Swimming to Antarctica

by Lynne Cox

  Tolbin and Novella nodded like they understood, and I was surprised. They needed film footage, but they weren’t going to pressure me.

  Following Pentilla, we climbed a steep embankment to the community center, where Pat Omiak, the mayor of Little Diomede, was waiting for us. He was wearing a green-and-white baseball cap that read, “Patrick was a saint but I ain’t.” He led us down a rocky path to a wooden rack where seven umiaks were stored hull-side up. They were thirty feet long, made of walrus skin stretched over a wooden frame and stitched together with walrus gut, and had outboard motors. Omiak pointed out that the stitches were close together so the boats wouldn’t leak. And the hides were replaced every three to five years, because they had a tendency to rot and tear.

  The boats seemed flimsy but he quoted me a price of five thousand dollars. That was beyond anything I could afford. I asked him to consider five hundred dollars, still more than anything I had paid for a boat that would travel only ten or fifteen miles. Omiak said he would consider it, but he had to talk to the boys about it. “The boys” were a group of men who were the walrus hunters, and they were the ones who fed the village. Omiak said he would let me know.

  While Novella and Tolbin filmed, I walked back to the edge of the sea. Two young boys joined me. The older boy, maybe twelve years old, told me that no one on the island knew how to swim, not even the walrus hunters. “The water’s too cold. If they fall in, they die,” he said.

  A teenage girl in a red parka with long brown hair and large brown eyes came over and joined in our conversation. When the boys wandered off, she stayed beside me. “We are very close neighbors with the Soviets,” she said. “I hope someday we can be friends with them. That has been my dream for many years.”

  It was as if she was the voice of the child within me from so many years ago. It was as if she had come to me to remind me of why I was there. I had to remind myself that so many things had seemed impossible so many times, all along this odyssey I had to alter my thinking. If I didn’t try, everything would be lost. Oh sure, I’d learned many lessons along the way, but my reason for all of this would remain unfulfilled. I couldn’t stand that.

  “Is the weather always like this?” I asked.

  “No, it changes every day, sometimes every twenty minutes,” she said.

  “So the weather conditions get better?”

  “Yes, sometimes the water is even flat. That won’t happen today. But it’s not always like this,” she said reassuringly.

  “Thank you for telling me that—I feel much better now,” I said.

  “Are you really going to swim over there?” she asked.

  “I’m going to try,” I said.

  “No one here thinks you can do it. But I do,” she said.

  Our takeoff from Little Diomede was white-knuckle frightening, but once we cleared the cloud pack, the trip to Wales was bumpy but uneventful. Novella and Tolbin returned to Nome in the airplane chartered by ABC television, and I flew back with Pentilla. He was tired, and I appreciated all that he had done for us.

  A few minutes after we lifted off from Wales, we heard someone speaking Russian over the radio. Pentilla explained that it was Russian air-traffic control. The Soviets had a lookout station on top of Big Diomede, where radar and other military devices enabled them to monitor the Alaskan coast. Our frequency was picking up Russian pilots conversing. Pentilla said that even though there was nothing to mark the border between Little and Big Diomede, everyone knew where it was. If an American helicopter ventured into Soviet airspace intentionally or inadvertently, it would be shot down. Once when he’d been caught in a fog bank, he had strayed across and had a close call with a Soviet helicopter. The only reason he wasn’t shot down was that the Soviets were as lost as he was.

  Were the Soviets monitoring our conversation? I asked Pentilla. Without a doubt, he said, nodding his head. Smiling, he said the KGB was also listening to us. So I got an idea. I decided to talk to them about the swim, to tell them everything I could about the upcoming ABC television coverage, my crew, and my contacts in Moscow with the Soviet Sports Committee. Pentilla helped by interviewing me over the radio, providing the Soviets on Big Diomede and, hopefully, in Moscow with my background information. I told them we were now just waiting for final approval from Gorbachev.

