by Lynne Cox
My brother, who had been competing at the national level in long-distance events in the swimming pool, swam across the Catalina Channel from the island to the mainland. He established a new overall record of eight hours and fifty minutes.
My younger sisters, Laura and Ruth, were still swimming for the team, but they were starting to become interested in playing water polo. My brother had started playing in high school, and I had played some on a club team in the evenings after my ocean-swimming workouts, with girls who would become members of the U.S. National Team. I loved the game, but I was only adequate at it. From the moment Laura and Ruth picked up the yellow ball, they were naturals. And there was no doubt that someday they would be great water polo players.
I was still trying to figure out what to do next when my folks suggested that I take a complete break and visit old friends in New Hampshire. It was a great idea, and I enjoyed being back, being free of thoughts of swimming, world records, and competitions. It was wonderful until a former neighbor handed me the morning paper with tears in her eyes. She was too choked up to talk and just pointed to the story. Davis Hart from Springfield, Massachusetts, had broken my time across the English Channel by thirteen minutes. It took a few minutes to absorb the news. There had been some controversy surrounding the time. One official said Hart had finished three minutes slower than my time; later, reports came in that that time had been a mistake; he in fact had swum thirteen minutes faster than me. This made me think about returning to swim the Channel again, but I knew I needed a break. Besides, if I decided to do it again, I’d have to ask for support from my mother and father, and for them to underwrite the cost of the trip.
Entering high school at Los Alamitos helped me return to an almost normal teenage life. Studies were just as important to me as swimming.
It was water polo season when I entered high school, but there was no such thing as a girls’ water polo team. The boys’ swimming and water polo coaches, George Devina and Dennis Ploessel, knew about my background. My brother swam and played water polo on their teams during the school year. The coaches knew that I had played water polo on a girls’ club team that was a feeder program for the U.S. Women’s National Team. Mr. Devina and Mr. Ploessel recruited me for the boys’ high school team. I was excited about joining the team. I loved water polo; it was a lot of fun, and hard work, and it allowed me to be on a team where I played as a team member.
Coach Devina suggested that I try out for the boys’ team. Not everyone thought this was a good idea, especially some of the parents of the boys on the team. Coach Devina decided to hold a team vote. The outcome was close, sixty to forty. Fortunately, the boys voted me on. Coach Devina was delighted. He said it was a major triumph for me to become the first girl on a boys’ high school water polo team in the state of California, perhaps in the nation.
Playing on the boys’ team was fantastic. It was fun working out on a tight-knit team, and, like the boys, I had to prove myself every day at workout. My first year of high school, sophomore year, I was a starter, and I lettered that season. But it wasn’t always easy being on the boys’ team. There were a couple of guys who didn’t like having me on the team, and it was certainly surprising to the other high school teams to suddenly play against a girl.
One time, swimming down the pool, I heard a boy yell, “I got this boy”—he stopped in mid-sentence—“girl covered?” Someone on my team passed me the ball, and he was in such shock that I scored off him. His father was in the stands and he angrily shouted, “You let that girl score off you?” It seemed strange that sometimes the parents had more of a problem with me being on the team than the boys did. Eventually, I was accepted, and I became close friends with four of the boys. It was difficult, though; at various times, each of them asked me to go out, but I couldn’t because I felt like I would have been showing favorites and it just wouldn’t have worked, being on an all-boy team. A couple of boys really persisted, and I did want to date them, but I told them it would be better to just be friends. Besides, between schoolwork and workouts, I had very little free time for dating, and by nighttime I was exhausted.
The first time I got hit in the face—on purpose or by mistake, I’m not sure—two of the players on my team saw it and swam after the other player. Fortunately, the referee saw what was happening and broke things up before there was a fight. But the referee had been a national player himself and knew that the other players were letting the player on the other team know that he couldn’t get away with anything. There was a clean way to play the sport and a dirty way, and the dirty way wasn’t acceptable. The referee was able to gain control of the situation before anything happened, and I was pleased that the boys cared about me enough to stand up for me. It made me feel I had been accepted, especially when there were many times in high school that I felt very isolated.
