Swimming to Antarctica (10 page)

“Over ’ere, love! ’Urry ’Urry, love. Step on that rock.” Mickey pointed and shouted.

I looked at the rocks. The waves seemed larger, and I didn’t want to go back down that way. One knee was bleeding. I was scared. If I messed up this time, I was really going to get scraped. I looked around. “I can’t get down there,” I yelled. The waves were too big.
But I couldn’t walk along the point either; it was at least half a mile to the beach. “Can you move over there, around the point a little?” The waves didn’t seem as big there. I stepped down, then glanced back at the lighthouse one more time. We did it, I thought, and I felt a deep, warm sense of satisfaction spread through my body. My father and brother and sisters would be so happy too. A wave lifted me, tossing me back up; I fought it and swam out to the launch.

Mickey had me face him, then slid a towel under my arms. He and Reg Junior dragged me on board like a netful of fish. Mickey held my head in his hands and kissed my cheeks. “You made it, love. You made it. Congratulations.”

Reg Junior said, “Congratulations, great job.” He was laughing at Mickey. He was very happy too.

“Did I break the world record?” I asked.

Mickey had started to cry. “I get very emotional sometimes,” he said, wiping the tears off his face. “Yes, love, you did. On July 20, 1972, you set a new world record. The fastest time anyone has ever swum the Channel. Nine hours and fifty-seven minutes. That record’s going to last a very long time.”

When I saw my mother in the boat, she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to push you so hard. I knew you were tired.” She burst into tears.

“I’m glad you pushed me, Mom. I needed your help. Thank you.”

She hugged me tightly. And then Mr. Brickell came over to me. He was absolutely beaming. He grabbed my hand and hugged me. “You did it! Congratulations. What courage.”

“
We
did it, Mr. Brickell. We did it. Thank you,” I said, and I hugged him again.

I was so cold and tired. Mickey and my mother wrapped me in blankets and I sat down, leaned against the pilot’s house, and fell asleep. When I woke up we were entering Dover Harbour, and I saw those beautiful white cliffs. I couldn’t wait to phone home.

There was no way I could have anticipated the crowd of reporters waiting for us on the dock. They were from the
Manchester Post,
the
Telegram,
even the BBC. Each of them asked about the swim. They
were thrilled. When my mother and I got back to the hotel there were radio stations calling from New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Bangkok, and even Australia. And there were so many requests to have pictures taken the next day.

The next day, before I did anything, I had to call Brickell, to thank him for all he had done and to include him in the photos, but he wasn’t in. He had taken Des out on his attempt to do a double crossing of the Channel. All day long I thought about Des, wondering if he would make it. Finally the news came back; he’d made it one direction, but the weather hadn’t held, so he’d pulled out. Somehow I knew that wouldn’t stop Des. He would try again. That was part of a long-distance swimmer’s nature.

When my mother and I boarded the flight home, my spirits felt higher than the plane after takeoff. At age fifteen I had reached my highest goal in life.

A couple days after I got home, I went to the Belmont Plaza pool to detrain, stretch out, and just get back into the water. There was a banner at the pool, and all my teammates cheered when I walked onto the deck. It was a wonderful feeling to receive their recognition, and when Coach Gambril took my hand and shook it, then hugged me, I thought it couldn’t get any better than this. But it did. Hans came over to shake my hand, and he said, “You did such a fantastic job. I can’t believe it. You were so fast.”

Then Gunnar walked over, shook my hand, rumpled my hair, and smiled. “Yes, you did a great job.”

It was nearly too much to have my two heroes telling me that I did great. And I nearly lost it when Hans said, “We talked with Coach and he said that you’ll warm up with us in lane eight today.”

What an honor, to swim with them.

That day I worked out with them, and for the first time I was able to see them up close, to see the power and beauty of their bodies as they moved seemingly effortlessly through the water. This time I could hear their breathing, and see the expressions on their faces, and watch their flip turns underwater, and feel the power they released when they pushed off the wall. I asked them if they would watch my stroke and help correct it. They did. Both gave me some pointers: kick harder, keep my head down.

It had been over a year since I’d swum in the same pool as they swam in, and they looked so much better than ever before. They were beginning to taper, reducing their mileage and getting more rest. In a couple of months they would swim in the Olympic Games. Hans would win the silver medal on the German freestyle relay team, and Gunnar would swim the four-hundred-meter individual medley to win the gold medal and establish an Olympic record.

What do you do at fifteen when you’ve achieved your highest goal in life? What can you ever do to surpass that? Coach Gambril left California to coach the Harvard University team, and I was sad about that; I knew he was not only the best coach I would have but one of my best friends too. I also knew he had taken me as far as he could, and he had to move on his own life’s path.

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 current 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.