by Lynne Cox
Samantha’s head was a bit high in the water, making her hips drop slightly, increasing her drag, and slowing her down. Dragging feet or landing gear considerably reduce speed through the water or across the runway. A similar kind of drag and speed reduction limits the LC-130’s takeoffs and flights. Major Mark McKeown, one of the LC-130 pilots, explained that sometimes when the LC-130 moves to taxi or take off from the skiway—a snow runway that is used by ski-equipped aircraft—the movement of the aircraft’s skis across the snow creates friction. This causes the snow to melt, and a very thin layer of water is formed. The plane glides on this film of water; otherwise the plane could not overcome the friction of the snow on the skis.
The water layer also creates suction. Sometimes if there is too much water, the aircraft does not have the power to overcome the suction to achieve the seventy miles per hour needed to take off. It’s like trying to pick up a wet penny from a flat surface. Sometimes the aircrew has to attempt a takeoff a few times, burn off fuel, and reduce the weight of the aircraft to let it move faster along the skiway and finally become airborne. Once in the air, they lift the landing gear into the aircraft and tuck the skis under the aircraft like a pelican pulls its feet up under its body to reduce air resistance and fly more efficiently.
Samantha East in a LC-130 with navigational chart.
The optimal position for the LC-130 to move through space depends on temperature and the aircraft’s weight. It is the same in swimming, although each person’s body is shaped and composed somewhat differently, so that each person has to find his or her own place in the water where he or she swims most efficiently.
“Samantha, your feet are down—it’s like having your skis down in the air.”
Swimming is about balance, and balance is equally important for the flight of the LC-130. The aircraft has to be balanced to fly, and the swimmer has to be balanced to move efficiently through the water.
Samantha was swimming smoothly, and she looked balanced, but she had overcompensated with her head position. One correction changed everything else. Now she was burying her head in the water and making it difficult to turn and breathe.
To correct this, I asked her to look out over the top of her goggles at the black line drawn on the bottom of the pool—like the way she used the radar screen to navigate the aircraft. I suggested that she rotate her core more, roll more from side to side, so that she was reducing her profile in the water and thereby reducing the water resistance. Rotating this way would help her breathe, and that rotation of her whole body would take a lot of stress off her neck. She immediately placed her head in the right position. Her ability to take in new information and translate it so quickly to swimming must be an awareness that she had fine-tuned when flying with her LC-130 aircrew.
The LC-130 aircrews were constantly training and regularly being tested and evaluated by LC-130 instructors who seemed like coaches. The aircrews were always learning and adjusting to new situations. Samantha was able to move from flight to swimming by using a training process that linked two different worlds.
Head position was key to flight through the water and through the air. When Major Mark McKeown came in for a landing, he trained his eyes on the landing spot and did not move his head. Major McKeown checked his instruments, but when the aircraft was near touchdown, he would visually select a landing spot and kept his eyes focused on that spot, and he listened to the navigator, copilot, and flight engineer, one by one, provide information to help him land the aircraft.
Samantha continued swimming, but she was getting fatigued; she was falling off her pace; her stroke rate was dropping. Senior Master Sergeant Thivierage said that cold fatigued the LC-130 and caused the aircraft to break, in which case they had to ground the aircraft and work on it.
Samantha’s stroke looked effortless, completely efficient, and she reminded me of Sandy Neilson, my roommate at UCSB who had the most beautiful and efficient stroke I had ever seen. Sandy had won the gold medal in the one-hundred-meter freestyle in the 1972 Olympic Games. She was swimming much faster at age forty-four than when she won the Olympic gold medal. She’d improved with age.
I wished Sandy could see Samantha swim. Sandy would recognize the natural feel that Samantha had for the water. Sandy would have gotten just as excited as I did. Samantha was a natural. I wouldn’t be surprised if her friends from the 109th were good if not excellent swimmers. Flight through the air was, in many ways, like flight through the water.
CHAPTER 23
Discovering Greatness
As the months passed, I continued working on trying to obtain permission from the National Science Foundation to fly with the 109th Air Wing in Antarctica and write about their joint mission, but I wasn’t making headway. One day, though, before I left home for a speech in Vancouver, I received an e-mail from Gary K. Hart.
Gary was a former California state senator; he had lived in the Santa Barbara area when I was at UCSB. We met then and he had followed my career. Gary had played football for Stanford University. He graduated and got his master’s degree at Harvard, and became California secretary for education. He was still very involved in education and he loved exploration. Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe Gary would know whom I could contact to help me get approval from the National Science Foundation to fly to Antarctica.
Time was passing quickly. It was October 21. If clearance came through, the trip would most likely take place in January, when the weather was the best, and when there were often scheduled press trips or trips for distinguished visitors such as Congressmen, senators, foreign dignitaries, and officials from the Pentagon.
I explained to Gary that one of the reasons that I needed to go to Antarctica was to see with my own eyes and talk with people about their observations on climate change and global warming, as I had in the Arctic and in Greenland.
Gary offered to help. He called his old friend Phil Angelides, who had been California state treasurer, and Phil contacted Senator Boxer and Senator Pelosi’s offices. They called the NSF and the generals at the Pentagon, who checked on my proposal. The generals assured Senator Pelosi that the air force had done all they could to support the project, but the NSF was not responding.