Everyone in high school knew me simply as “the swimmer.” This bothered me because I felt there was so much more to me than just being a swimmer. I was a serious student too, and like everyone else, I wanted to be accepted for who I was. That was probably why my handful of close friends weren’t athletes.
By the end of the school year, I’d decided that I wanted to go back to England and try to break the world record. Expectations for my second attempt were much higher than before. Since Coach Gambril had moved on to Harvard, my brother coached me in the ocean. We trained together off the shores of Long Beach and Seal Beach. It was difficult at times having my brother for my coach, but for the most part, I listened to him—not all the time, though, because I didn’t think he knew more than I did. But I understood that this time I would have to train more intensely, and stronger and faster. My commitment was deeper than before. Missing one workout or just going through the motions would make the difference between breaking the world record and failing.
My mother and I traveled again to England, and we went through the same preparations as the first time. Just as before, waiting for the right day was exasperating, and the pressure was so much greater because the expectations were so much higher. Completing the thirty-mile swim was no longer enough; if I finished the crossing without breaking the world record, I would fail.
With the same crew as the year before, I set out to cross the English Channel. We started from Shakespeare Beach, which looked just as it had on my last crossing. But the current was a lot stronger this time and our inverted S became much wider. The year before I had had to maintain my pace and increase my speed to cut across the currents. This time I had to crank everything up a couple of notches. I constantly wondered, Am I going to make it in time? I’m not sure why I wanted to put that kind of pressure on myself or why I felt the need to go back to swim the English Channel. Some people explained it by saying that swimmers get “Channel fever.” It’s as if the Channel lures swimmers back to Dover like a siren. It’s the place, the history, the friendships, the successes, and the heartbreaks. The Channel has a strange pull on swimmers, even if they’ve succeeded before. And some swimmers return to England year after year to pit themselves against the Channel again and again.
For me, I think it was that I needed another goal, something to focus my energy. I knew that one of my reasons for returning was to prove that I had not just been lucky on my first crossing. Some people had dismissed my previous swim by saying that I had had perfect conditions, though that wasn’t true. The currents had been changeable and very tough.
This year, no one could say I had it easy. By the middle of the night the wind had increased to ten knots and the chop on the sea surface to just before whitecaps. The tides were a lot stronger too. When we reached Cape Gris-Nez, the tide was so strong that for every stroke I was taking, the current was pushing me back four or five. For over an hour I fought a losing battle, with time slipping away and the lighthouse receding into the cliffs.
Brickell made many course changes, but nothing seemed to work. Finally he decided to turn south so we could cut across the current and hopefully find ourselves in a second curren
t that would circle back and carry us toward the point. Brickell wasn’t sure it would work, and after we started, he was even less sure; we weren’t making progress. The crew—Mickey, my mother, and Reg Junior—cheered me on. Brickell made three or four more course changes, and finally we started moving forward. But then we hit another current, and it started to pull us out into the mid-Channel again. There was nothing more discouraging than almost touching shore, almost climbing out of the water, only to be dragged back toward mid-Channel.
Again Brickell made more course changes, and I swam with all I had. Finally, we broached the current, swung around, and fought our way in to shore. In total I swam thirty-three miles, three miles farther than the year before, and I broke Davis Hart’s world record with a time of nine hours and thirty-six minutes. It was a great moment, being able to repeat an English Channel success, and I felt a great sense of satisfaction. But after that I decided I had had enough of swimming the English Channel; I wanted to do something else.
8
Invitation to Egypt
Later that year I received, because of my world-record Channel swim, an invitation from the Egyptian government to join a group of long-distance swimmers for a race in the Nile River. When Fahmy Attallah heard about the invitation, he encouraged me to go, and to have David accompany me as my coach. Fahmy told us that in Egypt long-distance swimmers are more revered than NFL quarterbacks. Streets are named for them, and parades are conducted in their honor throughout the city of Cairo. He said we would have a wonderful experience, and he romantically described how beautiful Cairo would be, and how well we would be taken care of. He said that Egyptians were very gracious and generous people; they would welcome us into their homes and would take good care of us. Fahmy gave us the names of his brothers and a cousin who lived in Cairo, in case we needed any help with anything.
