South with the Sun

by Lynne Cox

  Here I might be swimming with Greenland sharks, and putting blood into the water for them would be bad. I hoped Adam was right about the Greenland sharks not being a real threat.

  The plane rolled perfectly to a stop, and I felt a rush of energy. This was now our beginning. We gathered our gear and headed to the Hotel Icefiord van, and as we wound through the town built on high rocky hills and small flat rocky areas, I kept looking out the window to the bay, trying to see a cove or two where we could survey the area.

  The town itself was strangely quiet. It was early afternoon, and no one was out. We discovered that the hours people kept were different than ours. It was spring, and the sun was finally coming back to this part of the world; people were celebrating, eating late, playing late. Children and teenagers would play soccer until midnight, when the sun started to go down, and they would get up early for school and come home and rest so they could stay out late and enjoy the light.

  We had been given the names of Karen Filskov, who worked for a company called Destination Disko, along with her colleague Konrad Selbon. They had offered to help us work out logistics for the swim.

  When we reached the hotel, Karen and Konrad were waiting for us in a light snowstorm and immediately guided us into the lobby.

  We sat down around a wooden table with a map of Disko Bay spread out in front of us. Karen sat beside me. Her light-brown-and-honey fur-trimmed parka hood circled her face. She was the daughter of a Greenlandic mother and Danish father and was a beautiful and exotic blend of both, with the most extraordinary almond-shaped green eyes and soft auburn hair that fringed her cheeks. Her face was oval with a delicate nose, and she had high cheekbones and a big smile.

  Konrad was equally exotic. His parents were both Greenlandic Inuit, and he had black hair and large brown almond-shaped eyes and a quick boyish smile with the whitest teeth. He was powerfully built, like a collegiate wrestler. His torso had a V shape, and his deltoids, triceps, and biceps were large and well defined even under his long-sleeved T-shirt. He seemed strong and had incredible balance. I had watched him walking to the hotel along the uneven road and cutting across a yard filled with irregularly shaped rocks, moving from one to another as if they were flat and even stepping-stones. Konrad probably had gotten strong from hard work, from hauling in seals or whales and pulling in fish from the bay.

  This was good. If Konrad could haul a seal out of the water, he would be able to drag me out if I got into trouble and needed help.

  We discussed the tides. I hadn’t been able to find a tidal chart of Greenland’s waters, but Konrad fished there often, and fishermen usually knew the most about the tides and currents. Konrad said that the tidal change was rarely more than a foot because the bay was very well protected. The speed of the current would not be more than half a knot.

  We studied the map, calculated distances and time anticipated to swim, and considered the starting and, hopefully, the finishing point. There was one large bay near the northern section of town, and Konrad shook his head and explained that it was just below a shrimp-processing plant and that the inedible parts of the shrimp were dumped into the water. I pointed to another bay. Konrad shook his head. That was where the raw sewage pipe from town drained directly into the water. Konrad and Karen shifted into Greenlandic and Danish, speaking softly and discussing other options, and Karen translated their discussion for us. They suggested that I swim across Church Bay; it was near the town’s center, and it was a distance of a quarter of a mile. The bay was just below Knud Rasmussen’s home and the Zion church where his father had been the village vicar.

  Knud Rasmussen was one of the most beloved and famous Greenlanders. His father was Danish, and his mother was Greenlandic Inuit. Rasmussen had led a number of expeditions by dogsled to Thule in the far north of Greenland. He explored and mapped much of Greenland and Arctic America. On his first expedition, the Danish Greenland Literary expedition, he had served as a translator for Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, and translated the complex Greenlandic folk tales and myths into Danish.

  Church Bay seemed like a good place to swim. Maybe I would be able to see Rasmussen’s home from the water and use that for inspiration.

  Karen asked me, “When you swim, will you be wearing a wet suit or a dry suit?”

  “I’ll be wearing a swimsuit—a Tyr Lycra swimsuit,” I replied.

  It took a moment for my answer to register. Karen drew in a quick breath and said, “Are you crazy? Do you know how cold that water is?”

  I’d thought she understood what we were doing.

  “From the research I’ve done the water temperature could be between twenty-eight point eight to thirty-four degrees,” I told her.

  Konrad looked concerned. He asked Karen something in Greenlandic, and they spoke for a few minutes. Eventually, he said that he knew someone who had a Zodiac that we could use as an escort boat, in case anything went wrong and I needed to be pulled out of the water.

  Before we decided on this as the starting point, though, we needed to check on entry and exit points for the swim. We walked out of the hotel into a light snow shower and followed the main dirt road that climbed into town. Dogs with long thick coats were staked in tiers along the steep rocky hillsides. When, at one point, a puppy bounded down to greet us, the adult dogs broke into loud, anxious barks and high-pitched howls. Karen warned us not to play with the puppy. These were working dogs, Konrad explained, not pets or companions. They were conditioned to withstand the harshness of the environment and they were strictly trained. There was no room on a sled for a dog that didn’t listen. The result could mean death for the dog, the team, or the driver. These dogs could have been the descendants of Nansen’s and Amundsen’s and Rasmussen’s dogs. What amazing dogs they were.

