Swimming to Antarctica (35 page)

This was the hardest part, the first step. I was afraid, but I wanted to be there; I wanted to see what I could do. A wave rose to within an inch of my feet and instinctively I lifted them up. I didn’t want to touch the water before I slid in, afraid it would psych me out. The wind was blowing at around thirty knots right off the glaciers, right into me. I was already losing body heat.

I took a deep breath, leaned back, and threw my torso forward, keeping my feet under me. In flight, my body braced itself. My feet hit first, then my knees, thighs, chest, and face. I didn’t want my head to go under, but I couldn’t help it. I rapidly dog-paddled myself to the surface, got my head above the water, and gasped for air as the molten ice water shattered around me. All I could feel was cold. All I could do was turn over my arms as fast as they would go and breathe. All I could think about was moving forward. There were so many alarming sensations that my mind could not distinguish what was happening to my body. I just kept swimming.

The water was searingly cold, pervasive, and it stung. It was so cold I had to constantly tell myself to keep going, that I could do this.
Gradually, I lowered my face into the water, and my body shuddered and stiffened like a block of ice. I turned my head, drew in a deep breath, put my face back into the water, and for the first time, I looked at my watch on my left arm to check my time. I thought I had been swimming for at least ten minutes. I looked again. I had been swimming for only one minute. I thought,
Oh my God! How am I ever going to keep going at this rate?
I told myself,
You’ve got to. You can’t bring these people with you all the way to Antarctica and swim for only a minute. You’ve got to keep going.
A wave hit me in the face and I experimented; I let the water fill my mouth. It didn’t hurt my teeth, and it tasted surprisingly more sweet than salty. It must have been because the sun was shining and the glaciers were melting.

I was swimming at eighty strokes per minute, working harder than I had ever worked before, fighting the cold, going as fast as I could. This was taking everything I had. The crew watched me closely. Their expressions were tense and worried. I continued sprinting. When I reached the ten-minute mark, I thought,
Okay, I can stop now.
But it occurred to me that if I was going to swim a full mile in another day or two, I needed to swim at least five more minutes, at least half a mile, today.
Come on, you can do it, you’re ready for this,
I coached myself, and I pulled more forcefully with each stroke.

A few minutes later, I lifted my right foot and waved to Laura and Susan in one Zodiac. They smiled, and I heard Shawn laugh. Shawn waved back with his hand. I took a big breath and and shouted to the crew in the other Zodiac: “Are you doing okay?”

Chris, the cameraman, said, “Did she just say what I thought she said?”

I extended my reach into the water. The crew couldn’t believe I was still swimming. And I was surprising myself. Lifting my right foot, I waved again. The crew waved back. I checked my watch. I had completed fifteen minutes. My skin was freezing cold and I was tired, but I thought,
This was supposed to be a test swim, and the crew was supposed to practice pulling me out, but I don’t want to practice being pulled out. I’m very cold on the outside, but on the inside,
I feel warm. I want to push farther. Besides, this may be the only swim I get to do. The weather could turn bad in the next day or so. I think I can keep going.

I stretched out my pull and looked down into the water. Seventeen minutes, nineteen minutes. We were paralleling large icebergs, some as big as houses; others were the size of hockey pucks. Some were box-shaped, as if they had snapped off the glaciers; others were exquisitely carved and curved by the wind and smoothed by the sea. They were dancing ice sculptures, gliding and spinning on the current.

As we neared shore we turned to the right. The crew began pointing and yelling.

I heard Dan shout, “Lynne, ice!”

I just missed a block the size of a refrigerator. It was hard to judge the speed of the icebergs. They moved at different rates, like meteors, and I was trying to cut across their path.

The crew shouted again, pointing at small pieces of brash ice. This ice was transparent and hard to spot. I spun to my left.

“Watch out!” Barry pointed to my right.

