Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (39 page)

He had arranged for Trudy to make her final preparations to swim the Channel at the Hotel du Sirene, on the beach, but before she left the Hotel du Phare, Meg applied the first coating of olive oil to Trudy's body as Burgess hovered outside her door and admonished her to hurry up. Then Trudy donned her innovative, two-piece suit—the WSA logo and an American flag patch sewn onto the front of her brassiere—her red bathing cap, and a robe. It was 6:45
A.M. AS
soon as she was dressed they all hopped back into taxis and private cars and made their way to the beach, where Trudy, Meg, and Burgess went into the garage of the hotel and applied still more grease to her body, this time a darker, tarry substance that left Trudy looking and smelling like she had just left Burgess's garage back in Paris. Before Trudy began her short walk to the beach from the hotel, Meg helped her pull her goggles on over her head and pulled the strap tight.

Then Trudy strode purposefully to the beach, where the crowd now numbered nearly a hundred people, like she was out for a morning constitutional. She walked briskly, taking deep breaths, and carefully adjusted the goggles to her face, taking care not to smear grease over the glass surface. As the crowd gathered around, Burgess stood barefoot in the sand, his sleeves and pant legs rolled up, a plaid driver's cap perched on his head. He opened a can of lanolin and applied yet another layer of grease on Trudy's body, rubbing the thick substance up and down Trudy's legs, around her neck and under her arms, everywhere and anywhere he thought might be susceptible to chafing. The newsmen called greetings to Trudy, and she responded with good-natured humor. "I'll make it this time," she predicted. Then, looking at her hands, she held her arms wide and with a huge smile on her face she held her fingers, heavy with grease, apart and quipped, "I feel just like a grease ball!" At the prodding of a cameraman, Lillian Cannon, wearing a full-length coat to ward off the morning chill, stepped from the crowd and gingerly shook Trudy's hand and wished her good luck. As a newsreel cameraman captured the scene, the little dog that had swum ashore from the boat stuck its nose in the can of grease and slurped down great gobs of lanolin, drawing laughs from those on the shore.

For some, that was all they found amusing. Most of the forty journalists or so on the beach, roughly equal in number from the United States, England, and France, had assumed they'd be able to board the
Alsace
and accompany Trudy on her journey—that had been the custom when others tried to swim the Channel, and no one had indicated that wouldn't be the case this time. But the
Tribune-News
syndicate was protective of its story. It had paid for the boat, and only Julia Harpman and a few others—the photographer Arthur Sorenson, John Hayward, a journalist from the British newspaper the
Daily Sketch,
who would serve as the official observer, Meg, Helmi, Henry Ederle, and a few crew members were authorized to board the ship. The rest were left, quite literally, high and dry. Unless another boat could hastily be hired, they would all have some explaining to do to their editors and would witness only the start of the swim.

By the time Burgess finished coating Trudy with grease it was already just after 7:00
A.M.,
and the trainer was anxious to get going. He had plotted her course to take advantage of his knowledge of the tides, and every minute mattered.

No other swimmer had ever tried the course Burgess intended to have Trudy follow, but he was absolutely convinced that after nearly three decades of observation of the Channel, and untold hours spent in its waters, he had finally figured out the best way across. A year before, as was customary, Trudy had clambered into the waters from the rocks at the base of Cape Gris-Nez itself, the nearest point to Dover, a starting point that seemed to make common sense. If a swimmer left at the right time, after only a few strokes he or she was able to take advantage of the current.

Burgess, however, had recently reached a different conclusion. The previous summer he had watched not only Trudy's swim, but the swims of both Lillian Harrison and Jeanne Sion, and he had since taken to the water himself dozens of times and checked his theory personally, feeling the pull of the current on his own body.

