The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Lord Byron was one of the first to swim through dark waters and over great depths, and he did so at a time when the submarine world was still relatively unknown. He crossed the Hellespont, from what is now European Turkey to what is now Asian Turkey, on May 3, 1810, in emulation of Leander’s legendary swims to his lover, Hero. The distance is little more than a mile, but the current made it so arduous that Byron doubted “whether Leander’s conjugal powers must not have been exhausted in his passage to Paradise.” He later wrote of his crossing, “I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical.”

  The greatest swim in the history of marathon swimming, however, was Captain Matthew Webb’s conquest of the English Channel, in 1875, and the most sensational was the American Gertrude Ederle’s triumph there in 1926, when she became the first woman to swim across—using the crawl all the way—and beat the existing record by two hours. On her return to New York, she was greeted by sirens, flowers showering down from planes, and a ticker-tape parade; the enthusiasm for her welcome equaled that for Charles Lindbergh the following year. Captain Webb drowned in 1883 while attempting to swim the rapids below Niagara Falls, in a suicidal bid for “money and imperishable fame.” A crowd of ten thousand watched Webb disappear beneath the waves after he cracked open his head on a series of submerged rocks that surrounded a whirlpool where the river bends.

  Webb’s death was unfortunate, but his financial enterprise and his flair for self-promotion would have appealed to William Wrigley, Jr., the chewing-gum millionaire. In 1927, Wrigley instituted the first professional swimming race in the world: Competitors would swim from Catalina Island, twenty miles off the coast of Southern California, to the mainland for a first prize of twenty-five thousand dollars. He had just bought the island as a commercial proposition, and, impressed by Ederle’s reception in New York the previous year, concocted the pageant to solve the problem of a lack of tourists in California during the winter months. Some fifteen thousand spectators watched the winner swim home at three in the morning, illuminated by the searchlights of yachts. Wrigley’s venture was so successful that he inaugurated an annual twenty-one-mile race on Lake Ontario for a prize of thirty thousand dollars. Other businessmen followed his example, in bays and lakes all over America, and further afield—in Yugoslavia, South America, Australia, Mexico, Italy, England, and Egypt. Like modern golfers or tennis players on tour, the same group of swimmers would assemble in various parts of the world to compete for large amounts of money.

  Marathon swimmers are a different breed from short-distance swimmers. Compared with the long, lithe, and adolescent figures you see in the Olympics, marathon swimmers appear in photographs to be built like bisons rather than like cheetahs, with gnarled faces and stubborn expressions, their pendulous breasts and stomachs drooping down to stubby legs. (Only the Dane Greta Andersen has excelled in both forms of competition. After winning the gold medal in the hundred-meter freestyle in the Olympic Games in 1948, she won the English Channel race twice and became one of the greatest open-water swimmers in the world.)

  These swimmers need a tenacity and a stocky build to withstand the impact of waves and tides, the sudden nausea inflicted by oil slicks and bilge, the prolonged effects of salt water, which causes the lips and tongue to swell and reduces the face to something resembling fungus. So intense and concentrated are the conditions that marathon swimmers become prey to delusions and neuroses that are often beyond the experiences of other athletes. The huge distances that the swimmers cover, sometimes up to sixty miles, can bring on hallucinations. In 1961, in the first back-to-back swim of the English Channel, the Argentine Tony Abertondo imagined posts and dogs obstructing his path over the last two miles. During the same swim four years later, Ted Erikson saw his pilot boat suddenly fade into a black smear and then turn into a rosebush, at which point he found that there were roses growing all around him. In May 1975, Ben Haggard, a New York policeman, attempted to swim from Florida to Nassau, across the so-called Bermuda Triangle, using a shark cage. As night fell, floodlights from the boats accompanying him revealed sharks circling his cage. Haggard recalled feeling the presence of a hostile force. “I had this feeling that something wanted me to come out through the door,” he said afterward. “I knew what would happen, with the sharks outside, but the urge was irresistible. I swam over and grabbed the trapdoor. I was shaking, but I held on to it. I kept saying to myself: I am not going to let it take me out of the cage, whatever it is.”

