Swimming to Antarctica

by Lynne Cox

The fog deepened so that our visibility diminished to fifty yards. The crew was covered in a fine mist, the droplets clinging to their hair like dew and saturating their parkas. Huddling forward, they stared into the consuming grayness. We crossed the border, we thought, though it was hard to tell. There was nothing in the middle of the strait to indicate exactly where the border was. Scanning ahead, we strained to see the Soviet boats, but we couldn’t make out anything in the gray void.

  The current was pushing us north, and we were cutting across it. Our concern was still that we would be pushed into the Chukchi Sea before we reached shore. Then ghostlike fog blanketed us, constricting the light, and our visibility dropped to ten yards. It felt as if we had become detached from the world, a tiny blip of warmth on an icy, gray sea. We were moving in a void between the two islands. I felt like screaming. I was losing sight of the boats. That fear from the Catalina swim had come back to haunt me, only this time it was worse; it gripped me so hard that I was shaking in the water. I sprinted closer to the umiaks for human warmth. I needed to stay near them. I couldn’t lose them.

  David Soolook checked his compass and noticed that we were thirty degrees off course. He shouted something to Pat Omiak in Inuit, and suddenly both boats made sharp forty-five-degree corrections to the left.

  Now the current was broaching the left side of my head. Do they know what they’re doing? I wondered. Don’t they realize that every moment we stray off course, we diminish our chances of making it across?

  How could I expect them to know this? They hadn’t expected me to get into the water. They didn’t think anyone could swim in the Bering Strait and survive.

  Heavy drizzle began falling as Dr. Keatinge and Dr. Nyboer waved me over for another reading. I rolled over onto my back, impatient and grumpy. These readings were taking too long. Every time I slowed down, I got colder. Tremors were racing up my back.

  Dr. Nyboer was doing his best, but he couldn’t get a reading. He waved me away from the boat, then back again for another attempt. This time I ignored him. I had to start swimming faster, had to stay warm. The point wasn’t to be a human subject; it was to get across. This was slowing me down.

  A few minutes later, Dr. Nyboer waved me over again. He held the receiver right above my stomach while Dr. Keatinge studied the monitor. The receiver was malfunctioning. Although the doctors were working hard to fix it, cold was moving into my muscles, and they felt like wood. At that moment, I decided I would not stop again for tests. I couldn’t afford it.

  Suddenly we made another sharp correction to the left. Why can’t we stay on course? I wondered. Have we missed Big Diomede? Is that why the Soviets haven’t appeared? We had to be at least halfway by now. We had to have crossed the border. Where are you? Can you hear us? Please find us.

  I didn’t know it then, but Pat Omiak and David Soolook weren’t sure where we were. They had hunted walrus only along the border, never crossed over it. So they didn’t know what the currents were like on the other side. Pat Omiak asked Dr. Keatinge what heading he should take. Neither Pat Omiak nor Dr. Keatinge knew how far north we had already drifted. Rich Roberts, the journalist from the Los Angeles Times who was also a sailor, asked Pat Omiak what heading he was on, and then Rich helped Pat make a critical correction.

  The crew searched the fog for the Soviets, knowing that we needed them to guide us to shore.

  At first I thought I heard a sound through the water. It sounded like a small boat’s motor, but then it disappeared. I heard it again. It grew louder, and then faded again. Please find us, I thought.

  The sound of the motor grew louder. I could feel the water trembling around my body. I could hear the engine’s soft putter. The crew heard it too. The Soviet boat was circling somewhere out there. It was them. It had to be them! They were searching for us! The putter grew deeper; then the sound changed. They were moving away. Oh God, no! I thought desperately.

  The crew was shouting at the top of their lungs, waving their arms in the fog. No one could see them, and their voices were muffled, and no one could hear them, either. Jim McHugh and Jack Kelley began whooping. The entire crew yelled. The motor sound grew louder again.

  Turning to breathe, I saw Claire Richardson bouncing up and down in the umiak. Jack Kelley was pointing. “Look, there they are! It’s them. It’s the Soviets!”

