Swimming to Antarctica (25 page)

In the middle of June I decided to leave for Alaska. I had some sponsorship from local companies and individuals. Some of the kids whom I had taught to swim handed me their weeks allowance and wished me good luck on my swim. Their parents wrote out checks too. I was so touched. Alaska Airlines came through with one airline ticket, which I used for Dr. Keatinge; an outdoor clothing company gave us some sleeping bags; Quaker Oats gave me a check for five thousand dollars; and Johanna Zinter, a friend from Los Alamitos, had T-shirts made and sold them to raise money for the swim. The local high school swim team did a swim-a-thon and raised $230. Friends sent checks, and so did some people I had never met before but who believed in what I was trying to do. It was wonderful and very humbling. I knew I would think of all of them often, especially whenever I hit a major stumbling block.

All of this was helpful, but it wasn’t nearly enough pay for the project. Once again I asked myself, How can anyone believe in me unless I believe in myself? So I emptied out my bank account. That, along with the contributions, paid for the crew’s transportation, the rental house, food, phone calls, a helicopter (if we could get a group rate), and the support boats (if they were reasonably priced). Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough to pay for my plane ticket. I couldn’t take out a loan from the bank, so I took one out from my folks. All of this was hard; it took everything I had, emotionally, physically, and financially.

Dr. Keatinge called and confirmed that he would provide the medical support along with Dr. Nyboer; and Dr. Nyboer said he would bring his father out for the swim. Out of the blue I got a call from a man from New York named Joe Copeland. He had read about
the swim in April in an article in the
New York Times.
He said we had a friend in common. Joe had a background in fund-raising for major events, and he offered to help in return for having his expenses covered.

And I had another volunteer, Maria Sullivan. We had met through the Special Olympics. She had volunteered as an organizer for the Special Olympics, and I’d gone to the games as a guest athlete, to meet with the athletes who were participating.

Maria had read an article in
People
magazine about me while she was in a hospital bed in Los Angeles. She said what caught her attention was what I said about cold and pain—that I didn’t focus on the pain of the cold; I focused on getting through it to the other side. She said she was using this idea with her own pain. She had fallen four stories from a building and had broken her back. She’d had rods implanted in her back, and she was just starting to sit up again. She asked if she could help me. She knew I needed support, and it would divert her mind from her pain. I thought about it, and eventually she started making phone calls for us. She had her mother lighting candles at a local Catholic church and saying prayers for us. Then Maria offered to come to Alaska at her own expense to help out. It was a tough call for me because I was worried about her health. Finally I realized that she needed a chance as much as I did. I said I would love her help, but she had to watch herself. I didn’t want her to have any problems in Nome. In fact, as a precaution, I asked her to speak with one of the physicians at the hospital in Nome to make sure they could take care of her if the rods presented her with a problem. And I told her that if permission came through from the Soviets, I wanted her to remain on Little Diomede. I was afraid she would have a problem in the umiaks, and more than that, we would need someone to stay in touch with us as well as with the outside world. Maria would take some of her first steps in Nome. And she would become an incredibly valuable member of the support team.

When I arrived in Anchorage in mid-June, Jeff Berliner, a reporter from UPI, met me at Dr. Nyboer’s office to interview me. After an hour, he put down his paper and pencil, scratched his head, and said,
“So you mean to say you don’t have Soviet permission, you don’t have escort boats, you don’t know how cold the water is, and you don’t have sponsorship, but you think you can do it?” My reply was confident. “Yes, I think I can,” I said, and a sudden surge of excitement filled the room. It was electric. Berliner shifted forward in his chair and said, “Gorbachev has been talking about
glasnost,
a new openness between the United States and Soviet Union. Do you think he is aware of you and this project?”

“I sure hope he is—I’ve written to him at least four times,” I said.

“If Gorbachev approves of this swim, this action could signal a new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union,” Berliner said. Contemplating the depth of his statement, he shook his head and hurried off to file his story.

As he rounded the corner, I was overwhelmed by his questions. In all my planning I hadn’t looked at all of the challenges piled one on top of another, as he had presented them to me. Instead, I had kept everything horizontal, dealing with each challenge one at a time. When he’d asked me if I thought I could do it, I’d had to say yes, because otherwise there would be no point whatsoever in going through all that I had so far. But I still wasn’t sure how it was going to happen. I just continued believing that it could.

