Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [128]
A man in a green uniform reached down toward me alongside Vladimir McMillian. I pulled off my goggles and stuck them in my mouth. After more than two hours in the icy water, I needed both hands to crawl out of the sea. I tried to move forward, but the incline was steep, and I slid backward. I stepped up. Three men were leaning toward me, extending their arms as far as they could go. They were smiling and shouting in Russian. I leaned forward and reached as high as I could. I felt the warmth of their hands in mine.
A Soviet man was talking to me, draping his coat over my shoulders. A woman with dark reddish-brown hair who said her name was Rita Zakharova was piling blankets over me. They were heavy. My legs were so wobbly. I had to bend my knees to stand.
Vladimir McMillian was kissing me all over my face, as if I were his long-lost relative. Someone else wrapped a green towel on top of the blankets. Dr. Keatinge and Dr. Nyboer were on either side of me, supporting me under each arm. Dr. Keatinge said in a controlled, calm voice, “We’ve got to get her to the tent as quickly as possible to get her warm.”
Vladimir wasn’t listening; he was too excited and happy. His mother was Russian and his father was American. They had met after World War II, had married, and his father had stayed in the Soviet Union. That was why he spoke English so well. He was thrilled because half of him was Russian and the other half was American and he had seen with his own eyes the two nations, like the two parts of himself, coming together that day. It was something he never thought he’d see.
Vladimir kept talking, introducing everyone on the beach to me. It was very hard to concentrate. I was so cold, and I just wanted to curl up into a ball somewhere and get warm. It didn’t help that I was standing on the ice in bare feet, or that the air temperature was in the low forties. Vladimir introduced me to the Soviet press, but I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. More than once he had to repeat himself. But his comrades were only too happy to wait. “That man is from Radio Moscow. This woman is from Pravda.” He said their names, and I couldn’t catch them at all.
In the background, Dr. Keatinge was insisting that we head for a tent pitched on a steep hill on the rocky island. But Vladimir was holding my arm, and he wasn’t about to let go. I didn’t want him to; I wanted to meet everyone there, to see their faces, to see real live Russians, people I had been afraid of all my life.
It was so strange; they were all smiling, all excited, all thrilled to be there.
Vladimir introduced me to a man from Vremya, on Russian television. It’s called Time, like our Sixty Minutes. Vladimir himself was the reporter from TASS, he repeated, and then explained that the Soviets on the beach had been specially selected to be on this beach and to greet the Americans. They had been transported from all over the Soviet Union to meet us on Big Diomede. He introduced the Soviet national swim coach, a world-champion boxer, the governor of Siberia, the commander of a military garrison, a KGB officer, and three Siberian Inuit women doctors.
An Inuit woman wearing a bright red parka told me that she was a pediatrician in Magadan and kissed me on both cheeks. At the same time, I kissed her the same way. She was small and pretty, with black hair and delicate Asian eyes, and her lips felt so warm. Smiling, she handed me a bouquet of wildflowers that she had gathered from her village on the Siberian mainland. The flowers were the same ones I had seen on the Alaskan mainland—magenta fireweed, turquoise forget-me-nots, lavender wild asters, and goldenrod. And she said that at one time the two countries had been joined by a land bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska. When the sea rose in the Bering Strait, the continents were separated. She said that she was very happy that