Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [109]
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