In Nome, Dennis Campion, Dr. Nyboer’s friend, met me at the airport, drove me along the main dirt road to his home, and showed me to the guest room. He immediately made me feel welcome. A large Irishman with dark eyes, dark hair, and a rumbling laugh, Campion was an amazing person. He had traveled the world as a dredger, using special equipment to remove silt from harbors, canals, and, in this case, the gold mines around Nome. Campion had a nautical chart of the Bering Strait, and the day that I arrived at his home, he spread it out on the kitchen table. He was so excited about the swim, and he provided me with some valuable information. As a dredger he was well versed in reading nautical charts, especially in looking at changes in the ocean floor. He pointed out a deep trench immediately off Big Diomede. He said that there was a strong current immediately offshore and it was cutting away at the ocean floor. In summer the
prevailing current flow was from south to north; in winter it flowed from north to south, bringing with it pack ice. Campion suggested that I start at the very southern tip of Little Diomede and compensate for the strong current flowing north. In calm water the current between Big and Little Diomede Islands ranged from half a knot to one knot. That meant that I would have to crab against the current, go sideways into it, always angling to the left. I had to do this: Big Diomede was only four miles long, and if I missed the island, I would end up in the Chukchi Sea. There would be no way to turn back and fight the current. The current was too strong, but more than that, the water was even colder there than in the Bering Strait.

That same afternoon I received a phone call from David Karp, from the Nome Visitors and Travelers Bureau. He had contacted Evergreen Helicopters, and they said that they might be able to help with transportation for the swim if we were willing to fly out with the mail. Otherwise we would have to charter the helicopter, and that would be a minimum of five thousand dollars per flight. Flying out with the mail sounded like a great option, since I couldn’t afford chartering the helicopter.

A day after I arrived in Nome, I met with David Karp at the visitors bureau and set his office up as the place to take calls from reporters and from my brain-trust team. After I finished making the calls, a man named Larry Maine introduced himself. He knew David Karp and said that he was a fisherman from Petersburg, Alaska, who’d come to Nome to dredge and sift the beach sand for gold. He camped on the beach and dressed in worn-out clothes. There was a lot of time and weather etched in his face, but he seemed very kind, and that day he offered to walk on the beach with me as I swam. He did it every day, even when it was raining, or there were fierce winds, or even sandstorms. I remember asking him why he had volunteered and he said that sometimes you just need to have someone with you, to know that he cares. Although I never told him, I think he knew how much it meant to have him walk beside me. There were days when I didn’t want to swim, especially during the sandstorms, but I knew Larry would be waiting for me. He not only inspired me, he also represented all those people who had sent me their prayers and best wishes.

Person by person, the support was growing. Then Claire Richardson, a reporter from KNOM radio station, began doing daily updates about the planned swim. Soon KICY and other radio stations in Alaska started picking up the story, then radio stations in southern California. The
Los Angeles Times
ran a series of stories. Then the
Orange County Register
joined in, then the
Seattle Times
and the
Anchorage Daily News.
Then CNN did a story, and all the network television stations began calling. The media was intrigued with the idea. But they all knew that nothing counted unless we managed to get the Soviets to open the border. And then I’d have to make the swim.

The phone was ringing as David Karp and I entered the Nome visitors center. It was Gene Fisher, Bob Walsh’s assistant. Walsh was in Moscow organizing the Goodwill Games and was meeting with Soviet officials. Fisher sounded excited. He had heard from the Soviets. They had sent a telex requesting the names of our crew members, their dates and places of birth, and their passport numbers. The Soviets also wanted to know if there was anything in particular we would need at the end of the swim. I requested blankets, a hot-water bottle, hot drinks, and a babushka. I later learned that
babushka
in Russian means grandmother, not, as it has come to mean in English, a brightly colored shawl or scarf. The “babushka,” I thought, would identify us as landing in the Soviet Union and it would symbolize the brightness and warmth of our meeting.

I asked Gene if this meant that we had Soviet permission. He said it didn’t, but we were making progress.

