Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [0]
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue A Cold Day in August
1 Beginnings
2 Leaving Home
3 Open Water
4 Twenty-six Miles Across the Sea
5 English Channel
6 White Cliffs of Dover
7 Homecoming
8 Invitation to Egypt
9 Lost in the Fog
10 Cook Strait, New Zealand
11 Human Research Subject
12 The Strait of Magellan
13 Around the Cape of Good Hope
14 Around the World in Eighty Days
15 Glacier Bay
16 Facing the Bomb
17 The A-Team
18 Mind-Blowing
19 Debate
20 Across the Bering Strait
21 Success
22 Siberia’s Gold Medal
23 Swimming to Antarctica
Afterword
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Allen Daviau; Anne Rice; Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; Vicky Wilson, my editor; and Martha Kaplan, my agent, for all their help in getting this book published.
I would like to also thank David Remnick, Dorothy Wickenden, and Cressida Leyshon at The New Yorker for their support and for publishing my article “Swimming to Antarctica.”
Thank you to my grandfather, Arthur Daviau, M.D., for his support and his great genes.
And thank you to Kenny Hawkins, Dusty Nicol, Linda Halker, and everyone at Knopf for their help in transforming my manuscript into a book. It’s been a big dream for so many years, and finally an incredible reality.
Lastly, thank you to all my family and friends who believed in me and in this story for so many years. Thank you all very much!
PROLOGUE
A Cold Day in August
It is August 7, 1987, and I am swimming across the Bering Sea. I am somewhere near—or across—the U.S.-Soviet border. The water stings. It’s icy cold. My face feels as if it has been shot full of novocaine and it’s separating from my skull. It’s as if I’m swimming naked into a blizzard. My hands are numb, and they ache deep down through the bone. I can’t tell if they are pulling any water. They feel as though they are becoming detached from my body. I look down at them through the ash-colored water: they are splotchy and bluish white; they are the hands of a dead person. I take a tight, nervous breath. Suddenly it occurs to me that my life is escaping through my hands.
This frigid and ominous sea is behaving like an enormous vampire slowly sucking the warmth, the life from my body, and I think, Oh my God, pick up your pace. Swim faster, faster. You’ve got to go as fast as you can. You’ve got to create more heat. Or you will die!
I try to lift my arms over more rapidly. They are sore and sluggish. I am tired. I have been sprinting, swimming as fast as I can go, for more than an hour. But I sense that I am fading, becoming less of myself. Is my blood sugar dropping? Is that why I feel so strange? Or is my body temperature plunging? Am I hypothermic? Systematically I check my body. My lips feel pickled; my throat is parched and raw from the briny water. I want to stop to drink some fresh water and catch my breath. But the water is too cold to allow me to pause for even a moment. If I do, more heat will be drained from my body, heat that I will never regain.
Through foggy goggles, I continue monitoring my body. I’ve never pushed myself this far. The coldest water I’ve ever swum in was thirty-eight degrees in Glacier Bay Alaska, and that was only for twenty-eight minutes. This swim is five times longer. I am afraid of going beyond the point of no return. The problem is that my brain could cool down without my being aware of it, which would cause a dangerous loss of judgment. I glance at my shoulders and arms: they are as red as lobsters. This is a very good sign. My body is fighting to protect itself from the cold by employing a defense mechanism called vasoconstriction. It is diverting blood flow away from my hands and feet, arms and legs to the core of my body; it is keeping my brain and vital organs warm so they will continue to function normally.
I reach out and pull faster and, through muscle movement, try to create heat more quickly than I am losing it. My breaths are short and rapid, and my chest is heaving. My heart is pounding. I am afraid.
The fog is growing heavier; the air is saturated