I didn’t react quickly enough; I swam headfirst into a piece the size of a big dog, and hit it hard. The impact brought hot tears to my eyes. I wondered if I would have a bump. We were moving into a field mined with ice. From the boat on my right, I heard Susan yelling, “Lynne, watch out!” as Laura pointed to my right. I swerved to the left. Shawn was shouting, repeating, “Ice, ice!” to make sure I heard him, and Casey was directing me around a large chunk. I was breathing only on my right side now, focused on that side because the ice chunks and bergs seemed to be flowing in from that direction. I didn’t realize the ice was all around us until I heard Barry on my left side. He was leaning way over the side of the Zodiac, waving me away from the boat. I was swimming within inches of a large piece, and its edges were as sharp as broken glass. I could tell that if I got any closer to it, Dan was prepared to jump in and push it away. Clear ice the size of a hall mirror was barely visible on the surface, but it expanded below the surface, like an eight-foot-wide upside-down snow cone. I
looked at the base of the iceberg, then saw the shore. I couldn’t help myself; I started sprinting faster. I should have been more careful, but I just wanted to get clear of the ice field and finish. I wasn’t paying attention to the crew, and I slammed headfirst into a round chunk of ice the size of a soccer ball. My forehead registered a sort of blinding pain. I wanted to stop and rub it, but I decided instead to swim the last few yards with my head up; that way I would take the hits to my chest instead of my head.

When the passengers from the
Orlova,
who had no idea what we were doing and had been exploring King George Island, saw the Zodiacs landing, they ran down to the water’s edge to greet us. Our youngest crew members were standing onshore, cheering and clapping. I saw their smiling faces beneath their hoods, and I smiled too. I tried to stand up gradually. It was difficult moving from a horizontal position to a vertical one; it put a lot of stress on my heart, and I felt unsteady. The rocks, small as pancakes, flat, and blunt-edged like shale, were shades of terra-cotta, gold, white, and brown. As I hobbled forward, the rocks stuck into my feet. My feet were numb and stiff, but walking on those rocks hurt a lot, and I wondered if my body was magnifying the pain. I saw Susan Adie, the expedition leader, who had helped us plan out the swim. She was cheering and offering me her hand. I waved her off, wanting to completely clear the water first on my own, then reached for her hand. Someone else grabbed me under my left arm, supporting me. All I could see of his face beneath a furry hat were two very bright blue eyes. I leaned heavily on him, taking the pressure off my feet, so the rocks wouldn’t hurt so much.

“Who are you?” I asked.

He laughed and said something, and I recognized him as Bob Griffith. He had thought I was joking, but I really hadn’t recognized him; my brain was not working normally. It was operating at a mechanical level again. My brain was trying to filter out the multitude of sensations my body was experiencing; my brain was focusing on survival. I was colder now than I had been during the swim, and all I could think about was getting warm.

The three doctors surrounded me. Susan Sklar hugged me, helping me stand up. Laura King wrapped a blanket over my shoulders, and Gabriella Miotto supported me on the right side. I hunched over and closed my eyes, as if that would help shut out the cold. The wind was gusting through the glacier peaks at perhaps thirty knots. There were hands on my body, drying me off, and I smiled. I felt so pampered, so happy, so tired.

“Do you want me to take your swimming cap off?” someone asked.

I shook my head. “I want to keep it on to keep my head warm,” I said, not wanting to lose any more heat. Someone else was helping me pull on some boots. Yet another person was holding me under the arm and asking if we could start walking again. I looked at my legs. They didn’t seem to be part of my body. They were stiff, red, and wobbly. There were three bleeding scratches on my left thigh; I must have gotten them from the ice crystals in the water column when I’d jumped in. I was glad I hadn’t dived in headfirst.

The doctors and crew and I staggered across a one-hundred-yard-wide beach and forded a fast-moving stream to one of the huts of the Polish research base, where we climbed three stairs and walked inside. Three tall Polish men, who were working in the lab, examining plankton, were astonished to see me. They immediately offered me a place on the floor to lie down as well as a cup of hot tea. I was shaking too hard to drink or hold on to anything. Anthony Block, the ship’s doctor, appeared and checked to see if I was okay.

I lay down on a wool blanket on the floor while Dr. King covered me with another blanket. My whole body was shaking. It was working as hard as it had worked during the swim. I was breathing very shallowly and rapidly. And as the circulation opened to my skin and extremities, I could feel waves of cold pouring into my core. My body was shaking so hard, my head was bouncing up and down. Before I’d started the swim, my temperature was 99.5 degrees; immediately after I’d finished, it was 97.7 degrees.