Unlike Ederle, in 1925 Lillian Harrison had started her swim from the small sand beach near the Hotel du Sirene. As a result she had begun her journey in the calmer waters, protected by Cape Gris-Nez itself, giving her an opportunity to set her pace before being buffeted by open water. She had not entered the current until she cleared the cape, and as a result, she had not been pushed quite so far to the west, so that when the tide changed and turned back she had not quite so much distance to cover. Later, when Jeanne Sion had left from the cape itself, like Ederle, Burgess simultaneously started swimming from the beach just so he could gauge how much that small change would impact the route toward England. As he suspected, he found the route much easier and more efficient. He had, in fact, lingered in the water and eventually been picked up by Sion's escort vessel when she finally made her way to his position. Later that day when Burgess returned to shore, he told Alec Rutherford that after more than twenty-five years of splashing around in the Channel he believed he had "solved the riddle of the tides." Trudy would test his theory.

His plan was for her to swim to England following the familiar Z-shaped route. Ideally, four hours and twenty minutes before high tide in Dover, Trudy would enter the water at the beach and strike out due north for twenty minutes. Once she cleared Cape Gris-Nez she would encounter the westward-flowing rising tide, then change her heading to the northwest for two hours—more or less running with the tide while swimming farther out into the Channel, a course that would carry her some three or four miles west of Gris-Nez.

Then it was time to change course again, steering north-northwest, quarter north for the next seven hours. Even though this seemed somewhat counterintuitive, by keeping that bearing she would gain ground toward England even as she was swept along. As the tide would turn and begin sweeping the Channel waters through the Strait of Dover and into the North Sea, Trudy would cut cross the current and swim closer to England even as she was being swept to the northeast.

If all went well, at the end of seven hours the swimmer would be about three miles east of the South Goodwin lightship and in position to make for the coast on the last leg of the Z, first through slack water and then the next rising tide, landing on the coast somewhere between Dover and Folkestone. If she swam particularly well she might be even closer to the lightship, leaving even less distance to cover to make a successful landing and less of a chance of being overcome by fatigue, which could result in being caught too far offshore and then swept past Dover and even farther down the coast.

According to Burgess's calculations, if Trudy swam to her ability she could make the English coast in about fourteen hours, a record time, but one Burgess thought was achievable, based on her strength as a swimmer. He distributed a map to the press that showed her route and his projection of her progress each hour. Of course, the wind and the weather could wreak havoc with any plan, but this was where Burgess's years of experience might prove critical—if something went wrong, he could make adjustments on the fly. His only real concern was if the weather changed and slowed her down, for if she was too far south of the Goodwin Sands when the tide began running, she would be pushed to the west, nearly parallel to the English coast. Not even Trudy, thought Burgess, was a strong enough swimmer to cut perpendicularly across such a strong tide.

It was time to go. Trudy was already fifteen, almost twenty minutes late getting into the water, and as Burgess well knew, a few minutes could be the difference between making the shore and coming excruciatingly close, between success and failure, and potentially, life and death. There was no margin.

Quickly, with little fanfare, he urged Trudy toward the sea, then gave her a quick peck on the cheek before she reached the water, taking care not to touch her once she began to wade in the surf, for if he did, even in waters only ankle deep, that would, according to tradition, be enough to void her effort. Trudy then walked confidently to the water's edge near the two rowboats waiting to ferry those lucky enough to have passage on board the
Alsace.

As Burgess and several others waded through the shallow water and cautiously climbed into the boats, each of which bore both an American and a French flag, Trudy turned to Meg, trailing behind and carrying her purse, and gave a little wave. Then she turned her back on France and waded into the surf.

England was ahead of her, she knew that, but the day had already turned so hazy that only the barest outline of the cliffs on the opposite coast could be seen, appearing more as an apparition than a tangible landscape, the same tantalizing view that had called so many before her to cross the waters. Breathing deeply, gathering herself, Trudy plowed through the water, walking, feeling the sand beneath her feet, and then, as the water rose past her waist to her chest, she began to feel lighter. When a small wave tossed water up to her chin, she lifted her head to the sky, whispered, "Please, God, help me," then bent her head, reached out with her arms, and dove in beneath the waters.

