Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (40 page)

That's how it was, swimming like this—not thinking to sleep but starting to. For a second, a moment, she had been there but now she was not, her breath was now too deep, then too shallow, and her arms were out of sync—she reached too far, pulled too hard, and her internal metronome started to wobble as she sped up and slowed down, then sped up again. And there was a sound, a low rumble like gauze unwrapping around her head that pulled her back and took her away.

It was the tug. Of course, it was the
Alsace
and Meg and Pop and Julia and Helmi and Burgess, the dark shape waiting offshore, growing larger now, her partner for—how long? Fourteen hours? Sixteen? More? She tried not to think, not of time, not of the past or of the future but here and now and what was there, just ahead, that hand ahead of hers, just out of reach, holding her, leading her, pulling her along.

Phhhuh! Salt in her mouth and her lungs spasmed and shuddered, all salt and spit and she sputtered for a second, lifted her head a little more and spit out the water and spit out the salt, then breathed again, deeply. She cleared her nose and drifted for a second before starting again and tried trying to crawl back to that place, her head now felt as if it were full of sand.

What was that taste? Could she tell? Was her stomach awake, cramping, pulling her back? No, no, not yet. But then, sh-ah! Yuk.

A sharp, deep pain in her side and a sweet and sour taste in her mouth, as if her breakfast wanted to leave her. She clenched her teeth, tried to breathe deeply. Not again, she thought, not again. She did not want the sickness to grow and spread from her belly to her brain and back again. Not like last year, not again. Please, God, help me.

And then she remembered. Meg was on the boat, and Pop and Julia. Not Wolffe, not him, not his sour beef tea or his sour puss. There had been something in the tea last year, something that made her sick. She knew it she knew it she knew it. But not today, no not today. Meg had prepared her food. Like the man had said, she had been prepared for a shark but not for a Wolffe. She almost laughed. It was silly, now really, silly that someone had cared so much to slip something in her drink, silly that someone had done that, had tried to stop her. Silly.

But there was still the sweet and sour taste in her mouth and the pain in her side and the thoughts racing through her head. What was it? The peach! Of course it was the peach, the one Burgess told her not to eat but she had grabbed anyway, the sweetness that exploded inside her mouth, delicious, then dripped down her chin and onto her hands. And now she swallowed a bit of water and the peach grabbed her in the side and now it just wouldn't let go.

But no one would know. She would tell no one this time, ever, no matter how bad her stomach felt, how bad it hurt or how long, she would never let on. This time she wasn't going to stop, not once, not ever. No one would touch her and take her away, not this time, not once she found her place.

On the tug, they didn't know—they couldn't tell she was sick. She slowed her pace, breathed deeply, stretched from one side to another, and twisted as she approached the boat, slowing her pace from twenty-eight strokes a minute to twenty-six then twenty-four and, as she drew closer to the boat, to twenty-two slow strokes a minute, the metronome winding down.

Burgess would like that, he was always, always asking her to slow down, and she never, ever did for long, but now she would, just until, just until...

There! As she breathed out, the pain in her side began to slip away. There. She stretched and breathed, stretched and breathed, relaxed, and with each breath she pushed the pain away, out from her side and into the water, where she kicked it away, not looking back but pressing on...

Ahead of her, the tug lifted slightly in the swells, its single smokestack spewing black smoke and the big engine almost on idle as Corthes held his position. A moment before, the rowboat bearing Burgess, Lillian Cannon, and Julia Harpman had pulled alongside, and they had all climbed on board. Now they all stood on the deck waving at Trudy and calling out to her as she swam slowly, and according to plan, drew along the port side of the
Alsace
at midships, keeping the boat off to her side, ten or fifteen, twenty feet away, close but not too close.