  At the end of the conversation, Eric Pentilla said that he definitely would help us. He wanted to be our air pilot for the swim. Up until that point, Pentilla admitted, he, like the people on Little Diomede, didn’t believe that I was really going to attempt the swim. Now he understood why the swim was so important, how determined my crew was, and how much it was taking to make it happen. He said he would speak with the administration at Evergreen Helicopters and make sure we could fly out with the mail. After seeing Pentilla fly the helicopter, I knew he was a very skilled pilot, and with his help I could afford to rent the helicopter.

  All night long, I rolled around in bed, trying to figure out what to do next. When morning came, the wind was blowing so hard that Nome resembled a ghost town out of the Wild West. Swirling dirt clouds blew along Front Street, blasting the ice-heaved homes, tourist shops, and businesses that lined Nome’s main street. The boardwalk that ran along Front Street was buried under an inch of sand. I didn’t want to get up and work out that day. Just wanted to roll over and pull the blanket over my head. I was in a bad mood, really glum, but I knew that Larry Maine, the man who had volunteered to walk with me, would be waiting for me in his beach tent. So I put on my swimsuit and sweats and walked across town, leaning sideways into the wind, holding one hand over my face. The weather was so foul no one was outside. Its bleakness matched my mood.

  It was July 29,1987. More than a week had passed since we replied to the Soviets’ telex, providing them with information on the crew and myself. The Soviets knew that we intended to make the crossing in less than two weeks. Something had gone wrong; I was sure of it. But no one on our side of the border knew what it was. Much later, we would be informed that the KGB had denied our request to land on Big Diomede, and they had convinced high-ranking Soviet officials to withdraw their support.

  Salazar at the State Department, Evans in Senator Murkowski’s office, and Kassander, as the consultant for the Goodwill Games, my brain trust in Washington, D.C., knew something was wrong. They had been in touch with the Soviet embassy, and with Gene Fisher, Bob Walsh’s assistant in Seattle, and there had been no word at all. We kept talking, kept working on it, kept trying to figure out what to do. And I kept wondering, Why won’t they talk to us?

  The media was calling from all over the world. They sensed a big story. Journalists kept asking, Do you think the Soviets will support the swim?

  I didn’t want to go into the water that morning. Didn’t want to train. When I reached the beach the wind was ripping across the sand, lifting it and spraying it along the beach and into my face. This is crazy, I told myself; I’m working out in a Sahara sandstorm. What’s the point? But I kept putting one sand-stung foot in front of the other. Larry Maine would be waiting for me. He’d promised that he would be there. He had said he would. Every day since he’d volunteered to walk with me, no matter how bad the weather, Larry had been there.

  Outside his tent on the beach, I hollered his name. He didn’t answer, and I hoped he’d be out. It would be better to just go back to Dennis’s home and sleep. It would be better to just hide from the world for a while. Then Larry unzipped the green tent flap, stuck one old shoe out, and then another, and unfolded himself outside the tent. He stuck his head out, grinned, and shouted over the roaring wind and surf, “Good morning, Lynne. Ah, look up there!” He pointed.

  The wind was tearing the gray clouds apart, and an enormous pin-wheel of light was spotlighting the sea.

  “If you hurry, you can swim in that trail of light,” Larry exclaimed. “The sunshine will warm your back.”

  I felt that day that Larry was truly a godsend. Bent completely in half against the wind, fighting to move forward and
hold his balance, Larry walked on an incline, keeping pace beside me as I swam. Every ten steps or so, he would turn, wipe the wind, spray, and salt from his face, cup his hands around his eyes, and search the sea for me.

  The water was turbid brown and churning with heavy sediment and glacier silt as fine as baby powder. It was a tough workout. At times, the sand sprayed across the water and stung my face. And that made me think of how hard it was for Larry out there, just walking along beside me. It was a lot easier for me then, knowing both that he was with me and that my job was much easier than his was.

  At the end of a two-hour training session, Larry wrapped a towel over my shoulders and said in my ear, “That was a brutal workout. You did a fine job.”

  “I almost didn’t make it, Larry. Thanks so much for walking with me.”

  He smiled. “I used to run track. And for many years I was a track coach in Oregon. I found that sometimes it helps just to have someone with you. Sometimes just going through the motions helps you get where you need to go. See you tomorrow morning,” he said.