  We walked along a narrow boardwalk that ran between the quaint houses and over spongy marshland. Here and there, the weathered boards had snapped or were about to, and the frame wobbled with every step, and the footing was unsteady. Every now and then a woman in her home would look out her window and wave and smile. They all seemed to know why we were there.

  When we reached the southern end of Church Bay, we followed the cliff edge and decided on an entry point, an area of low rock that tapered gradually into the water. But the grass green algae that covered the rocks concerned me.

  We walked below the Zion church, the small eighteenth-century wooden building where Knud Rasmussen’s father had been a minister. The rocks around the church were covered by a foot of melting ice and snow. Below, a rocky ledge encircled the bay, but most of it was two or three feet above the water. If I were swimming, it would be too high for me to reach up and pull myself out.

  The next morning, we scouted the northern part of Church Bay for an exit point. We watched a powerfully built Inuit man, of medium height, wearing thick black rubber boots and carrying two large plastic buckets, slip, slide, and swing his arms to catch his balance as he walked to the water’s edge. If a local man had this much of a challenge to walk on the ice and rocks, what was I going to do? The man bent over and, with a groan, lifted a log-sized piece of clear blue ice from the water. He stuck it with a pick and split off chunks, which he dropped into the buckets. The ice had once been rainwater. It had fallen into the cracks of an iceberg and frozen there, and, when the iceberg broke up, the clear ice had floated away on the seawater. It was pure and sweet and would be used as drinking water.

  I spent the days getting over jet lag. The cold water would have a greater impact if I was tired, so I needed to give myself a chance to be fully rested. This was not the ideal situation, though. I couldn’t train in these waters, they were too cold, and I hadn’t been able to train much over the past week, with all the preparations I had to make before leaving home. By the time I got into the water, it would have been nine days without training, but I reminded myself that I would just do the best I could and make it work.

  The reason for going to Greenland wasn’t only to swim, it was to explore, and for the next two day
s we wandered through town and visited the local art museum, which featured Emanuel Peterson’s large canvas oil paintings with images from one hundred years ago, the time when Amundsen and Nansen sailed near these shores. The light on the bay, icebergs, people, fires and snow, and the Eskimo dogs all took you to a place that was long ago—and yet was alive within these paintings. Christian, the museum curator, was also the priest, and he took us on a tour of Zion Church. There was something so familiar about the space of the church that it felt strangely like home. The interior was painted white and sky blue, and behind the altar was a beautiful religious scene with Greenlandic words painted below.

  The church was intentionally built in the shape of a ship to create a metaphor between the church and God and man. It was believed that like the church, each person is also like a ship, sailing on his or her journey through life.

  It made me think of how often my body was a small boat as I crossed great waterways, and how often I felt most spiritual when I was out on the waters.

  Christian asked why we had come to Ilulissat.

  We told him we were trying to use the swim as a way to work with and connect with the people in Greenland, to understand them and their country a little better through the experience.

  It was strange. It was as if he already knew, somehow, and he seemed to think it was important. He told us that Monday, when we planned to do the swim, was All Saints’ Day, a highly spiritual day in Greenland, when people go to church in the morning and pray and give thanks. All schools and workplaces were closed that day. He asked us when we planned the swim, and he said that his colleague, a Greenlandic priest, would be giving the sermon, but he wanted to know if I might finish swimming after 9:00 a.m. so his congregation could come down and see the swim. He was so excited. He had to go to the jail to administer services there, but would race back for the finish. And he said that he would ask his friend to have the congregation say a special prayer during the service for the success of the swim, and they would come out of the church at 9:00 and welcome us if we reached the area.

  Everything was set. Konrad would be able to get a Zodiac boat to escort me during the swim, and we had a plan in place, but we had to wait for a couple of days. Karen and Konrad were tied up in meetings translating for Hans Enoksen, the prime minister of Greenland, and for Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House. I joked with Karen and Konrad that we had to share them—our crew—with the prime minister and Nancy Pelosi.

  Waiting was always difficult, and it was especially challenging when the weather was perfect. The air temperatures in Ilulissat were in the forties, a hot white sun was illuminating the sky, and the water and the bay were a silky smooth silvery mirror of the heavens. Icebergs the size of battleships and icebreakers had sailed in on the incoming tide, and they would have been a large obstacle to crossing Church Bay, but had drifted out with the outgoing tide. If we could have begun on that day, it looked like I could have swum straight across without having to swim around any icebergs. But we couldn’t, we had to wait.

  We met each day at the Hotel Icefiord in the lobby after Karen and Konrad had finished translating, and we discussed our plans in increasing detail, down to where our crew would be positioned; my main person to communicate with during the swim would be Bob Griffith, because he had been on my swim in Antarctica, and he had seen me swim in very cold water and knew how I responded.

  We ate our way through those next two days, enjoying puffy fresh whole wheat rolls with paper-thin slices of buttery Danish cheese for breakfast. For lunch we ate tender halibut, delicate cod, and sweet bay shrimp from Disko Bay, and for dinner we tried musk ox burgers and chili that were far leaner than hamburger and delicious. We also ate Thai chicken and fish, since the main chef was from Thailand.

