Swimming to Antarctica Read online

  To Mom and Dad

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue A Cold Day in August

  1 Beginnings

  2 Leaving Home

  3 Open Water

  4 Twenty-six Miles Across the Sea

  5 English Channel

  6 White Cliffs of Dover

  7 Homecoming

  8 Invitation to Egypt

  9 Lost in the Fog

  10 Cook Strait, New Zealand

  11 Human Research Subject

  12 The Strait of Magellan

  13 Around the Cape of Good Hope

  14 Around the World in Eighty Days

  15 Glacier Bay

  16 Facing the Bomb

  17 The A-Team

  18 Mind-Blowing

  19 Debate

  20 Across the Bering Strait

  21 Success

  22 Siberia’s Gold Medal

  23 Swimming to Antarctica

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Allen Daviau; Anne Rice; Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; Vicky Wilson, my editor; and Martha Kaplan, my agent, for all their help in getting this book published.

  I would like to also thank David Remnick, Dorothy Wickenden, and Cressida Leyshon at The New Yorker for their support and for publishing my article “Swimming to Antarctica.”

  Thank you to my grandfather, Arthur Daviau, M.D., for his support and his great genes.

  And thank you to Kenny Hawkins, Dusty Nicol, Linda Halker, and everyone at Knopf for their help in transforming my manuscript into a book. It’s been a big dream for so many years, and finally an incredible reality.

  Lastly, thank you to all my family and friends who believed in me and in this story for so many years. Thank you all very much!

  PROLOGUE

  A Cold Day in August

  It is August 7, 1987, and I am swimming across the Bering Sea. I am somewhere near—or across—the U.S.-Soviet border. The water stings. It’s icy cold. My face feels as if it has been shot full of novocaine and it’s separating from my skull. It’s as if I’m swimming naked into a blizzard. My hands are numb, and they ache deep down through the bone. I can’t tell if they are pulling any water. They feel as though they are becoming detached from my body. I look down at them through the ash-colored water: they are splotchy and bluish white; they are the hands of a dead person. I take a tight, nervous breath. Suddenly it occurs to me that my life is escaping through my hands.

  This frigid and ominous sea is behaving like an enormous vampire slowly sucking the warmth, the life from my body, and I think, Oh my God, pick up your pace. Swim faster, faster. You’ve got to go as fast as you can. You’ve got to create more heat. Or you will die!

  I try to lift my arms over more rapidly. They are sore and sluggish. I am tired. I have been sprinting, swimming as fast as I can go, for more than an hour. But I sense that I am fading, becoming less of myself. Is my blood sugar dropping? Is that why I feel so strange? Or is my body temperature plunging? Am I hypothermic? Systematically I check my body. My lips feel pickled; my throat is parched and raw from the briny water. I want to stop to drink some fresh water and catch my breath. But the water is too cold to allow me to pause for even a moment. If I do, more heat will be drained from my body, heat that I will never regain.

  Through foggy goggles, I continue monitoring my body. I’ve never pushed myself this far. The coldest water I’ve ever swum in was thirty-eight degrees in Glacier Bay Alaska, and that was only for twenty-eight minutes. This swim is five times longer. I am afraid of going beyond the point of no return. The problem is that my brain could cool down without my being aware of it, which would cause a dangerous loss of judgment. I glance at my shoulders and arms: they are as red as lobsters. This is a very good sign. My body is fighting to protect itself from the cold by employing a defense mechanism called vasoconstriction. It is diverting blood flow away from my hands and feet, arms and legs to the core of my body; it is keeping my brain and vital organs warm so they will continue to function normally.

  I reach out and pull faster and, through muscle movement, try to create heat more quickly than I am losing it. My breaths are short and rapid, and my chest is heaving. My heart is pounding. I am afraid.

  The fog is growing heavier; the air is saturated and raw. It feels as though I am trying to breathe through a wet blanket. With each breath, the chill rolls deeper into my lungs. Now I am cooling down from the inside out. I can’t help myself; I think of David Yudovin.

