by Lynne Cox
Something better came along. When Bill found out that I was not making progress, he contacted Craig Pfiffer, the vice president of his company, and Craig suggested that we do a test swim off Long Island, where there weren’t restrictions and the water would be cleaner. We got ahold of a prototype Zodiac 1800 boat for the test swim.
It all worked as planned. Our next step was to board the first historic flight on Greenland Airlines directly from Baltimore, Maryland, to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland.
CHAPTER 9
Greenland East and West
We arrived at Kangerlussuaq Airport on time for our flight to Ilulissat, but we were on hold because of rain and fog. Neither Bob, Bill, Gretchen, nor I could understand the announcements in Greenlandic or Danish, or even English over the PA system. We were afraid that we would miss the only flight that day to Ilulissat, which would throw off our plans. We had a meeting set up in Ilulissat with two local people who were going to help us decide the course of the swim.
Gretchen was busy checking with the agent at the airline counter. Bill and Bob were watching the tarmac for planes, and I was trying to figure out who else we could talk with who might know about our flight status.
I noticed a woman and a man, who had flight bags beside them with U.S. Air Force tags attached to the bags. They were sitting across from each other talking quietly. They looked relaxed, as if they were longtime friends. The woman was tall, athletic-looking, with a kind face softly framed with short wavy golden brown hair. She was speaking, leaning slightly forward in her chair, and the man was leaning back with his arms spread out along the top of the adjacent seat rests. He was totally open to the conversation, but they both looked a little tired, like two athletes after a long workout. They looked like they were recovering.
An announcement came over the PA system, words that were complete gibberish to me, but the woman and man listened momentarily and seemed to understand, and the man made a comment and they stayed in their chairs. They seemed very familiar with the airport and how everything operated. They could multiply our force—help us—but I wasn’t sure about interrupting them.
To gather confidence, I remembered the time after my swim across Lake Titicaca. My support crew and I were on an airplane that lost an engine over Barranquilla, Colombia. The pilot was forced to make an emergency landing. The United States didn’t have rights to land in Colombia, and diplomatic relations between the United States and Colombia were bad at that time.
Pete Kelly, one of our team members, who spoke fluent Spanish and had studied Latin American affairs for years, told me that we were landing in an unsafe place where there were three guerrilla groups fighting government troops in the jungles surrounding the airport.
The plane we were sitting in was a target. Pete made me realize that we needed to have a plan to get out of there. My first thought was that I hoped Bob Gelbard, a good friend who had been the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia and had helped us with the Lake Titicaca swim, would start to wonder why he hadn’t heard from us about the swim.
For six hot, steamy hours we waited in the plane for engine parts to be delivered. Pete continued listening to the news updates. When he spoke, he tried to sound calm, but he was worried. He noted that there were no inbound flights, possibly because the fighting was nearby. In addition, the place we had landed was a major drug trafficking region.
When the airline pilot announced that the Colombian government had given us permission to leave the airplane and wait in the terminal, I didn’t feel any more at ease, but as we disembarked, I noticed six men dressed in U.S. Army uniforms. They each looked agitated.
I remembered that Barry Binder, another member of our crew, had been in the U.S. Army. When we moved to a corner of the terminal, I told Barry what Pete had told me and asked him if he thought it would be a good idea for him and Pete to introduce themselves to the army men and, if they weren’t aware of what was happening, have Pete tell them what he knew.
None of the army men were fluent in Spanish; they knew something was happening but didn’t know exactly what. One of them, a captain, asked one of the team to use his radio and communicate with someone at a base somewhere. Pete let the captain know that he would keep them updated and that if they felt a need to leave, we would follow them. They asked if we knew of other Americans on the flight. We hadn’t met any others, but our friend Deborah Ford was from Australia and was part of our team, and they said she’d be welcome to join them, too.
For the next three hours we waited in the terminal. The sun had set, and the jungle came alive with wild parrot calls and screeches and gunfire. Finally another American airplane arrived, and we charged into the plane, buckled up, and flew out of Colombia.
Waiting at the airport in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, wasn’t like being in Barranquilla, Colombia. It wasn’t a critical situation, but maybe the U.S. Air Force would give us guidance. We were on such a tight schedule, with only five days to complete the swim. If we were delayed in Kangerlussuaq, our options for Ilulissat would be dramatically diminished.
The man rubbed his hand across his smooth face. Was he tired? Waking up? Bored? Would he want to talk, or would I be intruding? The woman stopped talking and smiled, and she seemed open. He inquisitively looked at me.
Start with the obvious and build, and see how far you can get: “Are you in the U.S. Air Force?” I asked.
They said yes.
“Are you busy?” I asked.
They shook their heads. I explained that I was with my friends waiting for the flight to Ilulissat and we couldn’t understand anything over the PA system. We were afraid we’d miss our flight. The woman smiled and said that sometimes they had a hard time understanding the announcements too.
She said, “Don’t worry, you’re not going to miss your flight. The visibility is poor, and the wind’s increasing.” She looked across the tarmac at the wind sock. “And there are cross winds.
