Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [115]
That evening, my crew gathered with me at the bar in the Gold Nugget Hotel in Nome to watch the preswim story produced by Joe Novella and Randy Tolbin. The piece was moving. They conveyed the awesome beauty and sheer vastness of the Alaskan frontier. They also ran an interview with me explaining the reason for the swim. And then they did something brilliant. They used a film clip of Gorbachev stepping off a plane, and the commentator ended the piece by saying, “The question is, Will General Secretary Gorbachev give Lynne permission to make her swim?”
Now the swim was directly linked with Gorbachev, and we asked friends to immediately express-mail a copy of the ABC tape to the Soviet ambassador and to General Secretary Gorbachev at the Kremlin. We hoped he would see the video and do something to help. We didn’t know then that communications had broken down between the different groups inside the Soviet Union or that something else was happening behind the scenes.
19
Debate
After the airing of the television story, Dr. Nyboer Jr., Dr. Nyboer Sr., Maria Sullivan, Dr. Keatinge, Rich Roberts, Claire Richardson, Jim McHugh, Jack Kelley, and I met at an Italian restaurant in Nome to do some serious carbohydrate loading.
We got our menus and ordered; while we waited for the food to arrive, Jim McHugh voiced the question that was on everyone’s minds: “If the Soviets don’t give you permission to swim to Big Diomede, will you go across anyway?”
This was the question I had been contemplating for the past three days.
“You know, it would make a fabulous story,” McHugh said, bouncing a little in his chair, his brown eyes lit up and his dark brown eyebrows pulled up into question marks. He was very excited. He was a passionate, highly reactive guy, a photographer I had met before when People magazine had done a preswim story.
Jack Kelley, his friend and the writer for the story, was a strong contrast. He was contemplative, gentle, and very balanced.
Both were great guys. It had taken a lot for them to convince their editors that this swim could happen, and I was happy they were with us.
Jack Kelley pushed his glasses back and ran his hand through his wavy salt-and-pepper hair. He sat back in his chair and objected to McHugh’s suggestion. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. If you cross into Soviet territory they could lock us up in prison indefinitely.”
“Oh, come on, Jack, do you really think they’d put Lynne in prison?” McHugh argued.
“They certainly could,” Jack said.
Rich Roberts, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times whom I had known since I was fourteen, when he’d started doing stories about my swims, entered the conversation. Rich was a strong, compact man in his mid-forties, an avid sailor who had grown up in the newspaper business. He knew the way the world worked. And he agreed with Kelley He said, “What you meant, Jack, was that they’d put all of us in prison. But Jim’s right—the story would go worldwide.” Rich smiled, a twinkle in his brown eyes. He was willing to risk it.
“Just think, I could get some great first shots from inside a real Soviet gulag,” Jim McHugh mused.
“That is, if you can get the film out,” Jack Kelley said, and then laughed.
“We could smuggle it out in Lynne’s bathing suit,” Rich Roberts suggested.
As Kelley twirled some spaghetti around his fork, he said, “You know, it would be very dramatic, especially if they sent gunboats to meet us. I doubt they’d put us in prison. It would look bad for Gorbachev and his new policy of openness.”
“He’s right. Lynne, you’ve trained a long time for this,” Dr. Nyboer Jr. said. “You’ve put a lot of effort into it, and you should go for it.” He knew what it was all about. As a marathon runner, he understood the commitment it took to reach this point as well as anyone could.
Suddenly Dr. William Keatinge sat straight up in his chair and said, “Look, Lynne, I think we’re all getting a bit carried away here. I’ve been trying