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By Root 491 0

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.

18

Mind-Blowing

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