  It was one of the most beautiful sights of my life. The dark gray Soviet boat motored slowly out of the fog toward us. They were there. Really there. And they were going to help us.

  For eleven years I had imagined this moment. I had imagined meeting Soviet sailors in the middle of the Bering Strait. But I never could have imagined the way I would feel. All the work, all the hope, all the faith, all the belief, all those people who’d believed and who hadn’t, and now, the Soviets were right there.

  “It’s them! It’s the Soviets!” I heard the crew shouting.

  Claire Richardson yelled to me, “What day is it, Lynne?”

  “It’s tomorrow. It’s tomorrow!” I shouted.

  We had crossed the border and the international date line; we had reached from the present into the future. We had done it. My goggles filled with tears. Finally, we had found each other.

  The Soviet launch stayed at a distance of fifty yards, and the sailors on board maintained stoic expressions. I couldn’t understand why they weren’t coming closer. Had we arrived too early or too late? Had there been another breakdown in communications? Were they angry at us for allowing the other umiaks to join us? Some of the villagers had come across with us, although during the swim I hadn’t seen them. Someone aboard the doctors’ umiak said that two of the villagers’ umiaks were turned back. But that was expected, as they hadn’t gotten clearance to land on Big Diomede.

  With the Soviet pilots guiding us into their territory, we moved directly toward Big Diomede. One of the crewmen, a fellow with curly brown hair, wearing a green uniform and a brown leather jacket, introduced himself. He said his name was Vladimir McMillian, and he was a reporter for TASS. He spoke perfect English. I shouted to him, “Vladimir, is there something wrong? Some reason why they don’t want to be closer to us? Please, I want to see your faces.”

  The crews talked back and forth. I couldn’t listen because I had to keep swimming to stay warm. But when I looked up again, both crews were smiling and the Soviet launch was moving in close to us, just ahead of the journalists’ umiak. They hadn’t wanted to be in the way. But they were smiling, and I felt like we were doing this together now.

  “Your stroke rate is dropping to fifty-six,” Dr. Nyboer said. “Down from seventy strokes per minute. You’ve dropped way off pace. You’ve got to pick it up.”

  My hands reached deep into the gray sea. I couldn’t feel them at all. There was no sensation. Put your head down. You’re wasting time looking up. Focus. You haven’t finished. Come on. Pick up your pace.

  Slowly the sun began melting the fog, and the top of Big Diomede Island towered above us. We were less than four hundred yards from shore. That’s when it happened, exactly when Dennis Campion had said it would: the current grew stronger, and the water temperature dropped to thirty-eight degrees. My body shuddered. My teeth started to chatter, and chills were crawling continuously up my spine. The water was only six degrees warmer than an ice cube, and my body was screaming, Get out! This water stings. Oh God, it’s so cold!

  Go through the pain. Just swim through it. Don’t focus on it. Don’t give any energy away to it. Keep focused. Keep swimming. Seabirds nesting in the cliffs on Big Diomede were calling. We were almost there. Fifty yards. I was tiring, and I was so ready to finish. I couldn’t wait to get out of the water and crawl into a warm sleeping bag. That thought made me swim faster.

  Turning to breathe, I saw the crew in the Soviet launch pointing to a snowbank a half mile south of us.

  Vladimir McMillian, the man with the curly brown hair, shouted excitedly to me, “The Soviet people are waiting for you over there. They could not manage to climb down
these cliffs. But they would like to meet and see you at the finish.”

  “Lynne, you can stop now,” Dr. Keatinge shouted. His voice was heavy with concern. He was afraid that my temperature would drop more. He hadn’t been able to get a reading.

  “You know, if you stop now, you will have succeeded,” Dr. Keatinge said.

  “How far is it to the snowbank?” I asked.

  Vladimir asked a crewman, then told me, “Half a mile.”

  “Bill, it’s okay if I stop now?” I asked Dr. Keatinge, trying to decide what to do.

  “Yes. Yes. You can finish right there,” he said, pointing to a rock.

  We were fifty yards from our goal.

  “She’s heading in to shore,” I heard Dr. Keatinge say, his voice filled with relief.

