Swimming to Antarctica (22 page)

“You can’t swim like that, with your top torn off,” Matkin said.

It didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to start. God, I just wanted to start. But she was right; I couldn’t swim without a top. I needed some protection from the ice, or I could really get cut.

Rummaging through my swim bag, Woodruff pulled out two spare Tyr swimsuits and tossed me the blue one. Crouching in front of the bow for some privacy, I pulled off my torn suit and changed into the spare.

More rocks were sliding down the ridge; it was becoming increasingly unstable. Rocks the size of oranges were bouncing off the bow. Koshman reversed the boat’s engines and started pulling offshore. Matkin turned the rowboat around and told me she would stay right beside me.

The avalanche happened at the best time. It pushed me offshore quickly. I had to move fast without thinking. Quickly I tugged my yellow cap onto my head, stuffed my long hair into it, pulled my goggles over my head, licked them so they wouldn’t fog, licked them again just to make sure, adjusted the straps on my swimsuit, took a deep breath, and slid my feet into the Muir Inlet of Glacier Bay. Immediately the frigid water dulled my feet and then my hands. My arms turned bright red and ached with a deep pain. I had asked the crew not to tell me what the temperature was.

At first, I swam freestyle with my head up; an inefficient way of swimming, but it allowed me to conserve body heat a little longer. More than that, I was afraid of the pan ice. I was afraid that I would slice my face with it. As I chopped it with my hands I felt it crack, and I felt the sharpness of the edges. It was like swimming through shards of glass. I didn’t want to get cut. I was scared.

The crew was shouting at me. Icebergs were being pushed toward me by the current from the left and directly head-on. There were five
or six icebergs, in different shapes and sizes, from six feet wide to one foot wide, and up to three feet high. They were flowing from the left, down the bay, and swimming near them was like running a gauntlet, but this gauntlet was moving toward us, and it was hard to judge the speed of the current. Could I get past them before they reached me, or did I have to slow down and let them slide by?

Dena Matkin was rowing ten yards ahead of me, her petite body working hard. Moving through the ice fields was difficult work. She had to get us through the ice patches and around the ice blocks without getting the rowboat caught up on the ice. At the same time, she was keeping an eye on me, making sure I wouldn’t ram into the back of the boat. Dena used her oars like a sledgehammer, slamming them down against the pan ice with all her might, repeating the action rapidly until the pan ice cracked.

Her boat became a mini ice breaker. She parted the ice and I followed her through the break, feeling the sharp ice sticking into my chest and forearms.

“Watch out for that berg!” Dena shouted a warning. “Head right. No—more. More. It’s wider than you think.”

Turning hard right, I followed Dena around a large iceberg six feet high and eight feet wide. We were within a foot of the iceberg, and as I swam, I stared at it. This was the first time I had ever been so close to an iceberg, and it was magnificent, a piece off the Riggs Glacier. At the bottom, the iceberg was bright glacial blue. In the middle, it was deeper blue and marbled with snow. The top of the iceberg had been sculpted by wind and rain into a thin, wavering, and silvery edge.

I swam as fast as my arms would turn over, trying to beat the cold and create heat. With my head up, I was able to see the bay ahead and to my right and left sides. The sun emerged from behind a cloud, and I looked across the Tiffany blue water, where a dozen icebergs shimmered like diamonds, bobbing slightly as they slowly slid downstream toward us.

“Look out, pan ice!” Matkin shouted. She broke a wedge through it with her bow so I could follow. It was a wide piece, and the unbroken
part shifted around in front of me. I thought,
Maybe I should wait and let it flow past me; then I won’t have to swim through it. That won’t work. It’s too cold.
Dena was yelling for me to swim around it, but that would take too much time. I had to swim through it. Using my right arm I made my hand flat, as if I were going to do karate. Then I chopped it down onto the ice. It hurt; my hand only bounced back up, reverberating like a bell. I did it again, harder this time, and felt the ice start to give. I hit it again in the same spot, and my forearm went through the ice and down into the water. I used my left arm next, and slammed it down. It worked. The ice cracked a bit more. I checked my arm. No blood. I hit the pan ice again, and it snapped and cracked open.
Hmm, this is actually kind of fun.
I carefully swam between the sharp pieces. I felt them jab into my arms, but I now knew that they weren’t cutting me, and somehow that made me feel more confident.