  Swimming, particularly long-distance swimming, appeals to the solitary and the eccentric. An informal survey of fourteen champion long-distance swimmers concluded that only two of them were swimming under no particular stress, while the others were all reacting to severe emotional tension. No one knows, for example, why Britt Sullivan, a hard-drinking former Wave from Nebraska, decided to swim the Atlantic Ocean in 1964. She lost touch with her escort boat off Fire Island, twenty miles from her starting point, and was never seen again.

  Lynne Cox appears to be devoid of neuroses and delusions, yet no doubt the long hours she has spent submerged in water have made her in some ways remote. Her endeavors seem to defy the limits of human possibility: She was the first swimmer to cross the Strait of Magellan, among the most treacherous stretches of water in the world; she has swum through Lake Baikal, one of the deepest, longest, and coldest lakes in the world. She follows a solitary course: The impulse behind her swims has been hers, as are the organization and negotiation. She is no longer registered with the United States Swimming Association, because races don’t interest her, nor does prize money. The purpose of her swims is not to promote rivalry but to create harmony.

  For Cox, swimming is an “emotional and spiritual necessity,” a phrase used by George Mallory, the mountaineer, to describe his own compulsion to dive into any lake or river that he came upon. Cox is drawn to the challenge of a confrontation with nature—a struggle perhaps familiar to mountain climbers. “It involves a lot of planning, training, and physical obstacles,” she says of marathon swimming. “In a pool, you know there’s a finish, because there are two walls. In a marathon swim or a mountain climb, you are never sure. There is a much higher risk involved. Basically, you can die.” If there is one image, now that all sports are so commercial and technologically sophisticated, that grips the imagination as much as Mallory, dressed like a gamekeeper and glimpsed through a brief break in the clouds, “going strong for the top,” it is that of Lynne Cox, virtually naked, forcing her way through the waves of the Bering Strait.

  I first met Lynne Cox by the Pacific, earlier this summer, among the palms of the Hotel Laguna. The hotel, built in 1888, was once dedicated to glamour, but now it is the haunt of earnest couples who seem intent on closing deals and analyzing “relationships.” Cox, with her generous smile, lilting voice, and long black hair, appeared to be everything they were not. Like the two plain syllables of her name, Cox was simple and direct. I had been drawn originally to American swimmers by their names, redolent of romance and dash—Donna deVarona, Casey Converse, Chet Jastremski, Zac Zorn—but Cox was in a different category.

  We changed and went to swim. The outline of Catalina showed through the haze in the distance. There had been a storm the night before; waves hammered the shore and threw me onto a rock. Cox laughed and shouted that at the start of her swim around the Cape of Good Hope, in 1978, she had had to dive through waves four times as high. At five feet six inches and 180 pounds, she is not particularly tall or lean; in fact, her body is between 30 and 35 percent fat. (Most women’s bodies are between 18 and 25 percent.) What makes her body remarkable, according to doctors who have tested her, is an “even” covering of fat that acts like a wetsuit; the porpoise bulk of her build forms a protective surface that keeps the temperature of her inner body normal in extreme conditions. Most of her power seems to derive from her mermaid hips. She doesn’t have the orangutan arms and shoulders of a shorter-distance swimmer, but as we swam I not
iced that she kept up a rhythmic, consistent stroke, zigzagging her hand viciously underwater, where it counts. She seemed to melt into the water. (To achieve a similar effect, East German swimmers were rumored to inject gas into their colons.) Her skin looked so smooth that I asked her if she went through the ritual of shaving before a swim, like Olympic swimmers, but she told me that long-distance swimmers preserve body hair for greater insulation.

  A harmless jellyfish floated by, which reminded her of the worst jellyfish she had encountered, in warm waters off Sweden. They were “red, yellow, and transparent—the size of a garbage-can lid—with long tentacles that slammed into my face and burned my body,” she said. “Every stroke was tentative and I could never relax—I would swim onto the back of one before realizing I was in the middle of it.”