  But when I turned to breathe, I saw the bright snow on the beach and I saw the little black dots that must have been the Soviet people standing there. I asked myself, Will you be satisfied if you stop now? Everything you have done has been about extending yourself, about going beyond borders. You’ve had to go beyond your physical and psychological borders. Everything everyone has done for you and for themselves to this point has been about extending themselves, too, beyond their own borders, about believing when there was little to believe in. But now you can stop. You’re only ten yards from shore. You can stop now and know that you have succeeded.

  God, I want to. I’ve got to think about how cold I’m going to be when I climb out of the water. I took a few more strokes forward. You’ve got to decide now, I told myself. In a moment the crew will be preparing to land.

  “You can finish on that rock,” Dr. Keatinge coaxed. “It’s the flat one. Over there. It should be smooth.”

  I knew I would regret it all my life if I didn’t push on. I turned left and began paralleling shore. I glanced at Dr. Keatinge. He looked surprised, then worried. He must have thought I was becoming disoriented and going into hypothermia.

  “Bill, it’s all the way or no way,” I shouted.

  He grinned, and the crew started cheering and clapping and waving their arms in the air. I rode their wave of energy, took it all in, let it carry me. They continued cheering. Oh, did I need their support.

  Look into their faces. Look at their smiles. Draw from their energy, I coached myself. But it was really hard swimming. The current was flowing into us at one knot, diminishing my speed by half. We were moving in slow motion, and all I wanted to do was to get there.

  Dennis Campion had said that the current might be easier closer to shore, so I angled in. The crew thought I was getting ready to stop. “No. We’re not stopping. I’m just trying to find a way to break through the current,” I said. It took so much energy to talk.

  Dennis was right; it made all the difference. We started moving faster. And then I heard Jack Kelley shouting, “Look, you can see the people on the snowbank. They’re waving!” I counted thirty black figures on the bright white snowbank.

  I looked at my hands pulling through the water. They looked like the purple-gray hands of a cadaver. My shoulders were blue, the color of blueberries, and my arms, legs, and trunk were splotchy white. They felt heavy, like meat taken out of a freezer. My thighs could no longer feel water being pushed past them. My face no longer felt like a face; it felt detached from my head. I started swimming faster, faster. Looking up, I could see the colors of the Soviet people’s clothes, red, blue, green, and black. And they were moving. They were running, slipping on the ice, picking their way down to the water’s edge.

  Dr. Nyboer and Dr. Keatinge shouted, “Sprint! Sprint in to shore!”

  That sure sounded great to me.

  The journalists’ umiak zoomed ahead as men in military uniforms set out small wooden ramps for the umiaks to land on.

  The journalists were leaping out of their boats, onto shore. Dr. Keatinge and Dr. Nyboer were leaning over the pontoon right beside me. Their smiles were very big.

  Then I saw it: the sea floor rose up to meet me. I could almost climb out. There were people, real life-sized people towering above me on the snowbank. They were cheering. And they were speaking Russian.

  A man in a green uniform reached down toward me alongside Vladimir McMillian. I pulled off my goggles and stuck them in my mouth. After more than two hours in the icy water, I needed both hands to crawl out of the sea. I tried to move forward, but the incline was steep, and I slid backward. I stepped up. Three men were leaning toward me, extending their arms as far as they could go. They were smiling and shouting in Russian. I leaned forward and reached as high as I could. I felt the warmth of their hands in mine.

  A Soviet man was talking to me, draping his coat over my shoulders. A woman with dark reddish-brown hair who said her name was Rita Zakharova was piling blankets over me. They were heavy. My legs were so wobbly. I had to bend my knees to stand.

  Vladimir McMillian was kissing me all over my face, as if I were his long-lost relative. Someone else wrapped a green towel on top of the blankets. Dr. Keatinge and Dr. Nyboer were on either side of me, supporting me under each arm. Dr. Keatinge said in a controlled, calm voice, “We’ve got to get her to the tent as quickly as possible to get her warm.”

  Vladimir wasn’t listening; he was too excited and happy. His mother was Russian and his father was American. They had met after World War II, had married, and his father had stayed in the Soviet Union. That was why he spoke English so well. He was thrilled because half of him was Russian and the other half was American and he had seen with his own eyes the two nations, like the two parts of himself, coming together that day. It was something he never thought he’d see.

