Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [63]
As in high school, I decided to join the women’s swim team and water polo team. This would give me a sense of stability and belonging, and it would be a way to have fun and train for other goals outside the pool. After Cook Strait my father had pulled out a map of the world. He knew that once again I was searching for what to do next; I really wanted to do something more, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
He pointed to the Bering Strait. There were two islands in the center of the strait: one on the American side, called Little Diomede, and the other, Big Diomede, in the Soviet Union. In a straight line, the distance between the two islands—from the United States to the Soviet Union—was only 2.7 miles.
My first thought was, There have got to be icebergs in those waters; there’s no way I could do that. But my father suggested that I do some research to find out more about the area and, if it looked like a swim was possible, start contacting officials to get a visa to the Soviet Union. Obtaining permission to land in the Soviet Union didn’t seem very likely. It was fall of 1975 and the United States and the Soviet Union were in the midst of the Cold War, locked in a power struggle, distrusting and fearful that the other would start a nuclear war. But as early as age sixteen, I’d known that one of my life’s goals was to make a positive difference in the world. I wanted to somehow make it count, to do more than just live a life from day to day. So I began to think about how this swim could be done. I wrote letters to the Alaska Fish and Game Department to find out information about water temperatures in the Bering Strait, and I wrote to my local congressman, Jerry Patterson, asking if he could contact the Soviets for me for a visa.
Meanwhile, I began college, and in May 1976 Dave volunteered to travel to Alaska to investigate the Bering Strait. Naively we thought that if he gathered enough information that spring, in the summer of 1976 I could make an attempt.
When Dave called us from Wales, Alaska, on the radiophone, he sounded like he was calling from Mars.
On the map, Wales looked nearly as remote. It was a small Inuit village of perhaps 150 people, about an hour’s flight north of Nome. Dave’s voice was filled with excitement. He had flown from Nome to Wales in a small plane, and they’d landed in a blizzard. By dogsled, the chief magistrate had taken him home and offered to let him stay with his family and to help him. When Dave had explained the reason for his trip—his younger sister wanted to swim across the Bering Strait—the chief magistrate thought he was either joking or just crazy. It was the middle of May, and the Bering Strait was frozen from the mainland of Alaska to Siberia. The strait could be ice-clogged until mid-July
The chief magistrate in the village told Dave there had once been a natural land bridge between the two continents and that about fifteen hundred years ago, his ancestors had probably walked across. The water had risen over the centuries and the bridge was submerged. Swimming the Bering Strait was not possible: the water was far too cold; no one survived. More to the point, the villagers did not trust the Soviets. They had removed some of the villagers’ family members from Big Diomede and several of them had been put in prison camps in Siberia. The villagers didn’t want to have anything to do with the Soviets.
Dave decided to travel to Tin City, an air force base—a concrete blockhouse north of Wales—set up as a distant early-warning station for tracking Soviet aircraft and missiles. It took a big effort on Dave’s part to convince the officer that he was seriously trying to gather information for a swim. The officer told Dave the idea was not possible—most people die within twenty minutes of falling into the water—but it was also militarily and politically dangerous.
While there had been brief periods of thaw in the Cold War, in 1976 there was a lingering chill in the air. Mutual distrust had escalated over our granting the Soviets most-favored-nation trade status contingent upon their