A few months later, during spring vacation in 1974, when Dave and I stepped off the United Arab Airlines plane onto the unlit tarmac at Cairo airport, submachine guns were trained on us by Egyptian army troops. The Yom Kippur War between Egypt and Israel, which I had intently studied in my current affairs class, trying to figure out why they’d had to go to war at all, had recently ended, and we were witnessing its aftermath. We’d never expected to see so much devastation in Cairo.
As we fumbled through a black corridor lit only by handheld flashlights into the arrival area, dust clouds rose around us, illuminated by moonlight streaming through the mortar holes in the airport ceiling. The moonbeams spread out, and as people passed us to stand in line for customs, they cast ghostly shadows against the bullet-pocked walls.
On the way in the United Arab Airlines plane had nearly crashed twice, during landings in Zurich and Cairo. Somehow, the first time, the pilot misjudged our distance to the ground, and we bounced down the runway with so much force that the overhead compartments sprang open and the contents flew across the plane; one woman got banged on the head by a silver platter. The second time, as we landed in Cairo, the brakes failed. We overran the runway, stopping moments before we crashed into a metal fence.
Now a customs official who hadn’t taken a shower for days, and was wearing an old, torn, and faded uniform, was studying our passports. He leaned in close to Dave and whispered something that sounded like “baksheesh.”
At first, neither Dave nor I understood what he was saying, and then it occurred to us that he was demanding a bribe and wasn’t about to let us go unless we paid him off. He turned Dave’s bag over and dumped his clothes onto a table. Then he picked up each article of clothing piece by piece, opening the shirts, inspecting the seams, and turning the pants and underwear inside out. When he didn’t find anything of any value, he unzipped my travel bag, pushed my street clothes aside, and began fingering my underwear and leering at me.
“Jeez, I can’t believe this guy,” Dave said loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear us. The army officer who had led us into the terminal came into the room. He said something in Arabic to the customs official, who tried to wave the officer away. But the officer conferred with his men posted nearby and he turned to the customs officer and started shouting at him. Abruptly the customs official turned to us, his entire demeanor softening. “So sorry for the delay. Welcome to Cairo. I hope you enjoy your stay in our beautiful city.”
He led us into the lobby, where we were supposed to meet with an official from the Egyptian Swimming Federation. It was three a.m., and the arrival area was completely deserted. We didn’t know what to do; we didn’t know where we were supposed to stay. We couldn’t speak Arabic so we couldn’t talk to anyone outside the terminal, and we couldn’t exchange our travelers’ checks, since the bank was closed.
We had been traveling for thirty-six hours, with a brief stopover in London. Not only was I exhausted, but I suddenly felt very far from home, in a place I didn’t think I wanted to be. Sinking down onto the floor, I tried to hold back the tears. I knew crying wouldn’t help, but this seemed like a strange and scary place, and I had no idea what to do.
“Don’t worry, they’ll find us here in a couple of days,” Dave joked to make light of our predicament. He had no better idea of what to do. He was only nineteen, and he had never traveled outside the States. So we sat for a couple hours and waited.
Fortunately, a man who owned a car-rental agency saw us looking very forlorn. He spoke a little English, and he offered to call Fahmy’s brother Nassief. I felt bad that we were calling him at five in the morning, but we didn’t know what else to do.
Nassief immediately offered to put us up in his apartment until everything was sorted out. The car-rental-agency man told us to wait for a minute while he called us a cab. The cab that pulled up a few minutes later had barely survived the war: the hood was tied to the bumper, the tires were completely bald, and the trunk had been so smashed forward that we would have to hold our luggage on our laps.