Burgess and Trudy had made a decision. On this trip there would be no rowboat in the water next to her, and no chance that someone would reach out and grab her and pull her in the boat, or that the boat would crest a wave and then tumble toward her, or that she would veer off course and touch the boat accidentally, or that anyone could touch her if she didn't want them to. A year before, when Wolffe was in the boat, Trudy felt as if she had spent half her time worrying that it would come too close, causing her to sprint away, then slow down so Wolffe could catch back up after falling behind.

This time there was only the tug. She would swim alongside it, in the lee of the ship according to the current, close enough so she could see and sense the vessel beside her, but not so close that they would touch, or she would struggle in its wake or in the wash of its propellers. When she needed nourishment or drink, Burgess or Meg or Pop would attach it to a line, lean over the rail, reach out, and lower it over the side, where Trudy would play fish to the bait. This time there would be no chance, no chance at all, that anyone would touch her. It was a bit more dangerous for Trudy—if she collapsed or became unconscious, unless someone was swimming next to her there was little chance that she'd be saved, but that had never happened, not once, since she had learned to swim. This time she was in control. It was her swim, all hers.

What was that? On the side near the bow, beneath the rail where she could see Meg and her father and Helmi and Burgess? It looked like a scratch on the side of the boat, then like chalk, like words.

It was! She read the words and laughed. That Meg, she was her champion, why if it wasn't for Meg, well, she'd have never done anything, never starting racing, never tried to swim the Channel—she knew that. She owed Meg everything. And the night before, or maybe early this morning, it looked as if Meg had taken some chalk, walked along the pier where the boat was tied up, on the bow of the port side, and drawn a big arrow pointing forward and the words "This Way, Ole Girl!" And now Trudy read it and laughed. This way, ole girl, this way...

As Trudy drew alongside the vessel, Captain Corthes touched the throttle and the boat jumped to life, propeller churning in the water, and waves started to slap at the bow. As the tug slowly churned to the northwest, Cape Gris-Nez loomed off the port, nose on the water, and then slowly started to grow smaller, as if watching. They could all tell Trudy was swimming strongly, and after a few minutes they all stopped watching and prepared themselves for the rest of the day, Harpman with her typewriter and table, her notebooks, and Meg with the gramophone, the records in a case, the speaker horn aimed over the water. Arthur Sorenson, the photographer, dashed to and fro along the rail, snapping pictures. Pop Ederle, a scarf around his neck, walked the deck, and Burgess was everywhere, back and forth, now on the rail, now in the steering house talking with Corthes, now back on deck talking with Pop Ederle. And every few minutes the old swimmer tilted his head back, scanned the horizon, and sniffed the air. The forecast said one thing—"light indefinite winds, visibility mainly good, warmer"—but that was in an office in Bracknall. This was the English Channel, which did not pay attention to words, and Burgess scanned the horizon and kept sniffing the air.

He did not smile.

As she swam along the tug, she could feel the sea now, and sense that she was not along the shore, fighting the surf in the shallows, but in the sea itself. The swells were deeper and longer and—now she could feel it! It was hard to explain but she knew the water and knew what it did and what it was going to do before anyone else ever did, her whole life, she said once much later, "too much water, swim, swim, swim." Hours in the water at the Highlands, the tide running in and out, gave her this sense. From somewhere deep inside she could feel the moon pull at the water, reaching all the way from space to draw the water from the North Sea to the North Atlantic, as the waters behind the cape gave way to the tidal current, every atom starting to race past.

She loved it. Ooh, how she loved it, this feeling in the water, swimming with the tide, speed like she was sprinting even though she wasn't, even though she was back to twenty-six to twenty-eight strokes a minute. The water felt soft, light, and her hands pulled through it easily.

She loved it loved it LOVED it. Now that they were going, finally going, she could slip away into "her sphere," and stop thinking. This was fun, now. All she needed to do was keep the big shadow of the tug in the same place, not too close and not too far away, and swim.

After a few moments she and the tug were one, the speed of each identical to the other. Trudy swam at a pace of twenty-eight strokes to the minute, and the
Alsace,
its engines running just ahead of the current, matched Trudy's pace, two and a half to three knots an hour.