Whatever it meant, to me it felt like a warm breeze was stirring around us after a very long, cold, hard winter—a promise that the ice would thaw and spring would arrive. But we were less than three weeks away from the target date.

My hand was shaking as I dialed Bruce Evans at Senator Murkowski’s office. He had just spoken with the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., and they hadn’t heard anything from Moscow, but he promised to keep the pressure on. He would convey the news to Senator Murkowski and he would ask the senator to put a call in to the Soviet ambassador in Washington with the hope that Ambassador
Dobrynin’s inquiry would prod Moscow to provide further information and even commitment. Meanwhile, Ed Salazar would check with the State Department and send another prompt to our embassy in Moscow with a request that they touch base with the Soviet Foreign Ministry.

Joe Novella, an ABC television producer, called and said that ABC wanted to take a gamble. They wanted to cover the story with or without Soviet approval. They planned to run a preswim story as well as one during the swim, and immediately afterward they wanted to fly me to New York City for an interview. If President Gorbachev didn’t know about the project by now, we could send him the news story with the hope that it would help persuade him to grant me a visa.

From an elevation of a thousand feet, the Alaskan tundra rolled out before us in a tapestry of red mosses, white lichen, jade shrubs, and emerald grasses. Woven throughout the land’s contours were brightly colored wildflowers, silvery blueberry bushes, and countless clear rippling brooks and streams. In the warm, intense arctic light the land sparkled and vibrated with energy and life.

Joe Novella and Randy Tolbin, his cameraman; our pilot; and I flew north by northwest, skirting the North American continent, bound for Wales, Alaska, the jumping-off point for Little Diomede Island. Crosswinds shook, turned, twisted, and jarred the plane. Looking at the pilot, I wondered how he kept us in the air. He saw me and turned slightly in his seat, grinned, and said, “Don’t worry, it will smooth out after we pass the mountains. You know, I think what
you’re attempting is great, and I am very happy I’m the one getting you to your starting point.”

As we rounded the foothills of the York Mountains, our small Cessna cast a tiny, bouncing shadow on the wide golden hills. There was great contrast—we were dwarfed by the magnitude of the environment, yet there was something so expansive about Alaska, something that infused the soul, that made you believe you could reach enormous dreams. It might be because the land in Alaska is so open, untouched, wilder than wild, and bigger than any imagination can hold; or it might be that the colossal size of the mountains, like the Brooks Range in the northern part of the state, matches the way Alaskans think. They carry with them a pioneering attitude, a belief that impossible things are possible.

From Anchorage to Nome, and now to Wales, whenever Alaskans heard about our plans, they did what many others hadn’t—they immediately embraced and supported the idea of swimming the Bering Strait, and that was truly inspiring. They made me feel the way our pilot did that day, like we were finally on the right path at the right time.

As we rounded some foothills, suddenly off to the left were sparkling, deep, lapis-blue waters. There it was! After eleven years of dreaming, working, and believing, I was seeing it for the very first time in real life, the Bering Sea. I stared at it, trying to match up what I had envisioned in my mind’s eye with the reality of what I was seeing. It was almost too much to comprehend. Yes, there it was—the Bering Sea. It was right below us, so blue, so vast, so wild, so beautiful and awesome. And somewhere in the middle of all that blue were Little Diomede and Big Diomede. We were getting closer, and my spirits were soaring high over the sea.

Studying the water more closely, I tried to tell how high the waves were. But I had no way to gauge distance or height from the air, so I asked the pilot. Rapidly breaking waves, four to five feet high, covered the Bering Sea to the horizon. This was typical weather, and that was sobering information. With only one week remaining before my proposed departure for the swim, we still hoped that we would hear from
the navy or coast guard and that they would support the swim. There was a good chance that the water would be much rougher in the middle of the Bering Strait. We had to have a safety net.

To our right, on the very edge of the Bering Sea, in a flat section of land between the foothills, was the village of Wales. Thirty small, dark wooden homes were clustered together around an unusual community center: a three-story-high building painted snow-white and shaped like an igloo.

