Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [24]
5
English Channel
At first, I didn’t know anything about established thought; I was too young to know, too certain that this was something I wanted to do ever since that day in New Hampshire when Mrs. Milligan had planted the original thought in my mind. The day she saw me swimming through the storm. Ever since that day, the dream had been there, just waiting for the right moment to burst forth.
Fortunately, my folks were also able to overlook established thought. They believed age was important, but they also believed that you could achieve almost anything in life with hard work and talent. I was lucky that they were open-minded about this, because I’m not sure what I would have done if they had told me I was too young; I probably would have worked on them until they couldn’t stand it any longer and finally gave in. They knew I was determined; my father called it stubborn. Still, they also knew how important it was to have dreams and goals and a path in life. And they instilled this in me.
It seemed, too, that this was exactly the right path for me. Within a week of Ron’s commitment to coach me, a cousin introduced me to an Egyptian swimmer who had attempted swimming the English Channel five times. When we met, Fahmy Attallah was in his sixties, although he looked like he was forty. He was a clinical psychologist in Long Beach, California, a humanist, and a gentle-spirited and enlightened man.
Fahmy and his wife, Donna, invited my parents and me to their home to make sure that this goal was something that I—not my parents—wanted to achieve before he decided to serve as a mentor and role model to me.
Fahmy was a short man, only five feet high; this told me that size, like age, didn’t really matter unless one let it. His shoulders were broad, as was his chest, and his arms looked powerful.
Still holding my hand in both of his, he led me to the table. There were piles of stuffed grape leaves, triangles of phyllo dough filled with feta cheese, roasted eggplant, and tomato and ground lamb, piles of fluffy rice topped with pine nuts, and wonderful dishes I had never tried until that night.
Fahmy had me sit beside him, and, handing me a platter of rice, he said in a melodious Egyptian accent, “Whatever questions you may have, I will try to answer them for you.”
Fahmy had grown up in Cairo and had swum for the Egyptian national team in the 1940s and 1950s. He was one of Egypt’s most celebrated athletes, in a country that names streets after long-distance swimmers. In 1941 he made a forty-one-hour long-distance swim in the Mediterranean, establishing a new record for time and distance. Fahmy made this swim at a time before goggles had been invented, or snug-fitting bathing caps, so to protect his eyes and ears from the salt water, he swam breaststroke with his head above the water. The longest swim he accomplished was in the Mediterranean. He swam nonstop for eighty hours. “The way I do this is, I meditate when I swim,” he said.
I did too. I knew that we understood each other. I immediately liked him. When my father told him that I was very stubborn, he laughed and tilted his head way back, until tears filled his eyes. “That is a very strong characteristic for a channel swimmer. Perhaps a better word for stubborn would be determined,” he said, wiping happy tears from his eyes.
During his daily swims, he pondered life’s big questions, and I believe that through those daily meditations he had discovered the essence of himself and the answers to his questions. “You know, the ocean is a very, very beautiful place. It is God’s gift to us,” he said.
I was sure Fahmy was God’s gift to me. I think he saw in me a younger version of himself, full of hope, eagerness, and determination. That day I told him that I was