Another piece of pan ice bobbed in Dena’s path. She rowed onto it and smacked it with her oars. It wouldn’t break. Turning my arms over quickly, I swam in place. She tried again. It still didn’t break. She tried hitting the ice with one oar at different angles, but it still didn’t work. Dena was struggling now. Gripping the gunwales, she stood up and jumped down in the boat, trying to use her weight to crack the ice, but she was such a featherweight, she couldn’t do it. She held the gunwales, coiled her knees up to her body, and bounced up and down in the boat. I couldn’t help myself; I started laughing. It was contagious—soon Debbie and Fritz were laughing so hard they were bent over.

Dena wouldn’t give up. She rocked the boat back and forth, and then pushed herself high into the air. When she hit the floorboards, the pan ice heaved, groaned, and cracked. Dena grinned triumphantly, then laughed, her brown eyes radiating sheer delight, and she motioned for me to follow quickly.

This time, it felt as if I were swimming through ice soup. Tiny blades of ice ricocheted off my body. With a quick sigh, I made it through that section. But a large berg was now directly beside us. There was no way I could swim over it, so I decided to stop for a
moment and let it slide pass. That was a mistake. The icy cold water quickly seemed to pull the warmth from the marrow of my bones.

We were about halfway across the Muir Inlet now, and I was starting to think about the finish. When we landed and I climbed out of the water, the cooled blood from my extremities would be pumped back into my heart. If the blood was too cold, it could cause my heart to beat irregularly. Getting cold now could have more serious consequences later. In the afterdrop phase, I could go into severe hypothermia and pass out, or my heart could stop. So far I felt I was okay. Actually, my confidence was growing. It was really strange; I could feel heat from my abdomen as if it were a radiator, and I could feel it moving up through my body. I dipped my chin into the water, then my lips and face. Instantly my face went numb, but I didn’t get a headache. I tried again, longer this time. The water tasted sweet, just a little salty. Glacier Bay was different from any waterway I’d ever swum. My lips were numb.

Jeffrey Cardenas looked at me from the boat; I could tell he was becoming increasingly concerned. We had traveled around the world together, and we had become good friends. Jeffrey had been the person who had suggested this area; he said it would be an incredible spot for a swim. Jeffrey knew that my original plan had been to keep my head up during the entire swim. Knowing that a person loses up to 80 percent of their body heat through their head, I’d thought I would be able to keep my body temperature up by keeping my head up. But during the crossing I changed my mind.

“Are you okay?” Cardenas shouted. His teeth were chattering. He was from Florida, and he didn’t like the cold.

“I’m fine. Just experimenting,” I said between quick breaths. My neck and shoulders were sore from holding my head up for so long. But I also wanted to see what I was capable of doing. I needed to know for the Bering Strait. The farther I could push myself now, the more I would know.

Kicking my feet to increase my tempo and to get my numb arms to turn over faster, I put my head down for a couple of minutes and sprinted. My face ached. But I could do it. I lifted my head and
looked around. Dena was waving at me again, telling me to swim around another iceberg.

When I cleared it, I put my head down again. My face was already numb, so it didn’t feel as cold this time. I counted my strokes up to one thousand. This time my face was in for maybe three minutes.

Jeffrey Cardenas shouted, “I thought you were going to swim all the way with your head up.” He was worried. I think he thought I was losing it, or on the verge of hypothermia.

It took so much additional energy to talk. “Don’t worry. I’m okay. I just need to see what I can do,” I said.

He looked at me through his Nikon’s long lens. “Your face is bright red and swollen. So are your shoulders. Your lips aren’t purple, and I don’t see any discoloration in your shoulders.”

“Thanks, Jeffrey.” He was telling me I wasn’t hypothermic. That was very good news.

I continued sprinting. We were three-quarters of the way across the inlet, and to our left, the Riggs Glacier was calling. Wind-driven plumes of snow were rising above the glacier’s face. Massive chunks of ice were exploding into pieces as they tumbled into the inlet with such force that the waves reached us in a matter of minutes. They were a couple feet high, making the icebergs twist, turn, and bob around us. Swimming around them became trickier. We had to give them more space—they were becoming tipsy and they could roll over on Matkin and submerge her or me. We watched more intently, reacted more rapidly. The intensity of this swim was like nothing I had ever experienced. It was unbelievable. There was so much to be aware of, and yet, throughout it all, I had to stay absolutely focused on how my body was responding. The icebergs I passed seemed to be exhaling breaths of icy air. Despite the cold, I was enjoying the swim. It was absolutely beautiful, seeing the icebergs dancing in the water currents, watching them as they changed colors—blue, green, white, silver, and gold—and brightened with light and deepened with shadow.