For the next twenty minutes I curled into a ball on my side on a blanket on the floor and shivered. When Gabriella and Laura offered
to lie down on either side of me, sandwiching me between them and giving me their body heat and comfort, I gladly accepted, but when Laura offered to come underneath the blanket, I declined. Both Laura and Gabriella were thin, and I was concerned that my cold skin and wet swimsuit would give them a chill. I was too cold to take my suit off. My fingers weren’t functioning properly and I was shaking too hard.

It was exhausting and yet amazing to feel what was happening. Dr. Laura took my core temperature every twenty minutes and recorded it. My body was systematically regulating its circulation, opening up blood flow from one area, shivering to create heat to compensate for the cold blood that rushed in from there, allowing for a few minutes of rest, and then beginning the sequence again with a new area. This was something I’d never experienced before, but I’d never been this cold. Still, in only forty-five minutes my temperature was back to normal.

Once I stopped shivering and was able to hold a mug, the three doctors and I drank a toast of tea to our new Polish friends. We took some photos together, got a quick tour of their lab, and said goodbye. The wind outside the hut had increased to forty knots. A storm was moving in rapidly from the south, and we needed to get out to the ship before it broke or we would have to spend the night in the hut and delay the ship’s sailing.

Barry was waiting outside the hut for us. He gave me a huge hug. He was as thrilled as I was. He and Susan held me under each arm and helped me walk across the beach. I was deeply fatigued. My legs kept slipping out from underneath me, and if Barry and Susan hadn’t been holding on to me, I would have taken two or three nosedives.

The Zodiac operator who had been driving the Zodiac on my left side during the swim was waiting for us. Amazed, he said to me, “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.” He shook my hand and directed me to sit on a pontoon beside him. On the ride back to the
Orlova,
the waves were steep, three to four feet, and it felt as if we were flying down a roller coaster. Each time a wave slammed into the bow, icy water flew into the boat. Brad Stahl, the
Zodiac driver, had positioned me behind Barry so I could duck behind him and stay dry; that way I wouldn’t get chilled or experience an afterdrop.

When we reached the ship, the passengers on the
Orlova
cheered as we climbed back up the ramp. I had swum for twenty-two minutes and fourteen seconds, covering .92 mile in thirty-three-degree water. No one had known that I would be able to swim that far on my first attempt, not even I, and I felt like we had achieved a lot. Now I believed that we could move forward with the larger goal, the one I had been contemplating for the past two years. I believed I was ready to attempt the first Antarctic mile, the first swim to the continent of Antarctica. And I believed the crew now had the confidence in me to help me achieve it. In spite of my fatigue, I felt a surge of energy.

As I walked back to my cabin, passengers and crew members hugged and congratulated me. I took a very long, hot shower and rested on my bunk. I needed to recover as quickly as I could from the swim, replenish my fluids, and flush out the lactic acid. I drank two twelve-ounce servings of a solution of maple syrup and water. My thinking was that when a maple tree goes from dormancy to budding, it uses sap as energy, so why shouldn’t I use it for rewarming and for energy?

That night when I ate dinner with my crew, everyone’s spirits were high. I had swum for twenty-two minutes and I had surprised them as well as myself. It was a much longer test swim than any of us had expected. We celebrated with toasts and tales and a lot of laughter. This gave me time to pause and relax. But that night, as I lay in bed, in anticipation of the big swim, I reflected on the day and the things I wanted to do better. I had never shivered so hard in my life, and it had been extremely uncomfortable. I wasn’t looking forward to doing that again. And since the water closer to the mainland would be colder, I suspected the shivering would be more violent or more prolonged or both. I decided that if I got the chance to swim a mile, I would need to crank my arm speed up and move faster to generate more heat; that way I wouldn’t be as cold at the end of the swim and wouldn’t have to shiver so hard. The bottoms of my feet were black
and blue and tender from being bruised on the rocks. It still hurt to walk. I would ask Dan to jump into the water with me in his dry suit when I was making the transition from swimming to standing and have him help me climb out of the water. And I’d ask him to let me lean heavily on his shoulder to take the weight off my feet. Before the test swim, I had thought of doing a second training swim the following day at Deception Island, but now I decided against it. My main goal was to swim to Antarctica, and I was beat. I needed more time to recover.