  “Don’t leave yet, please, Larry. Part of my support crew arrived last night. They’ve been setting up some research equipment on the beach. See? Over there.”

  Maria Sullivan, my friend who had injured her back, Dr. Nyboer Jr., and Dr. Nyboer Sr. were setting up a table with Dr. Nyboer Sr.’s medical equipment: an impedance machine, an experimental device that was supposed to measure changes in blood flow within the body. There was also an infrared device to measure heat-flow changes. They expected to see enormous changes in blood flow and heat flow due to my immersion in cold water.

  For more than an hour the doctors tried to get some measurements, and I lay on the table freezing. They tinkered with the equipment, but they kept getting false readings. Maria Sullivan finally figured out what was causing the problem: gold dust.

  Sullivan had noticed that when I’d climbed out of the water, my face, arms, and legs had sparkled. A fine layer of gold dust had adhered to my skin, and the gold had caused the electrical current within the impedance machine to short-circuit. When we brushed off the dust with a towel, the machine finally worked, and the doctors were able to successfully run the experiments.

  Dr. Nyboer Sr. immediately confirmed that my response to the cold was perfect. I was able to shut down blood flow to my extremities and maintain that closure, which enabled my body to keep the blood around my core warm.

  Three hours after my workout, I finally returned to Dennis Campion’s home. He informed me that word had come from the U.S. Navy: they could not provide support for the swim. They didn’t have any vessels in the area, and they didn’t feel it was their job anyway. They suggested that we contact the coast guard, who had a new state-of-the-art cutter anchored directly off Nome.

  Getting on the phone, I called Bruce Evans and asked if he would have Senator Murkowski call the director of the coast guard in Washington and request the coast guard’s support. The location of their vessel seemed perfect, and I thought, Maybe this is the way it’s supposed to work.

  On August 3,1987, one by one the support team assembled in the rental house in Nome. As each person arrived, the excitement intensified. Dr. Keatinge, Dr. Nyboer Jr., and Dr. Nyboer Sr. commandeered a bedroom and eagerly transformed it into a medical testing unit.

  Stretched out on one bed were an experimental charcoal-heated sleeping bag, a blood-pressure cuff, and a doctor’s bag filled with pills, syringes, adrenaline, and a stethoscope. On another cot was a forty-foot-long spaghetti-thin wire—the rectal probe that at the end of the swim would be plugged into a telemetry device to measure my core temperature. On a kitchen table was a portable defibrillator, the infrared heat-flow measuring device, and the impedance machine.

  Maria Sullivan assisted them as they tested and repacked their equipment. Maria had trouble walking, but she didn’t care. She was having the time of her life. And I needed her there so badly. It was exciting, but also crazy. The doctors wanted to run experiments on me each day after training. And there were phone calls coming in from all over the world, from reporters, well-wishers, even Mom and Dad, whose voices sounded stressed.

  In the living room, the journalists—Rich Roberts from the Los Angeles Times, Jim McHugh and Jack Kelley from People magazine, the ABC television crew, Claire Richardson from KNOM, a reporter from the AP, and one from UPI—set up a makeshift media center and began filing stories.

  Then there were the people from Nome. They had been listening to interviews daily about the plans for the swim, and the Nome Nugget and Anchorage Daily News were doing daily stories. It felt like a wave of interest was building around us and, with it, support. A businessman who owned a mining company called Inspiration Gold heard over the radio that I was trying to find life jackets for the crew in our umiaks. He brought over a dozen jackets that we could borrow for the swim. A shop owner, knowing that we had limited funds, sent over crates of apples and oranges. The local hospital let us borrow whatever medical equipment we required for the swim and said they would be on standby if we needed them. The town priest invited me to dinner to get me away from the crowd, and he said he would be praying for me. The town minister did the same. And then Libby Riddles, the first woman to win the Iditarod, the dogsled race across Alaska, came over to the house to wish me the best of luck and said that she hoped that we could succeed at opening the border. Neighbors, saloon owners, the whole town of Nome, it seemed, came by to offer support or wish us luck or just to let us know they cared. It was absolutely amazing.