  David was a seasoned long-distance swimmer who, during an attempt to swim from Anacapa Island to the California mainland, technically died from hypothermia. His body tried to fight the cold by shunting the blood flow to his brain and vital organs. For a period of time, his core was protected. But at some critical point the blood vessels in his extremities became paralyzed. Blood rushed from his core to his hands and feet, where it was cooled by the fifty-eight-degree water; when it flowed back into his torso, it caused his core temperature to drop. As a result, David became disoriented. His swimming speed dropped, and then his heart went into atrial fibrillation. As he continued to cool down, his heart became less functional, until it suddenly stopped beating altogether.

  There had been warning signs: his lips were purple, he was shivering, and his shoulders had turned blue. But his crew didn’t recognize the severity of the situation. When they spoke to David, he said he was doing okay, and the decrease in his body temperature was so gradual, they didn’t notice his deteriorating condition. Neither did David. His brain had been cooled down so far that he wasn’t able to recognize the warning signs. He had no idea he was dying.

  At the hospital in Ventura doctors and nurses shot Adrenalin directly into his heart and repeatedly shocked his heart with a defibrillator. They warmed his blood and had him breathe warmed oxygen. An hour and fifty minutes after his initial cardiac arrest, the medical team revived David. He had been lucky.

  Will I be that lucky? The water here is twenty degrees colder. Will I be able to recognize if I’ve gone too far?

  Yes. Yes. I will. I can do this. I’ve broken the world records for the English Channel, I’ve swum across the frigid waters of the Strait of Magellan, and I’ve done swims in icy waters where no one else has ever survived.

  I can do it.

  Thank God (or Ben & Jerry’s) for my body fat; it’s insulating me from the cold. Still, the cold is moving deep into the marrow of my bones. Chills are curling up my spine and spreading out across my shoulders. My teeth are clenched and my lips are quivering. My muscles are as tight as boards.

  I am pushing myself to the limit. But I’ve got to do this. This swim is not about me. It’s about all of us.

  It’s about doing something that’s going to make a positive difference in the world. For eleven years, I have hoped when there was no reason to hope. I have believed when there was little to believe. For the last forty-two years we’ve been engaged in a Cold War with the Soviets. Somehow it has to be stopped. I believe that this swim will create a thaw in the Cold War. I cannot fail. If I die doing this, the Soviets will regret giving me permission to make this swim. I can’t let that happen. Swim faster! Don’t focus on the cold or the pain. Don’t give any energy to it. Focus on the finish. Swim faster.

  I think of my parents, brother, and sisters, of friends and of the people who have gotten me this far. I conjure up their faces in my mind’s eye. This gives me energy, and I imagine how wonderful it will feel to embrace the people who are waiting for us on Big Diomede Island and to hold their warm hands. This is inspiring. I replay a sentence in my head: Hand to hand, heart to heart, we can change the world. This is what I have grown to believe.

  With every part of my being I am reac
hing forward, racing against time and the pervasively cold sea.

  I lift my head and look up.

  Something is very wrong.

  Out in front of me, to the left and to the right, are the two thirty-foot-long walrus-skin boats that are supposed to be guiding and protecting me. On board the one to the right is a group of physicians who are monitoring me during the swim. To the left is a boatful of journalists huddled against the chill. Inuit guides—Eskimos who live on Little Diomede Island—are driving the walrus-skin boats. They are veering away from each other.

  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 the locker room doors.

  Getting out of the water was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I hated doing calisthenics with the team. Usually we did them five days a week for an hour, after our two-hour swimming workout. A typical workout included five hundred sit-ups, two hundred pushups, five hundred leg extensions, five hundred half sit-ups, two hundred leg lifts on our backs, and two hundred leg lifts on our stomachs. As we did the exercises, Coach Muritt counted and we had to keep pace with him. Between each set of fifty repetitions, he gave us a one-minute break, but if anyone fell off pace or did the exercises incorrectly, he made us start the set all over again. He wanted to make us tough, teach us discipline and team unity. And I didn’t mind that. I liked to work hard, and I liked the challenge of staying on pace, but I detested having to start an exercise all over again because someone else was slacking off or fooling around. Brooks and Laddie McQuade were notorious for that. They were always trying to see how much they could get away with before they got caught. For them, it was a big game. Older boys on the team yelled at them and tossed kickboards at them, but they didn’t care; they liked the attention they were getting from the team and the coach. I didn’t want to play their game, and I didn’t want to do two long hours of calisthenics with them, so I shouted, “Coach Muritt, can I stay in the pool and swim?”