Burgess thought she was going too fast—he always did—but he said little. This time most of the communication with Trudy during her swim would be done by way of a chalkboard lowered off the aside—the combination of her poor hearing, her distance off the ship, and the sounds of the boat's engine and the water slapping against the tug made talking back and forth, while not impossible, difficult. There was no sense having Trudy yell back and forth all day. That would only make her tired.

As the tedium of the day settled in, there was silence on board. Channel swimming is a spectator sport only for the most dedicated, for apart from the relative excitement of the start and the finish, the success of a swim is often marked by monotony and the lack of drama. No news is good news.

That sentiment was not shared by everyone. All the drama, such as it was, was back onshore at the beach at Gris-Nez. As soon as Trudy entered the water and the rowboats bearing Burgess and the others left the shore, the remaining press contingent got busy. Just because they weren't being allowed aboard the
Alsace
didn't mean they were abandoning their coverage of the swim. The
Alsace,
after all, wasn't the only boat in the English Channel.

In Boulogne, another tug,
La Morinie,
had been engaged by Lillian Cannon for her Channel swim sometime in the future. There had been speculation that Cannon might swim today as well, but she had chosen to wait. Minott Saunders, the reporter assigned by the syndicate to cover Cannon and who served as her protector, hastily contacted the boat captain, and within only a few moments of Trudy's departure,
La Morinie
was steaming to Cape Gris-Nez to pick up its cargo of reporters and cameramen.

Cape Gris-Nez., Aug 6.—(By the United Press)
—
8
:09
A.M.—
About one and a half miles off shore; sea calm, sky hazy, and storm clouds off England.

Burgess didn't like it. The weather report, now nearly eighteen hours old, was not holding true. He was not surprised—this was the Channel, after all, and if his years of experience had taught him anything it was that the weather forecast was as much fiction as science—but he wished it were otherwise. Ahead toward England, the sky, which should have been growing brighter, was turning dark, and ever so slowly, seas were starting to rise as the wind, variable at the start, began to shift and blow more steadily. Almost imperceptibly at first, a fresh breeze of only a few knots began to press from the southwest. As it did, the sea, nearly quiet at the start, and smooth except for the usual swells, began to awake as wind and current met head on. For the next few hours, Burgess's attention was divided as he kept one eye on the swimmer and the other on the sky.

Then he heard the music. Meg had sorted through the heavy platters of recordings, cranked up the gramophone, and turned it up loud. She knew her sister, watched her, and knew when Trudy needed a lift. She could just tell. Not that Trudy was slowing down—she wasn't—but every so often she had to be reminded, had to be prodded, had to be pushed. She was sluggish and Meg could tell, and now it was time to wake her up. "Rosie O'Grady." "Yes, We Have No Bananas." "Always." "No More Worrying." "Sweet Georgia Brown." "The Sidewalks of New York." "Let Me Call You Sweetheart"-"hot" American jazz, mostly, the pop songs Trudy liked best, and some New York favorites.

"No More Worrying." Sam Lanin and his Orchestra, that was the song, a new one only a few months old and already one of Trudy's favorites. Meg placed the record on the turntable and set the heavy needle on the recording, which bounced and scratched then settled in the groove.

With the first sound of the drum and blare of the trumpet, Trudy's head snapped toward the boat. She was awake now, and she could hear the music. No more worrying!

Even from the boat, they could see Trudy's smile, and she couldn't resist sprinting for a second, coming closer to the boat, where she could see Meg and see Burgess.

"There'll not be any worrying," she shouted over the music, almost singing, "if we get to Dover tonight!" Then she rolled over and swam away, not faster but more lively, her arm movement quicker, her leg kick more brisk. Burgess yelled for her to slow down, but Trudy could not hear him.

Cape Gris-Nez France 9:09
A.M.
(United Press)
—The French vessel
Nicole Schafling
exchanged salutes with the tug
Alsace,
accompanying Gertrude Ederle.