On board the
Alsace
and on the shore, the first wireless reports crackled out through the atmosphere, telling the world she had started to swim.

Cape Gris-Nez., Aug 6. (By the Associated Press)
—Gertrude Ederle, the American Swimmer, started at 7:09 o'clock this morning in an attempt to swim the English Channel. The weather conditions when she took her plunge were fine.

"Please, God, help me." As her head left the air, Trudy tried to think of nothing else—nothing important, nothing that mattered, and nothing that didn't touch her at that instant. Nothing but the water and the air, the sea and the sky, her hands and arms reaching out, her legs kicking, her face turning toward the sky breathing in, then turning, under the water, breathing out.

The start, she knew, was the hardest part. As she plunged into the water and began to swim, her body, swept over by the cold, was still in pieces—her arms felt stiff, each stroke still uncertain, wavering, irregular, and as she kicked her legs she went at first too fast, then too slow, then back and forth, holding them too stiffly, then too relaxed, as she tried to find the place where her arms and hands and legs and feet were all one piece, in harmony. She tried to find that special place atop the water and in her mind where she did not feel the cold or the spray or the difference between the air and the water, lightness and dark, day or night. A place where there was no time at all.

In ... out ... in ... out ... this was the worst. In shorter swims—one hundred yards, two hundred yards, three hundred, she hardly ever thought of breathing, and never thought of anything but going fast, breathing fast, reaching out, and kicking and breathing. Then all she did was pull with her arms and feel the water slip away as she churned along for a minute or two or three, taking deep breaths and exhaling, one after the other, until she moved through the water like running downhill, so fast that it felt like it was over before she started, before she even felt tired, before she even had time to think.

This was different, far different from the long swims she took during training, or back in the Highlands with Meg, where she didn't think about swimming at all but laughed and giggled and talked about a million things as she swam. It was hard not to swim as fast as she could, by herself for now, and even as it pained her to admit it, she knew that today, in order to go fast she somehow had to go slow. It was funny, but the farther she had to swim the slower she had to swim, and the slower she swam the harder it was for her to find that place, the place Julia Harpman called her "personal sphere." The writer had tried to talk to her about it, tried to ask her what she felt and what she thought of when she was in the water for hours, but Trudy had no words for what she thought or felt because when she reached that place there
were
no words for what she thought or what she felt, just the feeling of being lifted up and held from below, a soft hand carrying her away, deeper and farther...

She was not there yet, and as she stroked and kicked and breathed, she had not reached that place. She could still hear the gulls, and the splash and the slap of water had not faded the way the sound of the wind faded when it blew hard all night through an open window, or the way the sound of the rain on the rooftops slipped into a single soft surface, or the way the sound of the cars going past her home on Amsterdam Avenue ran together and made a kind of music.

It was hard for her to hear things. She knew this, but she did not know what it was like to hear everything. She did not know that everything she heard was softer and rounder and muffled, that words ran together sometimes, and that music soared and lifted and sank, like the water, like the sea, a single sound like a river running past, or a stream, all rapids and falls and quiet corners. She knew it was hard, but sometimes she thought that by being partially deaf it was actually easier for her to hear, because even though she heard less she listened more. She heard enough to know when voices were talking over hers, not waiting for her ears to hear, and she knew there were sounds that stayed with her that others missed, low rumbles and hums and whispers and laughs, secrets she heard and kept to herself.

Then it happened. For a few moments she had not thought of her arms or her legs or the water or air. For a moment she had been there, away in her place. She simply listened to the sea and spoke to it not with words but thoughts, and felt the water ride over the sea bottom and sensed the way the wind pushed the waves flat and pressed her flesh as she slipped between the sea and the air. It was like sliding into bed and finding that place, that comfortable spot between the sheet and the coverlet, her head on the pillow, and slipping into sleep.