  As we swam, Cox spoke of her childhood in New Hampshire, and summer holidays her family spent in Maine, on a lake called Snow Pond, where she swam all day and often at night, too, when she was “sticky with sweat.” She described her sense of relief on entering the black water, recalling “the smell of pine accentuated at night, the moonlight that turned the edge of the shore to silver.” Frogs and snakes and sandfish snatched at her body. Swimming among white and yellow water lilies, she would dive down through the clear water to follow the long stems that attached the flowers to the sandy bottom. A mile out, in the middle of the lake, there was an island that she always wanted to swim to. Years later, she went back to the lake. “I swam around to the original smooth, sloping stone from which I entered the lake as a child,” she told me. “I slid off it again and swam out to the island, across a surface disfigured by Jet-Skis and motorboats.” At the end of each summer, she hated returning to the local public pool. She loathed the routine and the regimentation, the innumerable laps spent staring at a black line on the bottom of the pool.

  In 1969, when she was twelve, her father, a radiologist, moved the family from the East Coast to California. His experience in the Medical Corps on Iwo Jima during the war had turned him into an idealist, and he determined to bring up his four children in a healthy climate and make them all into good swimmers, believing that swimming extended the body more safely than any other sport. In California, Cox started training with a swimming coach, Don Gambril, who was also the coach of the Olympic team. He noticed that she picked up the pace only after a mile, and so had no prospects as an Olympic swimmer, and he encouraged her instead to join a group of young swimmers who were training for the open sea. “Suddenly I felt released from a cage. I was actually going somewhere, not merely back and forth,” Cox recalls. “I felt exhilarated by the challenge of swimming against the current and into the waves.” When the group swam from Catalina Island to the mainland, Cox was so far ahead of the other swimmers that she had to tread water while they caught up. She was then fourteen.

  She returned to Catalina in 1974 to break the record. She started at night, when conditions are usually most favorable. “The whole atmosphere seems somehow refined,” she says, “and you feel you are really swimming on the upper inches of the ocean.” But on this occasion fog descended five miles offshore. Cox became separated from her escort boat. “I felt the sea welling up around me and huge shapes brush up against my body,” she recalls. “Within half an hour, I became hysterical.” The boat found her shortly afterward, and she gave up the attempt.

  When we finished our swim, we lay on the sand and watched the body of a dead seal drifting about in the shallows; its head had been snapped off by a shark. Although Cox swims often in shark-infested seas, she refuses to use a cage, believing that it divorces a swimmer from the elements and creates currents and conditions of its own, sometimes causing a drag that can help a swimmer along. She says that this is “unfair—like climbing Everest on an escalator.” On two attempts made by marathon swimmers to cross from Cuba to Florida which I followed, cages were used. One swimmer was able to relax motionless for hours while being towed along; the other took a ten-minute break every two miles to stand on the bars while he prayed and consulted his psychiatrist.

  The first time Cox swam from Catalina Island, she was warned that fear reduces energy. In order to avoid thinking of sharks, she concentrated on her hands moving through the water and the phosphorescent bubbles trailing off her fingertips. She has always managed to divert her mind from what may lurk below the surface. She was forced to confront reality once, however, when a frogman who was protecting her as she swam around the Cape of Good Hope shot a shark that had emerged from the kelp, its jaws wide open, and was making straight for her. She was almost home, but had to sprint the final four hundred yards—a cloud of blood was attracting other sharks.

  Sometimes, Cox admitted to me, reflections of clouds could assume sinister shapes in the water and affect her imagination. I asked her how she felt when she studied navigational charts and discovered, as the light blue on the map gradually turned to dark, the depths over which she would be swimming. I wanted to know what went through her mind as she peered down through goggles into two or three miles of water. Anything can rise out of that shadowy line ten or fifteen feet below a swimmer, where the shafts of sunlight fade into blackness. At this point, her insouciance momentarily faltered and she seemed almost to shudder; then she quickly told me to stop my questions.

  The English Channel is the ultimate goal of any long-distance swimmer. Cox first became aware of it at the age of nine, even though she had no idea where it was. She was swimming in an outdoor pool in New Hampshire when “there was a sudden hailstorm and strong winds sent waves racing across the surface of the pool,” she recalls. “Everyone was ordered to get out and practice calisthenics indoors. Only I remained, and I exulted in the conditions.” When she finally did emerge, a woman at the pool predicted that one day Cox would swim the Channel.