  Then CNN, NBC, and NHK, from Japan, arrived to do stories. CKO from Canada, the BBC from Britain, and ABC radio called for live radio interviews. Reuters, the Long Beach Press Telegram, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Manchester Union Leader, the Boston Globe, the Orange County Register, the Chicago Tribune, and so many others were calling for interviews. All of the journalists were asking the same question: Will the Soviets open the border for you and allow you to swim? Trying to sound positive, I told them I thought they would, but I had no idea if they would do it.

  Suddenly it occurred to me that I had overlooked a very important detail. Our request for permission to land had been for the physicians and journalists, but I hadn’t supplied the names of the pilots for the swim, nor did I know if the coast guard would support us. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to pass into Soviet waters without our pilots and boats. This oversight was a major mistake and could have blown the whole project.

  I immediately called Bruce Evans at Senator Murkowski’s office, Gene Fisher, and Ed Salazar. Evans said that the Soviet ambassador had put his other projects on hold, giving this one priority; it appeared that the ambassador had joined our team. He was in contact daily with Moscow, trying to find out the status of the project from the Foreign Ministry.

  That evening, my crew gathered with me at the bar in the Gold Nugget Hotel in Nome to watch the preswim story produced by Joe Novella and Randy Tolbin. The piece was moving. They conveyed the awesome beauty and sheer vastness of the Alaskan frontier. They also ran an interview with me explaining the reason for the swim. And then they did something brilliant. They used a film clip of Gorbachev stepping off a plane, and the commentator ended the piece by saying, “The question is, Will General Secretary Gorbachev give Lynne permission to make her swim?”

  Now the swim was directly linked with Gorbachev, and we asked friends to immediately express-mail a copy of the ABC tape to the Soviet ambassador and to General Secretary Gorbachev at the Kremlin. We hoped he would see the video and do something to help. We didn’t know then that communications had broken down between the different groups inside the Soviet Union or that something else was happening behind the scenes.

  19

  Debate

  After the airing of the television story, Dr. Nyboer Jr., Dr. Nyboer Sr., Maria Sullivan, Dr. Keatinge, Rich Roberts, Claire Richardson, Jim McHugh, Jack Kelley, and I met at an Italian restaurant in Nome to do some serious carbohydrate loading.

&nbs
p; We got our menus and ordered; while we waited for the food to arrive, Jim McHugh voiced the question that was on everyone’s minds: “If the Soviets don’t give you permission to swim to Big Diomede, will you go across anyway?”

  This was the question I had been contemplating for the past three days.

  “You know, it would make a fabulous story,” McHugh said, bouncing a little in his chair, his brown eyes lit up and his dark brown eyebrows pulled up into question marks. He was very excited. He was a passionate, highly reactive guy, a photographer I had met before when People magazine had done a preswim story.

  Jack Kelley, his friend and the writer for the story, was a strong contrast. He was contemplative, gentle, and very balanced.

  Both were great guys. It had taken a lot for them to convince their editors that this swim could happen, and I was happy they were with us.

  Jack Kelley pushed his glasses back and ran his hand through his wavy salt-and-pepper hair. He sat back in his chair and objected to McHugh’s suggestion. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. If you cross into Soviet territory they could lock us up in prison indefinitely.”

  “Oh, come on, Jack, do you really think they’d put Lynne in prison?” McHugh argued.

  “They certainly could,” Jack said.

  Rich Roberts, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times whom I had known since I was fourteen, when he’d started doing stories about my swims, entered the conversation. Rich was a strong, compact man in his mid-forties, an avid sailor who had grown up in the newspaper business. He knew the way the world worked. And he agreed with Kelley He said, “What you meant, Jack, was that they’d put all of us in prison. But Jim’s right—the story would go worldwide.” Rich smiled, a twinkle in his brown eyes. He was willing to risk it.

  “Just think, I could get some great first shots from inside a real Soviet gulag,” Jim McHugh mused.

  “That is, if you can get the film out,” Jack Kelley said, and then laughed.