Reaching through broken windows, we opened the doors and climbed in. There were no seat belts, but that didn’t matter, since there really weren’t seats. The driver turned the ignition key at least a couple of times before the engine started, and then he stomped on the accelerator. He drove like an Indy race-car driver on an obstacle course. Dave and I held on to whatever we could, laughing uncontrollably as we sped around corners, tires squealing, the car launching over innumerable bumps and potholes.
We flew through the sleeping city, tears streaming down our cheeks, past stark concrete buildings, going the wrong way down ancient one-way cobblestoned streets and through a city that was unlit except for the stoplights, which, to our driver, were mere decorations. At one police checkpoint, he sped through without hesitation even as the policemen blew their whistles and waved angrily at him to stop. A few minutes later, we arrived at an apartment complex.
Nassief Attallah, a tall, broad-shouldered man in his sixties, trotted downstairs wearing long striped pajamas and a red nightcap over his thick silver hair. Phillippe, his younger brother, followed, walking with a limp. Phillippe looked very much like Fahmy He said, “Welcome, welcome, welcome.” It was Fahmy’s voice. One phrase connected the families a world away, and everything suddenly seemed so much better.
Lena, Nassief’s wife, led us to our room, where Dave and I slept deeply on mattresses filled with sweet straw. In the midafternoon, I awoke to the exotic sounds of donkeys braying, car horns blaring, and a muezzin in a minaret calling Muslims to prayer over a loudspeaker. Still exhausted, I tried to turn over and fall back to sleep, but searing white desert light was streaming through sheer curtains beside my bed, so I got up and looked outside.
The world below was swirling with humanity. The men were dressed in Western-style clothes and long cotton shirts that looked like pajamas; some of the women were dressed in Western clothes too, but many wore long, heavy black chadors. Immediately below the window, women and children were selling pita bread stacked in open wagons, the children shooing off the flies with a straw brush. Cars were everywhere, completely disregarding tra
ffic signals and people attempting to cross the street.
While we ate a delicious breakfast of warm, chewy pita bread, salty feta cheese, and homemade sweet date jam, Phillippe arrived and told us he had phoned the Egyptian Swimming Federation. There had been a mistake in our telex, and we had arrived a day earlier than expected. We were instructed to take a cab to the Continental Hotel, where we would be staying with the other foreign swimmers for twelve days. This would give us time to get over the jet lag and prepare for the race.
At the hotel, a throng of journalists and television crews greeted Dave and me as if we were rock stars. The press thought we had been avoiding them, and one journalist in particular was annoyed at me. He was a short man with a thick black mustache and greasy black hair plastered to his head. He said his name was William Amen and he was a journalist for the largest newspaper in Egypt. He started following me around, asking me a number of questions over and over again. At first I thought he didn’t understand English very well, and since I was the only American who had been invited to the race, I wanted to represent my country to the best of my ability. I wanted to make sure that he understood me, so I politely answered his questions over and over again. Finally, I broke away to deposit my luggage in the room Dave and I would be sharing.
A few minutes later, Fahmy’s cousin Morad Luca, a very wide, bald, and friendly man, arrived. He was one of the top defense attorneys in Egypt and he spoke a little English. Phillippe had called him and told him that we needed his help, so he’d arrived to take us to the Egyptian Swimming Federation’s old steamboat, anchored on the Nile River. It doubled as the federation’s offices and sports club. While I went back to the room to change into my swimsuit and sweats, Morad phoned ahead and organized a guide and a rowboat for us. While Dave, Morad, and the boat captain discussed the Nile River currents, I took off my sweatsuit apprehensively and looked across the river. Fahmy had described the Nile as the river of life and the birthplace of the world’s ancient civilization. With dreamy eyes, he had said, “The Nile is very, very beautiful. It has its very own shade of blue.” Sixteen years had passed since Fahmy had lived in Egypt, and much had changed. The river was not any shade of blue; it was dark brown, thick, and opaque, and it stank like something old and dying.
