thomas has taught her “that conservation and growth can co-exist.

“There’s room for this town to grow and still keep our open spaces.”

Last December, Thomas and her husband, Stephen Thomas, signed a conservation easement for the 375 acres of land they owned in Peterborough and 53 acres in Greenfield.

The land abuts the 1,672-acre section of property that Thomas’ parents donated to the state in 1972, which was used to create the state’s first national wildlife refuge, Wapack National Wildlife Refuge.

Looking to the future, Thomas says she plans to continue writing and spending time with her family.

And she may even have the subject for her next book.

“Actually, there’s a woodchuck that lives around here,” she said, jumping up from her desk to peer out her office window into the meadow and forest beyond.

Casey Farrar can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1435, or cfarrar@keenesentinel.com.

Article at: http://sentinelsource.com/articles/2009/09/19/community/monadnock_profile/free/id_371421.txt