  Trying to get rested and get over the jet lag, I went to bed at eight p.m., long before sunset.

  I woke up around one a.m. and wiped the thick frost off my windowpane and looked outside. The crew was sitting on patio chairs two floors below my window. They were looking out across the silvery waters of Ilulissat Bay, watching the icebergs sliding by on the incoming tide and holding their hands up to their eyes now and then to examine the shapes of snowflakes lighting on their black gloves. They were huddled together, wearing their heavy winter coats, hats, and boots and wrapped up in navy blue woolen blankets trying to stay warm, and it was snowing harder. Big heavy wet snowflakes were swaying like tiny feathers falling from the sky. The wetness of the snowflakes meant the air temperature was growing warmer. And there was a shift in the air currents. Maybe by tomorrow the snow would have stopped. It would make it easier to swim, both psychologically and physically. Swimming in a snowstorm wasn’t what most people did. But then there was something exciting about having the training and the focus to do it.

  The storm was moving in. Snow was swirling with gusts of wind and falling more quickly now. Below my window my friends were covered from head to toe with an inch or two of fresh snow. They shook out their blankets and picked up their hot drinks, took a sip, and watched the snow falling into the water. They were like little kids; even though it was freezing cold, they didn’t want to come inside. It would have been fun to join them, but it was late, and sleep was more important so I would be ready to swim in the morning.

  CHAPTER 11

  Coolest Crossing

  A day later, on May 28, 2007, I put on my swimsuit and, for the first time, put on the bright orange harness and attached a carabineer to the back. My goal was to swim across Church Bay, about a quarter of a mile, and if I was doing okay my plan was to push farther. The distance would be decided by my reaction to the water temperature. I put on my sweat suit and gazed out of the window of the Hotel Icefiord, studying the movement of the icebergs. There were some that had returned on the tide that were larger than battleships. In 2002, just before I jumped into the waters off Antarctica, I had been overwhelmed by the thought of swimming among icebergs. Now, five years later, I was using the icebergs like buoys; they made the water currents visible.

  Karen walked with me while the rest of the crew motored to the starting area in the Zodiac. They had taken the water temperature. It ranged from 28.8 to 29 degrees, 3 degrees colder than the water had been in Antarctica. I had asked them not to tell me the temperature. I knew the water would be cold, and I didn’t think it would help me to know how cold it was. It could psych me completely out.

  The bay was calm. There was no wind, and there weren’t enough icebergs to make navigation difficult, but the tide was lower than we expected, and the exposed algae-covered rocks would be too slippery to walk across. We searched for another spot. A group of people from the hotel had come along as support and just to see the swim. One of the men, Sven, was a rock climber and mountain climber from Denmark. He helped us find a bare rock. It wasn’t ideal—I would have to drop five feet off the rock cliff and hope that the water would slow my impact enough so that I could land safely on a craggy ledge two feet below the surface and give my body a few minutes to adjust to the temperature.

  I handed my sweat suit to Karen and felt the cold 40-degree air against my skin. I put on my cap slowly, so my skin temperature would become the same as the air temperature, and the blood under my skin would race into my interior to keep it warm. I wrapped the elastic band of my goggles around my wrist so I wouldn’t lose them when I hit the water. I looked over the edge and at the crew on the Zodiac boat. Gretchen was on the bow, Bob and Bill were sitting on the seat behind her, and Konrad was operating the motor. Bob was in his bright orange survival suit, Bill in his dry suit; all were watching the water for any Greenland sharks.

  Bob was ready, holding on to a long orange-and-yellow nylon rope with a carbineer on one end and leaning slightly forward. Bill was clasping his hands and praying. The crew looked solemn.

  “Lynne, are you ready?” Bob asked with a steady voice. I could just see his face under his parka hood. He would take the lead on this. He would be the one who communicated with me so I would just have
one focus. If something else came up, Bill or Gretchen or Konrad would say something to Bob and he would speak to me. They knew that the water might be so cold that I might not have the air to speak to them. If that happened, I would lift my foot, and give them the Seal Beach wave, to let them know I was okay.

  “Yes,” I said.

  We had discussed everything many times before. I looked down. I knew where to get in, but with the ebb tide, the water was lower than we expected. Would I be able to get out? I remembered: if I couldn’t land, Bob would clamp the carabineers together, and they would bounce me out.

  I’m swimming across Church Bay, Ilulissat, Greenland, in 28.8-degree-Fahrenheit water, feeling the movement of fish below. In the Zodiac, from left to right, are Konrad, Bob, Bill, and Gretchen, all focused on me.

  I took a deep breath and stepped off the rock. My feet touched the ledge, and in twenty seconds my arms, legs, and torso were numb. The water felt colder than in Antarctica. I licked my goggles to keep them from fogging, pulled them over my head and over my eyes, pushed off the ledge, and started swimming head up. I couldn’t feel my arms and legs, just this sensation of extreme cold, but I could sense that they were moving against the water. My breathing was different than what it had been in Antarctica. There, when I first hit the water, I immediately started hyperventilating. That was the normal response. The adrenaline kicked in, increasing heart rate and breathing.