“It will be an hour or more before any flights can land or take off,” she said.
For most people, talking about the weather was a way to socially engage, but in this case, it was what mattered most to me. I could tell she was aware that I was intensely interested. This wasn’t the unusual response unless you worked in her world. She offered me a seat and introduced herself; her name was Samantha East and the man sitting across from her was Brian Gomula. He nodded and smiled. He was tall, trim, and tanned.
“What is the U.S. Air Force doing in Greenland? Are you based here?” I asked.
Samantha explained, “We’re in the New York Air National Guard’s One Hundred Ninth Airlift Wing, and we’re part of the U.S. Air Force. We’re based out of Stratton Air National Guard Base at Schenectady County Airport near Scotia, New York. Part of our mission is Operation Deep Freeze.”
“Didn’t that start with Admiral Richard Byrd, who competed with Lindbergh to become the first man to fly across the Atlantic? Wasn’t Byrd the first man to fly to the South Pole and back? Didn’t he set up some kind of stations in Antarctica?” I asked.
“Yes. McMurdo and the South Pole.” She smiled and seemed happily surprised.
“I’ve been to Antarctica and I love history, reading about people who achieve things that most people would think impossible. If you’re connected to a mission in Antarctica, why are you flying in Greenland?”
Samantha explained that the U.S. Air Force supported the scientists doing research in Greenland and in Antarctica. It was a joint mission between the air force and the National Science Foundation. She said that the air force flew LC-130s Hercules. They were nicknamed “Hercs” and “Skiers,” because they were equipped with skis to land on snow.
The only cargo planes I knew of were C-17 Globemasters, built in Long Beach, California. They were massive aircraft, so large that I wondered how they got airborne. Often on the way to the beach, I pulled over to the side of Seal Beach Boulevard to watch them on their final approach for landing at the Los Alamitos military base.
The LC-130s were about one-
third the size of a C-17, which enabled them to fly into more remote areas where the C-17s couldn’t land. Samantha said that they trained in Greenland, landing on and taking off from the Greenland ice cap, to prepare them for the flights in Antarctica.
She explained that the C-17s were used in Antarctica to transport heavy cargo and people, but they just flew from New Zealand to McMurdo Station and back. McMurdo is the main base for the United States in Antarctica. The C-17 only has wheels so it can’t land in the snow like the LC-130s. The C-17 also makes airdrops to far-reaching sites on the continent.
“Samantha, are you a pilot?” I asked.
“I’m the navigator. For the LC-130s we use a navigator. We have a flight crew that works together to fly the aircraft.”
I thought for a moment, and said, “So as a navigator you give directions to the pilot and he listens to you?” This seemed unusual. Men aren’t always good at accepting directions from a woman.
They smiled. They were amused by my naïve question.
“The air force is a professional organization and we’re trained to perform our jobs and to work together,” Samantha said.
“Brian, are you a pilot?”
“I’m a navigator, too,” he said, and he explained that one navigator flew on the LC-130.
“But why do you need a navigator on an airplane? Aren’t there navigation systems that you can use to guide the airplane?”
“Many of the navigational instruments don’t work well or at all in the polar regions, and so we have to use different methods for navigation,” Brian explained.
I wondered about the magnetic showers, the astronomical events Lindbergh wrote about in The Spirit of St. Louis, his story about trying to be the first man to fly from New York to Paris. He was flying somewhere off the coast of Greenland, and his magnetic compass stopped working. He was flying though the clouds and couldn’t see anything. He wondered if something called magnetic showers were interfering with his compass. “Do your instruments not function well because of magnetic showers?” I asked.
Samantha nodded. “And also because of our close proximity to the North Magnetic Pole or South Magnetic Pole.”
To read about this in Lindbergh’s biography, and then to realize how much these forces of nature affect life and navigation, even today, was amazing to me.
I asked Samantha what it was like to be in an environment where she worked mostly with men.
She loved doing her job, and she said the men she worked with were completely professional.
“Are they good guys?” I asked.
“Yes, I married one of them,” she said with a very big smile.
“Is he a navigator, too?”
“No, he’s a pilot.” She paused.
I laughed—a navigator marrying a pilot, what a great match. And she took his name—East. What a perfect last name for a navigator.
“We met in the chow hall at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.”
“How romantic. Who would have ever thought!”
“Guess life takes you where you’re meant to go,” Samantha said.
Samantha East, self-portrait, 2007–8 season, Beardmore Camp, Antarctica. Altitude about six thousand feet, about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The skiway is about two miles long, located at 84 degrees south latitude, or about 415 miles from the South Pole.
Samantha explained that from what she’d experienced the weather in Greenland in the springtime was very changeable, but the changes weren’t as rapid or random as in Antarctica. Low-pressure systems swept across the Atlantic and were often accompanied by strong winds and snowstorms. The weather usually moved in and out pretty quickly, at least by the third day.
This was all good news. If the weather was bad, it could change quickly enough for me to get through the weather window and make a swim. Samantha realized that there was a real purpose for my questions.
