How can one woman change the world? Breaststroke, butterfly, Australian
crawl...
(Newsday Photo / Bruce Gilbert)
By JoAnn C. Gutin JoAnn C. Gutin is an
anthropologist and writer in New York.
February 15, 2004
OK, so
the first thing you need to know about Lynne Cox is that the title of her book,
"Swimming to Antarctica" (Knopf, $24.95), isn't a metaphor or a symbol or
anything like that. She actually swam there. Among icebergs. In the kind of
suit, cap and goggles you or I would wear to swim laps in a heated pool. Of this
feat, she reports being "thrilled ... knowing my body had carried me to places
no one else had been in only a bathing suit."
To which one might
reasonably respond, "And nobody's ever climbed Everest in high heels, sister,
but that doesn't make it a good idea." But here's the second thing you need to
know about Cox: Clammy cynicism melts like April snow on contact with her sunny,
gentle and guileless self. When she talks about her long-distance swims as a way
to bridge political differences and to expand the notion of the possible, you
find yourself saying not "What?" but "Oh. Well, of course."
Don't believe
me? Here's what happens when you're with her: In a hotel coffee shop in midtown
Manhattan, young strivers in sharp suits snap their PowerBooks and cell phones
shut so they can eavesdrop on your conversation. On the snowy median strip of
Park Avenue - where she has gamely agreed to pose for a photograph coatless in a
frigid wind - people who've read her book or seen her on "Letterman" or "60
Minutes" roll down taxi windows to say, "Aren't you that swimmer? You go, girl!"
She is a phenomenon.
In "Swimming to Antarctica," the 47-year-old Cox
presents her swims as steps on the path to self-knowledge. The story progresses
from her epiphany at age 9, swimming laps in an outdoor pool during a violent
New England hailstorm - "I had experienced something different, beautiful and
amazing" - to her 1.2-mile Antarctic swim in 32-degree water in December 2002,
the longest and coldest immersion ever by any human being.
Milestones
along this remarkable road include her first ocean race at age 14, in which she
beat a field of veteran swimmers; her swim that same year from Catalina Island
to the California coast, 26 miles across the sea; her first English Channel
crossing at age 15, in which she broke the male and female records. (As she
clambered ashore, hands and knees sliced by barnacles, she recalls, "I was
excited; I'd never been to France before.") And then she started doing the hard
swims - Cook Strait between the South and North islands of New Zealand, the
Strait of Magellan between Chile and Argentina.
All these were mere
preludes, however, to the feat that absorbed her attention for an entire decade:
swimming the Bering Strait. Cox begins the book with it: "It is August 7, 1987,
and I am swimming across the Bering Sea." (To my mind that sentence should be in
the Arresting Openers Hall of Fame, along with "We were somewhere around Barstow
on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.") She conceived the
notion in the mid '70s, at the height of the Cold War, but it took her 10 years
to organize it, what with writing to congressmen, businessmen, Russian premiers
and the U.S. Coast Guard, then renting boats and arranging helicopters - all on
her own dime.
What isn't so apparent from the book is that the woman
pursuing this, ummm, idiosyncratic passion was simultaneously living a normal
life. As an elite athlete, Cox worked out for hours a day, naturally, and still
does. But she also graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in history,
worked as a librarian and a physical therapist, gardened and wrote this
book.
She kept notes on all her swims, hoping someday to convey how it
feels to be a warm speck in a cold ocean. Boy, has she succeeded. I kept casual
tally of heart-stopping passages; the winner described being lost in the fog, at
night, in the middle of the Catalina Channel. In the shipping lane, where
enormous waves were created by passing tankers. "The water was as black as the
inside of a coffin," she writes. Then, as huge shark-like creatures pass
beneath, "I could feel the water suddenly become hollow, and I could feel myself
dropping down into the hole."
Waiter, could I have a drink, please? Make
it a double.
Cox is just as driven in front of a computer. She rewrote
the book 11 times, beginning to end, adding and deleting chapters on the
contradictory advice of various agents. (She would get up at 3:30 a.m. and write
until 6, when it was time to swim in the Pacific for two hours.) Rejections from
a dozen publishers followed, over nearly as many years. Not until she screwed up
the nerve to ask novelist Anne Rice, a distant relative, to look at the
manuscript, did the tide, so to speak, turn. "She called me up and said she
loved it and would I mind if she showed it to her agent," she tells me. Pause,
for the widening of the blue eyes. "Mind?"
Even after all these
struggles, in the water and out, Cox hasn't finished taking chances. Which
brings me to the last thing you need to know about Lynne Cox: We may need to
protect her from herself. After some prodding, she confided to me that she's
considering three places for future swims. They're "risky," she says. Now, I
have no clue what the word "risky" could possibly mean in the context of Cox's
life, but I do know that NASA is looking for water on Mars. It has me very, very
worried.