Every day and night I continued thinking of who else I could contact to help get NSF approval. Then it came to me: Arthur Sulzberger! Arthur was the publisher of the New York Times. We had met in 2000 when I gave a motivational lecture for the salespeople and executives at the Times. After the conference, he was introduced to me, and we talked for a few minutes. He was so approachable. He was an athlete, rock climber, scuba diver, and a tremendous supporter of Outward Bound.
A few months later, he invited me to have lunch with him, and I was so nervous about meeting with him. For as long as I could remember, I had wanted to be a writer, and this was the chance to meet the man who ran the best newspaper in the world, a man who had been a journalist himself.
During lunch we talked about our backgrounds and we discussed where we found our inspirations. When I mentioned to Arthur that I’d been a librarian after I graduated from UCSB, he immediately offered to show me his library. I love libraries, and I love to see what people read. It gives me insights into what is important to them, what inspires them, what they are curious about.
We climbed up a flight of carpeted stairs to the top of the old New York Times building, and I gazed at the bookshelves from floor to ceiling on the walls around the room. One section was filled with old books. The covers were faded from time and light, and the print on the spines was in heavy black. The covers looked brittle, like they needed to be opened with great care—with one hand supporting the delicate spine, and the other hand slowly opening the book and gently turning the page.
There were biographies, memoirs, histories, books on wars and on current events by pundits and politicians. There was Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August, as well as books by some New York Times journalists and New Yorker writers, too. There was an entire section on Winston Churchill
.
I was so involved in studying the books that I lost Arthur. When I turned around, he was standing behind me, slightly off to one side.
There was a whole section of books just on the Arctic and Antarctica!
Arthur was smiling. His hazel eyes were filled with light. I couldn’t believe his collection. There were books by Amundsen, Byrd, Cook, Scott, Shackleton, and Peary. One at a time, I pointed to a book and asked Arthur about every author and every story. He knew them all. He explained that the New York Times for generations had covered the stories of exploration and human achievements.
A name on the spine of one book, Fridtjof Nansen, was new to me. This was the first time I encountered him. I asked Arthur about him. He said Nansen was a polar explorer from Norway and he had walked across the Greenland ice cap and attempted to be the first to reach the North Pole by dogsled. He said that Nansen was Amundsen’s best friend, and that he lent Amundsen his ship, the Fram. Amundsen had used the Fram on his attempt to become the first man to reach the South Pole.
What a friend Nansen had to be, I thought, to lend Amundsen his ship. People never achieved great things completely on their own; there were always people who came before, who served as mentors, or who simply kept the dream going in the most adverse times. And that kept them going, and propelled them to achieve what had never been done before.
Neither Arthur nor I realized it at that time, but our meeting was like the one between Nansen and Amundsen, and between Amundsen and Byrd when they discussed their plans, and helped and inspired each other to attempt their great goals. By telling me their stories, and about their friendships, Arthur inspired me to write about them. Arthur immediately began helping me with research. He turned away from the bookshelves and said, “Would you like to see something that Admiral Byrd gave my grandfather?”
I couldn’t believe his grandfather knew Admiral Byrd and I nodded very quickly.
Arthur led the way to his office and pointed to one of his most precious mementos—a silver dollar mounted beautifully in a large frame. Arthur explained that it had been handed down through his family. His grandfather had been a great supporter and fan of Admiral Byrd, and the Times had extensively covered Byrd’s missions. His grandfather gave the coin to Byrd first when he flew to the North Pole in 1926. The second time Byrd carried the silver dollar with him was on his flight across the Atlantic. The third time Byrd carried it on the first flight to the South Pole. The coin’s fourth trip was Byrd’s second Antarctic expedition, and the fifth was Byrd’s third Antarctic expedition. The last line in the story that is framed along with the coin is one Arthur’s grandfather wrote—“A dollar can go very far in the proper hands.” Arthur took the coin with him when he and his son made their first trip to Antarctica.
Arthur told me that Byrd continued his exploration of Antarctica with the U.S. Navy in Operation Deep Freeze, and there were enormous parts of Antarctica that still hadn’t been explored.
That day was when I seriously began to think about writing a book about Amundsen and Nansen.
Anyone who does anything of significance faces obstacles.
What would Amundsen or Nansen have done? They went to the king of Norway. I wished President Reagan were still in office. He had invited me to meet him in the Oval Office after my Bering Strait swim. We spoke about swimming. He’d been a lifeguard in Illinois, and he had rescued more than twenty people. He also swam off Santa Monica Beach. He was fascinated with my Bering Strait swim. Maybe President Bush would be approachable. But he was leaving office; Senator Obama was becoming president, but it was too early to approach him.