I’d been thinking about how to tell her if she asked. If I started off by saying I was going there to swim, it would have given her room to have doubts about me, and so I told her my background, that I’d been doing long-distance swims for years. I’d swum across the English Channel and the Bering Straits, and I’d completed a 1.22-mile swim in Antarctica in a swimsuit, cap, and goggles. My interest was to figure out how to survive better in the cold, to find better ways of rewarming after cold exposure, research I’d been involved with for years with the hypothermia expert at the University of London.
The reason I choose Ilulissat, I explained, was that I was following in the wake of Roald Amundsen off Greenland and through the Northwest Passage. I wanted to write about him and compare his journey with mine, which would be about one hundred years later. But there was more to it. I wanted to see how far I could go, try something that caused me to reach further and explore the inner and outer worlds of what a human being could achieve. So I wanted to try to do a swim in Ilulissat, in waters that could be colder than in Antarctica.
Also I wanted to learn more about climate change, to see for myself and learn what was happening from people I met along this journey. What I’d read and heard was that the Arctic ice cap was melting, and the Northwest Passage, which had been such a challenge to navigate, was opening up. How would this affect the world and everything that inhabited it?
Samantha was surprised, and now she understood why I was so interested in the weather. She also mentioned that she was a triathlete and that she had always loved to swim. Of all the people to speak with in the U.S. Air Force, I discovered the swimmer. What were the chances?
Samantha explained that she and Brian were heading to Ilulissat, too, as representatives of the air force at meetings, but they would be flying on a different aircraft than me.
The low clouds were beginning to lift. We could see the base of the glacier. It was about twenty miles from where we were sitting. Her friends were training on that glacier, and I wondered if it could be the same glacier I saw on my first flight over Greenland. And I wondered what it would be like to land on a glacier. I so wished I could go there. I wished I could see how they flew there, how they landed, and what it was like to be on the surface of a glacier. I wondered what kind of research the scientists were doing.
There was an announcement over the PA system. Samantha said, “Your plane will be landing in twenty minutes.”
I told Samantha I hoped we would meet again one day, and she agreed and wished me luck.
CHAPTER 10
Ilulissat
After all of that, we nearly missed our flight. Three planes landed within a few minutes of one another, and we couldn’t tell which one was ours. We made the wrong choice, went to the wrong gate, and, once we realized our mistake, had to sprint across the runway with our luggage to reach the correct airplane in time. There were people on standby, and if we had been a few minutes later, we would have been bumped off the flight.
Out of breath, with sweat rolling down our cheeks, we ran up the stairs on the ramp, ducked through the aircraft door, and quickly found our seats. Gretchen sat beside me, and we watched to make sure Bob and Bill got on. We knew that if we missed that flight, we would have to wait for two more days for another flight if the weather held and longer if not, and there just wasn’t extra time. We only had eight days to coordinate and attempt the swim. We had taken the last four remaining seats.
Within a few moments, the pilot started the engines, and I felt the hum of the airplane through my body. I loved to fly as much as I loved to swim, I loved everything about it, the takeoff, the landing, and everything in between.
As a child, I used to go with my dad to the airport in Manchester, New Hampshire, and we stood near the landing field for hours watching the Cessnas and Pipers come in for a landing and take off. There was something so exciting about watching the airplanes and hearing their engines as they raced down the runway and suddenly lifted off. It was magic. But flight didn’t work for humans; I knew that. I’d experimented a lot. I just couldn’t run fast enough, and even with the boost of a maple tree, when I jumped
from one of the low branches, I just went down, and it was never a good landing. I longed to fly in one of those airplanes, to see what it felt like, to see the world from above, like a robin. And then one day my uncle Edward’s friend Mr. McGraw, who lived in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, asked me if I wanted to fly with him in his Cessna. Mr. McGraw gave my cousins rides, and now he was asking me.
From the moment I climbed into the airplane, I was smiling. I knew what was going to happen from watching the small planes take off, but being in the airplane was nothing like watching it. The engine roared, and the plane shook as we raced down the runway, and suddenly, the airplane lifted off and the ground got farther and farther away. I think I was so excited I forgot to breathe. There was nothing in the world that compared to this. We were flying. We were moving between the heavens and the earth. We were free, going higher and higher and flying over the treetops. I’d climbed to the top of trees, but I had never been this high before. Nothing short of a miracle. We were flying!
Mr. McGraw glanced at me with a concerned look on his face. “Are you okay?” he shouted. He was wearing earphones, and he pulled one of the ears aside.
I felt my body shift backward into the seat as we leveled off. We looked down on the backs of black-and-white cows. They were so small they looked like farm toys. We flew over Mr. McGraw’s red barn and saw the roof and the top of the silo. There were bales of hay in the back of the barn. They looked like small squares of gold.
It was magic.
I never wanted this to be over. There was too much to see. I wondered what it would be like to fly beyond the horizon. What would we find there? Was there an end to the horizon? Or did it just keep going? I knew I wanted to go there someday—beyond the horizon.
