• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 367 0

greet us. Our youngest crew members were standing onshore, cheering and clapping. I saw their smiling faces beneath their hoods, and I smiled too. I tried to stand up gradually. It was difficult moving from a horizontal position to a vertical one; it put a lot of stress on my heart, and I felt unsteady. The rocks, small as pancakes, flat, and blunt-edged like shale, were shades of terra-cotta, gold, white, and brown. As I hobbled forward, the rocks stuck into my feet. My feet were numb and stiff, but walking on those rocks hurt a lot, and I wondered if my body was magnifying the pain. I saw Susan Adie, the expedition leader, who had helped us plan out the swim. She was cheering and offering me her hand. I waved her off, wanting to completely clear the water first on my own, then reached for her hand. Someone else grabbed me under my left arm, supporting me. All I could see of his face beneath a furry hat were two very bright blue eyes. I leaned heavily on him, taking the pressure off my feet, so the rocks wouldn’t hurt so much.

“Who are you?” I asked.

He laughed and said something, and I recognized him as Bob Griffith. He had thought I was joking, but I really hadn’t recognized him; my brain was not working normally. It was operating at a mechanical level again. My brain was trying to filter out the multitude of sensations my body was experiencing; my brain was focusing on survival. I was colder now than I had been during the swim, and all I could think about was getting warm.

The three doctors surrounded me. Susan Sklar hugged me, helping me stand up. Laura King wrapped a blanket over my shoulders, and Gabriella Miotto supported me on the right side. I hunched over and closed my eyes, as if that would help shut out the cold. The wind was gusting through the glacier peaks at perhaps thirty knots. There were hands on my body, drying me off, and I smiled. I felt so pampered, so happy, so tired.

“Do you want me to take your swimming cap off?” someone asked.

I shook my head. “I want to keep it on to keep my head warm,” I said, not wanting to lose any more heat. Someone else was helping me pull on some boots. Yet another person was holding me under the arm and asking if we could start walking again. I looked at my legs. They didn’t seem to be part of my body. They were stiff, red, and wobbly. There were three bleeding scratches on my left thigh; I must have gotten them from the ice crystals in the water column when I’d jumped in. I was glad I hadn’t dived in headfirst.

The doctors and crew and I staggered across a one-hundred-yard-wide beach and forded a fast-moving stream to one of the huts of the Polish research base, where we climbed three stairs and walked inside. Three tall Polish men, who were working in the lab, examining plankton, were astonished to see me. They immediately offered me a place on the floor to lie down as well as a cup of hot tea. I was shaking too hard to drink or hold on to anything. Anthony Block, the ship’s doctor, appeared and checked to see if I was okay.

I lay down on a wool blanket on the floor while Dr. King covered me with another blanket. My whole body was shaking. It was working as hard as it had worked during the swim. I was breathing very shallowly and rapidly. And as the circulation opened to my skin and extremities, I could feel waves of cold pouring into my core. My body was shaking so hard, my head was bouncing up and down. Before I’d started the swim, my temperature was 99.5 degrees; immediately after I’d finished, it was 97.7 degrees.

For the next twenty minutes I curled into a ball on my side on a blanket on the floor and shivered. When Gabriella and Laura offered to lie down on either side of me, sandwiching me between them and giving me their body heat and comfort, I gladly accepted, but when Laura offered to come underneath the blanket, I declined. Both Laura and Gabriella were thin, and I was concerned that my cold skin and wet swimsuit would give them a chill. I was too cold to take my suit off. My fingers weren’t functioning properly and I was shaking too hard.

It was