Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [2]
The dark fog has grown so thick that our visibility is down to twenty feet. We planned to meet the Soviets at the border so they could guide us to Big Diomede Island, to their shore. Our guides have never ventured across the border. They were afraid that the Soviets would pick them up and jail them in a Siberian prison. This had happened to relatives. They had been imprisoned for fifty-two days.
Pat Omiak, the lead navigator from Little Diomede, asks Dr. Keatinge, one of the doctors, “Which direction do you think we should take?” Keatinge says, “I’m not sure.”
Like Omiak, he has never ventured into these waters. But he recommends going straight ahead. I follow them. They are making abrupt turns to the right and left. I am frustrated. Each moment we spend off course diminishes our chances of making it across. It hits me that we are lost somewhere in the middle of the Bering Sea. But I keep swimming and I keep thinking, Please, God, please let the Soviet boats find us. I strain to see them through the fog, listen for high-pitched engine sounds in the water, feel for vibrations, and continue praying.
When I turn my head to breathe I notice that the boats are drifting away from me. I shout at the top of my lungs, “Move closer! Move closer!”
They have no idea how frightened I am. They don’t know what’s happened before. I don’t know how long I can last.
1
Beginnings
“Please. Please. Please, Coach, let us out of the pool, we’re freezing,” pleaded three purple-lipped eight-year-olds in lane two.
Coach Muritt scowled at my teammates clinging to the swimming pool wall. Usually this was all he had to do to motivate them, and they’d continue swimming. But this day was different. Ominous black clouds were crouched on the horizon, and the wind was gusting from all different directions. Even though it was a mid-July morning in Manchester, New Hampshire, it felt like it would snow.
Cupping his large hands against his red face, and covering the wine-colored birthmark on his left cheek, Coach Muritt bellowed, “Get off the wall! Swim!”
“We’re too cold,” the boys protested.
Coach Muritt did not like to be challenged by anyone, let alone three eight-year-old boys. Irritated, he shouted again at the swimmers to get moving, and when they didn’t respond, he jogged across the deck with his fist clenched, his thick shoulders hunched against the wind and his short-chopped brown hair standing on end. Anger flashed in his icy blue eyes, and I thought, I’d better swim or I’ll get in trouble too, but I wanted to see what was going to happen to the boys.
Coach Muritt shook his head and shouted, “Swim and you’ll get warm!”
But the boys weren’t budging. They were shaking, their teeth chattering.
“Come on, swim. If you swim, you’ll warm up,” Coach Muritt coaxed them. He looked up at the sky, then checked his watch, as if trying to decide what to do. In other lanes, swimmers were doing the breaststroke underwater, trying to keep their arms warm. More teammates were stopping at the wall and complaining that they were cold. Laddie and Brooks McQuade, brothers who were always getting into trouble, were breaking rank, climbing out of the pool and doing cannonballs from the deck. Other young boys and girls were joining them.
“Hey, stop it! Someone’s going to get hurt—get your butts back in the water!” Coach Muritt yelled. He knew he was losing control, that he had pushed the team as far as we could go, so he waved us in. When all seventy-five of us reached the wall, he motioned for us to move toward a central lane and then he shouted, “Okay, listen up. Listen up. I’ll make a deal with you. If I let you get out now, you will all change into something warm and we’ll meet in the boys’ locker room. Then we will do two hours of calisthenics.”
Cheering wildly, my teammates leaped out of the pool, scurried across the deck, grabbed towels slung over the chain-link fence surrounding the pool, and squeezed against one another as they tried to be first through