Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [84]
I stopped off in Dover on the way back from Europe and said good-bye to Monir. I had hoped to see him for a few days before I left England, but it was probably a good thing that I didn’t get romantically involved. With Yudovin in the hospital, I knew I had to get home and see him. When I reached London, Dr. William Keatinge met me and had me stay at his and his wife’s home. A physician and a physiologist at the University of London, Dr. Keatinge was also a friend of Dr. McCafferty’s at UCSB. He and I had met at UCSB, and I had started corresponding with him to find out more about the human body’s responses to cold.
Most of the evening we talked about his research, my swims, and Yudovin’s condition. In the morning, Dr. Keatinge took me to Heathrow Airport. Unfortunately, the airline I was taking home was overbooked by hundreds of people, so for four days I had to sleep in an alley with two hundred other people outside the Pan Am terminal. All in all, it was a good experience. It gave me a small sense of what it would be like to have to live on the streets, and it also showed me how situations like that can bring out the best in people. Everyone shared what they had, and told stories about their families and their homeland.
By the time I arrived in California, Yudovin was out of the hospital and was home recovering. It would take him six months to be healthy enough to get back in the water again. Years later he would make that swim from Anacapa Island, a double triumph this time.
14
Around the World in Eighty Days
By 1985 I had been working on the Bering Strait project for nine years. Every day I wrote at least one letter to someone in either the United States or the Soviet Union, seeking permission to make the swim. To pay the bills, I worked as a reference librarian, wrote magazine articles, taught swimming lessons, and worked with a group of physical therapists. The librarian job was so helpful; during breaks each day I could look up information on the Soviet Union, or talk with the other librarians to find out if they had any new suggestions for establishing contact with the Soviets.
For years, I didn’t get any answer from them, so I tried to make contact through congressional and Senate offices. I didn’t make much headway there either. And I still had the challenge of paying for all of it. My folks helped by letting me live at home so I could save money; at the same time, I was writing letters to Fortune 500 companies, seeking sponsorship. The problem was that no one believed the Soviets would allow the swim to occur. My family and friends questioned my tenacity. They could not understand why the Bering Strait project had taken on such importance for me. Part of my conviction came from the realization that if I gave up, I would wonder all my life if I might have been able to make a positive difference in the world. If I gave up, I would throw away all that I had done to reach that point. In many ways, the effort to obtain permission and support for this swim reflected life and the essence of long-distance swimming: as long as you hang in there and keep going, you have a chance at succeeding. Once you give up, you’re done.
To generate interest and push my physical limits, I decided to attempt a series of swims that would take me around the world in eighty days. The idea was to swim across ten of the coldest and most difficult waterways in the world. With the amount of press I had had through the years, I hoped to secure corporate sponsorship for the around-the-world journey, but I got only limited support. It was partly because I didn’t allow enough time and partly, my father said, because I was a woman. Whatever the reason, I didn’t get enough support for the swim around the world. So I finally asked myself, How can anyone believe in me unless