The pilot fought strong crosswinds and landed us on the runway. As we stepped out of the plane, he said another pilot would meet us for the return flight, then radioed Eric Pentilla, our helicopter pilot to Little Diomede. The weather was very unstable in a village to the north of us, so he would have to wait to see if it would be possible for him to take off. In the meantime, we were invited to stay at the community center.

A local villager driving a beat-up old van gave us a lift into town. We drove along a narrow dirt road past small, storm-worn homes, most with plastic tarps for windows and doors. I imagined how cold and how difficult it must be to live there all year long. None of the homes had fireplaces, and there were no trees; I wondered if they had electricity or any way to heat their homes. In their backyards were clotheslines covered with the black drying carcasses of walruses and seabirds, and some backyards had satellite dishes. The village looked so small and fragile against the great expanse of land and sea.

At the community center, a young Inuit woman with a long black ponytail greeted us and invited us up to the third floor. As we climbed upstairs, we saw a group of teenagers playing pool and talking. The young woman led us to an office and offered us hot coffee. She explained that about 150 people lived in Wales. The men in the village were primarily walrus hunters. They and their families ate the meat, and they carved the tusks and sold them to tourists in Nome and Anchorage, or used the scrimshaw as money in trade. She was very interested in what we were doing and said that we were welcome to stay the night if the weather did not improve.

For three hours we waited, pacing the edge of the Bering Strait in
an icy cold wind. Finally, we heard from Eric Pentilla. He would wait another hour. If the weather conditions improved, he would pick us up, but if they didn’t, he would have to fly to another village to deliver mail and supplies. That would mean that we would be delayed in Wales for a day, maybe more. Everything in Alaska seemed to depend upon the whim of the weather.

Another hour passed and we began making plans to spend the night. Then we heard the throb of helicopter engines. The van driver explained we had to hurry. This was only a break in the weather, and we had to get out of town immediately. Clambering into his van again, we were taken to a flat piece of land at the edge of the village, where Pentilla was waiting. Quickly we loaded the helicopter and climbed in. Pentilla, who looks like Harrison Ford but taller, handed us headphones and told us—so quickly that I wanted him to repeat it—what to do if he had to ditch the helicopter in the Bering Sea. He said there were life jackets under our seats, flares, and an emergency kit. But the sense of his message was: I’m telling you this because I have to. In reality, your survival time in these waters is five to ten minutes maximum, and there are no rescue boats between Wales and Little Diomede, so you don’t need to worry. If the helicopter crashes, you will die.

Pentilla opened the throttle, checked his watch, and said that if we made it to Little Diomede, we wouldn’t have much time there; it was late, and he had been flying all day. He flicked a series of switches; spoke into the radio, telling someone somewhere about our destination; did a quick visual inspection; got a weather update; and opened the throttle further. The engine sound heightened, the helicopter trembled, and we lifted off.

This was my first helicopter ride, and sitting there inside the glass dome, I felt like I was riding inside an enormous bubble. Sunlight poured into the cockpit, warming it to at least eighty degrees. Everything inside the bubble sparkled. Once through the cloud layer, we floated across the intense blue sky with a puffy white carpet rolling out before us as far as the eye could see.

Finally, after eleven years of dreaming about Little and Big
Diomede, I would see the islands, and I couldn’t wait to get out there. But the cockpit was so warm and the air was calm, and I was enjoying every second of the experience.

At the edge of the horizon, there was a great hole in the cloud carpet. Circling the hole and tipping the helicopter forward, Pentilla looked straight down. Then he pulled back up, deciding where to descend. When he started down it suddenly felt as if we were free-falling into a giant vortex. It was as if a great whirlpool in the air were sucking us down, shaking and twisting us like we were in a coffee grinder. The helicopter itself seemed to be screaming and hollering as the blades tried to hold on to unstable air. Pentilla clenched the joystick and tried to control it. “It’s a little bumpier than I expected,” he said, his voice shaking from the helicopter’s vibrations.

The wind was plummeting into us so hard that I wondered if it would project our bodies through the glass bubble. Just ahead of us, to our right, emerging from the clouds and mist, was Little Diomede, a cone-shaped volcanic island, rocky and green and seeming to bound up and down on a viscous sea.

“I’m going to try to descend to two hundred feet,” Pentilla shouted.