  In 1972, when she was fifteen, she felt ready for an attempt. Her coach, however, thought her too inexperienced. At this critical moment, she met a Coptic Egyptian living in California called Fahmy Attallah, who describes himself as a “clinical humanist psychologist.” He had attempted the Channel on five occasions, between 1939 and 1950, and had failed every time. In 1950, he missed by a mere three hundred feet: He had raised his arms to shield his eyes from the sun as he gazed in disbelief at the nearby shore. The pilot presumed he had given up and bent down to pull him out of the sea. Fahmy was disqualified. (His various attempts made headline news in Cairo, and influenced a great period of Egyptian swimming which followed the Second World War and culminated with Abo-Heif, a suave and brave Old Etonian, and one of the world’s strongest swimmers.)

  Fahmy inspired Cox to achieve what he hadn’t. He described Dover and Folkestone, and told her where to train and how to find a pilot. Her training was much more intense than his had ever been—to increase her speed, she adopted methods used by Olympic swimmers—but he emphasized the discipline required to swim in cold water.

  In the summer, Cox traveled to England with her mother. Throughout her swim, she felt that she had the record within her grasp, but two miles off Cape Gris-Nez she was forced sidewise, and a gap of five miles opened up between her and the shore. The currents a mile or so off the peninsula are terribly strong, and she had heard numerous stories of swimmers who got within a mile of the French coast and just couldn’t get ashore. They got pulled back into the middle of the Channel, or were swept up toward Calais, or simply gave up.

  She spotted a rocky promontory and decided to sprint for that, even though her pilot said that the rocks looked too dangerous and advised her to go for the beach. Her decision was crucial: She made it to the rocks, and her time of nine hours and fifty-seven minutes broke the men’s record by thirty minutes and the women’s by almost four hours. Telegrams of congratulations followed from all over the world, a few including offers of marriage. Some months later, her record was broken. Cox went back the following year to break the new record: She wanted to prove that her first swim hadn’t been a fluke. Stronger currents forced her to swim three miles farther, throug
h rougher seas, and still she broke the record by ten minutes.

  On her return to America, Fahmy encouraged her to look for further challenges. She was invited to Cairo to compete in an annual twenty-mile race through the Nile. Fahmy assured her that it would be clean, but years away from Egypt had blunted his memory of local conditions. Cox struggled through fifteen miles of sewage, rats, and dead dogs before she was forced to retire. Fahmy also persuaded her to reattempt the Catalina record after she lost her nerve.

  Now aged ninety, the diminutive, dignified Fahmy lives across the road from the Pacific in a Long Beach apartment whose sliding doors open on to a pool. He still swims daily. The author of the recent Beauty of Being: Psychological Tips for Holistic Wellness, he has continued to act as a mentor to Cox over the years. “More than anything,” she told me, “he taught me to experience the spirituality of water: how we feel embraced and freed and connected to something much larger than ourselves when we are swimming through it.”

  Whenever I met Cox after our first swim, I noticed that she always veered toward a table by a fountain or a pool. When it rains, she told me, she opens her windows wide, and when it rains hard she drives down to the ocean to swim. To the amazement of her neighbors, she washes her car in her swimsuit in the rain. One night while we were talking, she looked up at the stars and exclaimed how excited she was by the thought of the frozen lakes of Europa.

  In 1975, Cox flew to New Zealand for an attempt on the sixteen-mile Cook Strait, between the country’s North and South Island. This would prove to be one of her most arduous swims. Caught on a massive swell caused by conflicting currents, she found herself farther from the finish after five hours than when she started, but the sight of dolphins spinning and leaping renewed her spirits. The whole of New Zealand seemed to be following the swim. “The escort turned up the radio so that I could hear messages of public support,” she recalls. “A cross-channel ferry diverted its course and spectators lined the sides to cheer. Airlines altered their flight paths to fly low over the Strait. When I was halfway across, the prime minister called to say that the New Zealand people were behind me.” After she touched the rocks at South Island, church bells were rung throughout the country to celebrate.