Swimming to Antarctica (30 page)

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 and 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.

The media fell silent and did something I had never seen before from the press: they nodded in agreement.

Dr. Keatinge and Dr. Nyboer were getting agitated. They could see that I was starting to stagger.

“We’ve got to move her now. She’s really cooling down,” Dr. Keatinge said.

But the reporter with Radio Moscow asked in English, “Who were the corporate sponsors?”

Suddenly I was embarrassed. I saw all that the Soviets had done— they had moved ships, helicopters, people, everything to this island. Later I would find out they had spent nearly a million dollars. What could I tell them? That no large U.S. corporation had really supported us? That none of them had believed the Soviets would open their border? I didn’t want to embarrass the United States.