  He was wiping his eyes and nose with a handkerchief, and asked incredulously, “Jeez, aren’t you freezing?”

  “If I keep swimming, I’m okay,” I said, and smiled, trying my very best to convince him. I was a chubby nine-year-old, and I was a slow swimmer, so I rarely got a chance to stop and take a rest. But because I just kept going, I managed to constantly create body heat, and that way I stayed warm when all the other swimmers were freezing.

  “Is there anyone else who wants to stay in the water?”

  “We do,” said three of his Harvard swimmers in lane one.

  During the college season, Muritt coached the Harvard University Swim Team. He was considered to be one of the best coaches in all of New England; at least a dozen of his college swimmers had qualified for the U.S. Nationals. In the summer, most of his college swimmers worked out with our age groupers on the Manchester Swim Team, and they inspired us by their example. Somehow my parents knew from the start that to become your best, you needed to train with the best. And that’s why I think they put my older brother, David, me, and my two younger sisters, Laura and Ruth, into Coach Muritt’s swimming program.

  Coach Muritt studied the sky, and we followed his gaze. “I still don’t like the looks of those clouds,” he said pensively.

  “Coach, we’ll get out immediately if it starts to thunder. I promise,” I said, and held my breath, hoping he wouldn’t make me do calisthenics.

  He considered for a moment, but he was distracted by uproarious laughter, high-pitched hoots, and shouts coming from the locker room.

  “Please, Coach Muritt, please can we stay in?” I said.

  “Okay, but I’ll have to take the pace clock or it’s going to blow over—you’ll have to swim at your own pace for the next couple of hours.”

  “Thank you, Coach,” I said, and clapped my hands; I was doubly thrilled. I had escaped calisthenics and now I was going to be able to swim for three hours straight. I loved swimming and I loved swimming at my own pace, alone in my own lane, with no one kicking water in my face, and no one behind tapping my toes, telling me I had to swim faster. It was a feeling of buoyant freedom. But swimming into a storm was even better; waves were rushing around me, and lifting me, and tossing me fr
om side to side. The wind was howling, slamming against the chain-link fence so strongly that it sounded like the clanging of a warning bell. I felt the vibrations rattle right through my body, and I wondered if the wind would tear the fence from its hinges. Turning on my side to breathe, I checked the sky. It looked like a tornado was approaching, only without the funnel cloud. I wondered for a second if I should climb out of the water. But I pushed that thought away; I didn’t want to get out. I was immersed in unbridled energy and supernatural beauty, and I wanted to see what would happen next.

  My world was reduced to the blur of my arms stroking as a cold, driving rain began. The raindrops that hit my lips tasted sweet and cold, and I enjoyed the sensations of every new moment. The pool was no longer a flat, boring rectangle of blue; it was now a place of constant change, a place that I had to continually adjust to as I swam or I’d get big gulps of water instead of air. That day, I realized that nature was strong, beautiful, dramatic, and wonderful, and being out in the water during that storm made me feel somehow a part of it, somehow connected to it.

  When the hail began, the connection diminished considerably. I scrambled for the gutters while the college swimmers leaped out of the water and ran as fast as they could into the locker room. One looked back at me and shouted, “Aren’t you getting out?”

  “No, I don’t want to,” I said, crawling into the gutter by the stairs. The hail came down so fast and hard that all I heard was the rush and pinging of the stones as they hit the deck and pool. Thankful for the white bathing cap and goggles protecting my head and eyes, I covered my cheeks with my hands. Hailstones the size of frozen peas blasted my hands, neck, and shoulders, and I winced and cringed and tried to squeeze into a tighter ball, hoping that it would be over soon.

  When the hail finally changed to a heavy rain, I crawled out of the gutter and started swimming again. As I pulled my arms through the water, I felt as if I were swimming through a giant bowl of icy tapioca. The hailstones floated to the water’s surface and rolled around my body as I swam through them. I realized that by putting myself in a situation different from everyone else’s, I had experienced something different, beautiful, and amazing.