The Muir Inlet was like a natural amphitheater as the wind in the bay increased to five knots. The sounds of the moving ice, creaking
and moaning, grew louder, and with the movement of the water and wind, the earth and trees, the high notes became sweeter and longer sustained. We were listening to a symphony of Alaska sounds. This was something I had never heard before, something I had never imagined, something beautifully new.

Koshman checked the thermometer and noted that the air temperature had dropped to thirty-three degrees. The sun’s warmth was completely extinguished by thick gray clouds. If the temperature dropped any further, we would have real problems with pan ice and getting back home.

My feet, arms, and legs felt like stumps, and for the first time I noticed sharp, cold pain shooting into my armpits. Matkin and I approached another iceberg and she motioned for me to go left. But I didn’t follow her. She had taken a course against the current that added twenty yards. It would take too much effort. Instead, I swam right toward the iceberg, thinking that the current would move it out of my way before I reached it. Poor physics. The iceberg and I were moving downstream at the same speed. Caught on an underwater ledge, I had to drag my chest, stomach, and legs off the iceberg, and it felt like I was sliding naked down a snowbank covered with rough ice crystals and nodules.

Matkin broke through another ice panel and pulled ahead. By the time I reached the panel, it had twisted completely around in the current. There wasn’t time for me to swim around it; I was too cold, too tired. It was thicker than the pan ice from before, and I knew I had to break it with my arms. I was scared. I lifted my arm and slammed it down against the ice. It didn’t break. I tried again. It hurt a lot. I was glad my arm was already numb. I took three quick strokes and used the weight of my body to break through it, the ice splintering around me.

“Swim closer to me,” Matkin urged, pulling her red cap down tightly on her head.

This time I listened to her and stayed right behind her stern.

Debbie and Jeffrey were leaning over the boat’s railing, shouting ice warnings for us and for Fritz. We continued twisting and turning,
abruptly shifting from one direction to the other, until we were four hundred yards from the landing point. I began sprinting with my head down, with all the strength I had remaining. I didn’t see the iceberg on my left and I smacked my left hand into it. The impact and pain rang through my arm and body, and I shouted a curse into the water. Oh, it hurt. I scraped the torn skin off, and my arm was bleeding.

I couldn’t afford to stop and examine the wound, but looking down through the water, I tried to determine how bad it was without interrupting my stroke. I couldn’t see anything. The water was filled with glacial silt, and it was milky white and opaque.
It’s okay. It doesn’t matter,
I told myself.
We’re almost three hundred yards from shore.
I looked down the beach.
Maybe I can swim to that next beach. It’s another half a mile. That would increase my distance by half, and it would help me see if the Bering Strait is really possible. Maybe I can push farther.
“How are you feeling?” Jeffrey called from the boat. I couldn’t feel my arms or legs or my face; they were numb. And my eyes ached.

Maybe I can go farther. That’s not a good idea. Because if you do, and you’re okay, you’ll want to go farther again. What’s wrong with that? You can’t feel your body. You’re ice-cold. Can you imagine what’s going to happen when you stop swimming? I don’t want to think about that. Right, and it’s going to be worse if you keep going. Remember, you have to think of the afterdrop. You’re going to get colder if you continue. The cold will penetrate deeper when you’re tired. You had better stop now. I know. But I really want to try it. The crew’s watching me. Sure they are, and they’re making sure you’re coherent, but your brain could have cooled down without them or you knowing it. And you know that’s bad news. You may be losing your sense of judgment without knowing it. And that means you could push yourself too far. Remember what happened to David Yudovin on his Anacapa attempt? He thought he was fine. He had no idea he was dying. His brain had cooled down and he lost all sense of reality. I think I’m okay. Sure, but if you cut right and head for that other beach, you’ll be riding the current, and
you’ll be in this iceberg-filled water for at least twenty more minutes. You’ve been going flat out for more than half an hour. And this cold is sapping your energy. Do you really think you can continue? Do you think you can make that shore? No. I’m too cold. Okay, then you’d better get out. But where am I going to get a chance to swim in water as cold as this before the Bering Strait? I don’t know. But you’d better be satisfied with what you’ve done today. You’ll find another time to test yourself. Honestly, you’ve reached your limit. Be happy. You’ve made it. You’re fifty yards from shore.