A Dip in the Cold.(long distance swimming)(Travel narrative)

In June, 1972, I flew over the North Atlantic Ocean. I was fifteen years old, and on my way to England to swim across the English Channel. I gazed out the window of the plane and saw Greenland. Glacial domes sparkled in the clear blue Arctic sky, fractured snow and ice clung to the steep mountain walls, and rivers of ice and snow extended in wide bands to the sea. I pressed my forehead against the cool window and looked thirty-five thousand feet down. Something small and white was floating on the dark-blue water--an iceberg.

Greenland, the world's largest island, lies mostly within the Arctic Circle, and more than three-quarters of it is ice-capped. The coastline is rocky and barren, but for centuries its harbors and inlets drew explorers who were searching for a northern sea route from Europe to Asia. The frozen seas and inhospitable lands of the Arctic thwarted one expedition after another. In 1820, the British explorer William Edward Parry made it through Lancaster Sound before being forced back by ice; in 1833, John Ross abandoned his second attempt to traverse the passage after his ship was trapped in ice for four years; and in 1845 John Franklin, commanding two ships, disappeared. The first successful transit of the Northwest Passage was not completed until 1906, under the leadership of the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.

I have been a long-distance swimmer since I was fourteen. Initially, I was interested in breaking other people's records--the record for crossing the Channel, for example. When I was in my twenties, I decided to tackle waterways that had never been swum, and crossed the Strait of Magellan, went around the Cape of Good Hope, and swam between various Aleutian Islands. In 1987, I swam the Bering Strait, from the United States to the Soviet Union, and seven years later I swam through the Gulf of Aqaba, from Egypt to Israel and Jordan. Then I became interested in the limits of endurance. I wanted to know whether my body could tolerate extreme cold. In 2002, wearing only a swimsuit, I swam for more than a mile in Antarctic waters of thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. In the Arctic, water can be two or three degrees colder; still, I wanted to swim portions of the Northwest Passage, travelling from Greenland to Alaska, using Amundsen's account of his journey as a guide.

Roald Amundsen was born on July 16, 1872, in Borge, near Fredrikstad, the fourth son in a family of shipowners and sea captains. His mother had wanted him to become a physician, but on May 30, 1889, when he was sixteen years old, he realized that his ambitions lay elsewhere. He was waiting on the shores of Christiania Fjord to greet Fridtjof Nansen, who had returned to Norway after successfully leading the first trip on skis across the Greenland ice cap. In his memoirs, Amundsen recalled the crowds that day. "I wandered with throbbing pulses amid the bunting and the cheers, and all my boyhood's dreams reawoke to tempestuous life," he wrote. "For the first time something in my secret thoughts whispered clearly and tremulously: 'If you could make the North West Passage!' " Four years later, Amundsen's mother died, and he abandoned his medical studies. He read accounts of polar explorations, studied the latest scientific papers from Germany about geomagnetism and the shifting location of the North Pole, and trained like an endurance athlete. He sailed with sealers in the Arctic and, from 1897 to 1899, served on the Belgian Antarctic Expedition, as a second mate.

On June 16, 1903, Amundsen and a crew of six men, along with six sled dogs, sailed out of Christiania, as Oslo was called then, on the Gjoa, a forty-seven-ton herring boat, which had been reinforced for the trip and equipped with a new engine. The Arctic seas were frozen for as much as ten months of the year, and they were barely passable when ice did break up, in the short summer.

Today, as a result of the changing climate, the sea ice starts to melt earlier and the seas remain open longer, but I still had a narrow window for my trip. I planned to begin in May, 2007, off Greenland, and then return to the United States in June to train while I waited for the Canadian Arctic to thaw. I would swim in the Canadian Arctic in July and the Alaskan Arctic in August, before the sea froze again. Even in the twenty-first century, it was hard to obtain precise information on sea ice, water temperatures, and currents. I wasn't sure where I would be able to swim in each location, and I knew that I might have to wait for the right conditions. In January, 2005, I began training in California, and organized a small team of friends who would accompany me on different legs of the trip.

An obvious concern was the extreme cold. The frigid temperature of the water could cause an incredible shock to my body, overstimulating the vagus nerve and causing my heart to stop beating. The cold could also cause my fingers and arms to become so numb that I wouldn't be able to pull myself out of the water. I was also worried about the Greenland shark, which can be as long as twenty-one feet. An old friend, Adam Ravtech, who is a wildlife filmmaker, showed me footage he had captured of a Greenland shark. It was huge, but Adam told me that he had felt safe during the many hours he spent filming it. What I really needed to worry about, he said, was the walrus. One had tried to grab a diver by the leg while Adam was filming a documentary in the Arctic. Adam had had to pluck the diver out of the water.