  Vladimir kept talking, introducing everyone on the beach to me. It was very hard to concentrate. I was so cold, and I just wanted to curl up into a ball somewhere and get warm. It didn’t help that I was standing on the ice in bare feet, or that the air temperature was in the low forties. Vladimir introduced me to the Soviet press, but I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. More than once he had to repeat himself. But his comrades were only too happy to wait. “That man is from Radio Moscow. This woman is from Pravda.” He said their names, and I couldn’t catch them at all.

  In the background, Dr. Keatinge was insisting that we head for a tent pitched on a steep hill on the rocky island. But Vladimir was holding my arm, and he wasn’t about to let go. I didn’t want him to; I wanted to meet everyone there, to see their faces, to see real live Russians, people I had been afraid of all my life.

  It was so strange; they were all smiling, all excited, all thrilled to be there.

  Vladimir introduced me to a man from Vremya, on Russian television. It’s called Time, like our Sixty Minutes. Vladimir himself was the reporter from TASS, he repeated, and then explained that the Soviets on the beach had been specially selected to be on this beach and to greet the Americans. They had been transported from all over the Soviet Union to meet us on Big Diomede. He introduced the Soviet national swim coach, a world-champion boxer, the governor of Siberia, the commander of a military garrison, a KGB officer, and three Siberian Inuit women doctors.

  An Inuit woman wearing a bright red parka told me that she was a pediatrician in Magadan and kissed me on both cheeks. At the same time, I kissed her the same way. She was small and pretty, with black hair and delicate Asian eyes, and her lips felt so warm. Smiling, she handed me a bouquet of wildflowers that she had gathered from her village on the Siberian mainland. The flowers were the same ones I had seen on the Alaskan mainland—magenta fireweed, turquoise forget-me-nots, lavender wild asters, and goldenrod. And she said that at one time the two countries had been joined by a land bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska. When the sea rose in the Bering Strait, the continents were separated. She said that she was very happy that I had swum between Big Diomede and Little Diomede because she understood that it was the human way of reconnecting the continents. She was fighting to hold tears back as she said that she had family who lived on both sides of the Bering Sea, on Little Diomede a
nd on Big Diomede, but they had been separated by political differences that none of their families believed in. She told me that after today she thought they might see each other again; maybe this was a beginning. She smiled, and her eyes filled with tears. Mine did, too, and I just had to hug her again and say, “Da. Yes, someday this will happen, I just know it.”

  Vladimir pulled me away by the elbow and said that the Soviet press wanted to conduct a news conference. Would I be willing to talk with them? Sure, I said, but I knew my body temperature was dropping. I was shivering hard, and Dr. Keatinge kept urging me to go to the tent, but I wanted to talk to them, to answer their questions. I wanted to find out who they were. I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into.

  The Soviet press’s questions were direct, complex, and very difficult to answer. They phrased their questions in three or four parts, making sure they could get as many answered as possible. The problem was that each question was translated by Vladimir immediately one after the other, and I was so cold. I was trying as hard as I could to respond, but by the third or fourth question, the reporter would have to repeat him-or herself before I could understand. One reporter from Russian television asked me, “Do you think your swim will contribute to a reduction in nuclear missiles in the United States and the Soviet Union and further the INF treaty? Do the American people really view the Soviet Union as the evil empire? Why did you make the swim? What do you feel now?”

  My speech was slurred, and my numb lips weren’t helping me speak. I tried to quickly sort out my thoughts and feelings. How could I possibly speak for the American people?

  But this was what they were asking me to do.

  Vladimir translated what I said into Russian. “The reason I swam across the Bering Strait was to reach into the future, to cross the international date line, and to symbolically bridge the distance between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was to generate goodwill and peace between our two countries, our two peoples. I would not have swum here if I believed that this was the evil empire. I can’t say if this swim will contribute to the reduction of nuclear weapons, but I sure hope it does. We need to become friends. That is why I did this; that is why we did this,” I said, pointing to my team.