Who else could I try? The father of Chris Murray, my roommate in college, was Dr. Bruce Murray. He had been the director of NASA/Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. Bruce had invited Chris and me to see the close encounters of the Voyager I and Voyager II with Io, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. We watched images on a television screen being beamed back live from deep outer space. Bruce understood the importance of relationships, whether they were between the planets or people. Maybe he could help, or maybe my friend Astrid Golomb’s father could. Her father was Dr. Solomon Golomb, and he taught at Caltech, spoke twenty-six languages, and helped develop space communications. He was a fan of the Norwegian explorers and had offered to translate Amundsen’s and Nansen’s letters for me. Maybe he or Bruce would know someone at the NSF. But there wasn’t much time remaining. Maybe there was a faster route.
The New Zealand air force had a great relationship with the U.S. Air Force, and the Kiwis flew to Scott Base, just four miles from the U.S. base. Maybe I could fly with the Kiwis and walk from Scott Base to McMurdo to at least have the chance to talk with members of the 109th Air Wing. But the New Zealander air force made fewer flights than the Americans and they had finished their season.
Finally I got a call from Gary Hart, who had spoken with Senator Boxer’s office. The NSF had turned down my request.
For the next three or four days I thought hard about how I could accomplish what I needed to achieve, but in a different way. It wasn’t clear which direction I needed to take. There would be a way to see Amundsen’s vision and understand how it was realized. There was always a way. But I was stuck and heartbroken, and I still didn’t know enough yet to ask good questions about Antarctic flight.
I sent an e-mail to Mary Thoits. She was a swimmer who swam in the ocean from the spring to the fall off the Southern California coast, and off Mexico when she took vacations. She taught world affairs at Long Beach City College in California, and for her eighty-fifth birthday, last year, she went skydiving. It was something she said she had always wanted to do. She went tandem and gave me a picture of herself with a handsome man behind her; both had arms outstretched like seagulls, and both had wide smiles.
Mary Thoits, Women Air Service Pilots, entering an AT-6 cockpit at Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas, summer 1944. The new U-2 trainer aircraft are named for the AT-6, and her WASP colleagues were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, March 10, 2010.
Mary Thoits—celebrating her eighty-fifth birthday—and a friend skydiving above Lake Elsinore, California, 2009.
Mary had initially contacted me five years before and asked me to speak at the college. At the time, I had been too busy, but Mary kept nudging me, and when I finally found time to speak, I discovered that she was one of the people I was supposed to meet in my life. She is a pioneer.
In 1944, during World War II, she flew with the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots—WASPs. They were the first women who were trained to fly U.S. military aircraft and opened the world of aviation to women. These pilots were civilians, and they weren’t permitted to be in the military, but they served the country. They trained in Sweetwater, Texas, where the first male African American pilots trained, too. The women pilots ferried aircraft across the United States. Some of the women learned how to fly up to twenty-seven types of aircraft. They also served as test pilots—they were the ones who often flew an aircraft for the first time, and they helped the engineers work out problems with the aircraft. During their training missions, they also dragged long targets behind their aircraft, so the army, on the ground, could shoot at the targets for practice.
Mary first learned to fly because her older brother charged her twenty-five cents if she needed a ride in the car. He wouldn’t teach her how to drive, so she decided to fly instead. She saved Green Stamps, which were like coupons that could be redeemed for a gift or service. She was in high school at the time and convinced her friends to save stamps for her.
One entire booklet of stamps equaled fifteen minutes of flight. When she got four booklets, she had enough stamps for two takeoffs and two landings.
When World War II broke out, Mary decided that she wanted to fly in the service, for the country. She’d heard about the training program in Sweetwater, and asked her mother if she could go.
Before she entered flight school, Mary had to pass a physical, and she had to be five feet sev
en inches tall. She was only five foot one, so when she went in for the physical, she made her hair poof up on her head and she stood on her tiptoes when they measured her height. She passed the height requirement and the physical, and later, during flight training, she realized why there was a height requirement. She had a difficult time reaching the pedals in the aircraft with her feet, so she put three pillows behind her.
During one aerial maneuver, her instructor, in the front seat of the AT-6, rolled the aircraft over so Mary could learn how to feel the capability of the plane and learn how to get out of a spin. When the aircraft rolled over, the pillows that Mary had piled behind her back so she could reach the pedals flew out somewhere over Texas. She figured out how to strap the pillows in and hold them in place for her next training flight.
Early flight was all about feeling. When Mary was in the AT-6 racing down the runway, she felt the moment when she was supposed to pull back on the stick and fly. But she also had to learn how to fly with instruments instead of by feeling. The instructor sat in the front of the aircraft and the student in the back with a canopy over her head so she didn’t have any visual references. The instructor did a number of acrobatic moves, and Mary couldn’t tell if she was flying right side up or upside down. She had to learn to look at the instruments to figure out where the aircraft was, and she, like the other students, wore a string with a pencil attached to it, so they could tell if they were right side up or flying upside down.
Mary loved flying, and after the war was over, she became a flight instructor. A lot of the instruction she gave was on how to fly floatplanes that were a few generations newer than the one Amundsen used for the Arctic. The thing that made landing on water tough, she said, was that if the water was flat, it reflected the sky; it was hard to judge how far the plane was from the water, and that made landing very challenging.
Mary liked challenges. She thrived on them and loved to participate, so when I asked if she would come with me to the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base to meet with General James Combs, she immediately said yes.