The wind gusts were shifting us from side to side. It was as if we were riding at the tip of a nervous dog’s wagging tail. Pentilla fought to hold the helicopter in a straight line, but he couldn’t control the aircraft in the windstorm. He couldn’t descend farther. Suddenly a gust caught the helicopter and tossed us down to within fifty feet of the sea. Fear registered on Pentilla’s face.

The waves right below the helicopter’s runners were large. I couldn’t tell how high they were, but they were creating choppy air, and the helicopter wasn’t responding to Pentilla’s commands. Holding on tight, we watched Pentilla and felt the waves pulling us down. Suddenly, to our left, the wind lifted a cloud bank like a huge curtain, and there was Big Diomede—the Soviet Union, less than three miles away. I was too focused on what we were doing at that moment to be excited. Only the image registered—
Oh, there’s the island.
The clearer thought was,
Are we going to make it down alive?

Pentilla shouted to us over the radio, “We’re going to try to land on that barge.”

The barge was a rusting old ship that had sunk during a storm. The upper section of the ship had been cut off and transformed into a landing ramp. From our position, the barge was the size of a postage stamp. But the island itself was composed of black rocks and boulders; there was no alternative place to land.

“Eric, will you be landing?” a man’s voice asked over the radio. “The wind’s from the southwest at forty to forty-five knots.” It seemed like the man strongly questioned Pentilla’s actions. But so far, all Pentilla had done was show us that he was an incredible pilot.

“Yes, that’s an affirmative,” he said.

The wind was bouncing us and shaking us radically. Pentilla dropped the nose slightly, and just as we reached the barge, eight feet above the landing area, a huge gust tossed us to the left, way off target. Quickly Pentilla added throttle; the helicopter teetered between flying and falling. Somehow we surged upward.

Pentilla made a second attempt, but the wind tossed us nearly sideways, into the island.

“I’ll try one more time. If we don’t get down this time, we’ll have to turn back. We don’t have enough fuel to make another attempt,” Pentilla said.

Our necks were snapping from side to side, and I wished I had gotten more out of Pentilla’s safety demonstration.

We circled around and descended again. To our right, we could see tiny, brightly painted houses on stilts built into the hillside of the extinct volcano. Below us were two men bent over against the wind, signaling Pentilla with flashlights. He dropped to ten feet above the barge and hovered, waiting for a moment to center the helicopter. Slammed sideways by a wind gust, we dangled over the water.

For a split second I hoped that Pentilla would abort the attempt; but he waited, felt the wind, held out for a pause, maneuvered the helicopter into position, crabbed sideways, and set us down.

We cheered and then sat there, unable to speak, while two villagers latched the helicopter’s runners to the dredge so it wouldn’t be blown
into the sea. Then Pentilla let out a deep breath and grinned. We slapped him on the shoulder. He grinned again and admitted that the landing had been more difficult than he’d anticipated.

When I stepped out of the warm bubble, a blast of cold arctic air nearly blew me off the barge and into the water. Waves were crashing close by, over a small breakwater. One of the villagers, a young woman, grabbed my hand and guided me to a place where I could climb down onto the rocks and land.

Once there, I turned around and looked at the Bering Sea. I was horrified. It was rougher than any ocean I had ever seen. Rougher than the Strait of Magellan, rougher than the Cape of Good Hope, rougher than anything I had ever dreamed in my worst nightmares. I couldn’t register what I was seeing.
It can’t be like this,
I thought.
How is this ever going to work?
There was no way a walrus-skin boat or even a navy ship could navigate these waters without sinking. Staring across at Big Diomede, I thought,
That island is only 2.7 miles from us, but it might as well be a million.
At that moment I felt farther from the crossing than I had in eleven years.

Novella, Tolbin, and Pentilla joined me on the beach. The air was frigid, it felt like it was going to snow, and the wind was blowing so fiercely we had to shout into each other’s ears. Tolbin pulled a cap over his red hair. His blue eyes were tearing up from the cold. He asked me if I was going to train along a ten-yard-long strip of beach.

It wasn’t safe to train even three feet from shore. The current was so strong that it would whisk me out to sea. “It’s too rough,” I said.

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.