Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [111]
Novella, Tolbin, and Pentilla joined me on the beach. The air was frigid, it felt like it was going to snow, and the wind was blowing so fiercely we had to shout into each other’s ears. Tolbin pulled a cap over his red hair. His blue eyes were tearing up from the cold. He asked me if I was going to train along a ten-yard-long strip of beach.
It wasn’t safe to train even three feet from shore. The current was so strong that it would whisk me out to sea. “It’s too rough,” I said.
Tolbin and Novella nodded like they understood, and I was surprised. They needed film footage, but they weren’t going to pressure me.
Following Pentilla, we climbed a steep embankment to the community center, where Pat Omiak, the mayor of Little Diomede, was waiting for us. He was wearing a green-and-white baseball cap that read, “Patrick was a saint but I ain’t.” He led us down a rocky path to a wooden rack where seven umiaks were stored hull-side up. They were thirty feet long, made of walrus skin stretched over a wooden frame and stitched together with walrus gut, and had outboard motors. Omiak pointed out that the stitches were close together so the boats wouldn’t leak. And the hides were replaced every three to five years, because they had a tendency to rot and tear.
The boats seemed flimsy but he quoted me a price of five thousand dollars. That was beyond anything I could afford. I asked him to consider five hundred dollars, still more than anything I had paid for a boat that would travel only ten or fifteen miles. Omiak said he would consider it, but he had to talk to the boys about it. “The boys” were a group of men who were the walrus hunters, and they were the ones who fed the village. Omiak said he would let me know.
While Novella and Tolbin filmed, I walked back to the edge of the sea. Two young boys joined me. The older boy, maybe twelve years old, told me that no one on the island knew how to swim, not even the walrus hunters. “The water’s too cold. If they fall in, they die,” he said.
A teenage girl in a red parka with long brown hair and large brown eyes came over and joined in our conversation. When the boys wandered off, she stayed beside me. “We are very close neighbors with the Soviets,” she said. “I hope someday we can be friends with them. That has been my dream for many years.”
It was as if she was the voice of the child within me from so many years ago. It was as if she had come to me to remind me of why I was there. I had to remind myself that so many things had seemed impossible so many times, all along this odyssey I had to alter my thinking. If I didn’t try, everything would be lost. Oh sure, I’d learned many lessons along the way, but my reason for all of this would remain unfulfilled. I couldn’t stand that.
“Is the weather always like this?” I asked.
“No, it changes every day, sometimes every twenty minutes,” she said.
“So the weather conditions get better?”
“Yes, sometimes the water is even flat. That won’t happen today. But it’s not always like this,” she said reassuringly.
“Thank you for telling me that—I feel much better now,” I said.
“Are you really going to swim over there?” she asked.
“I’m going to try,” I said.
“No one here thinks you can do it. But I do,” she said.
Our takeoff from Little Diomede was white-knuckle frightening, but once we cleared the cloud pack, the trip to Wales was bumpy but uneventful. Novella and Tolbin returned to Nome in the airplane chartered by ABC television, and I flew back with Pentilla. He was tired, and I appreciated all that he had done for us.
A few minutes after we lifted off from Wales, we heard someone speaking Russian over the radio. Pentilla explained that it was Russian