Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (5 page)

Unfortunately, none of these options were yet available to Trudy Ederle. Her ear infection lingered, turning a small problem into a much more serious and permanent condition. The infection spread to surround the three bones of the inner ear and further suppressed her ability to hear. Within only a few weeks the chronic infection caused permanent damage to her eardrum, the bones of the ear, and even the nerves, resulting in a significant and permanent loss of hearing.

Although Trudy's doctors were able to diagnose the condition, they were powerless to reverse the damage. Although her hearing loss was significant and more profound in her right ear, she was fortunate that she could already speak and she retained enough hearing that she was not yet significantly disabled. She was still able to live a normal life.

Trudy resumed her usual activities, but now she and Meg grew even closer. Meg understood that Trudy sometimes had difficulty hearing, and she became adept at helping her sister without making it obvious, for example, by repeating others' statements back to Trudy and asking if she agreed or not, rather than simply repeating the statements and drawing attention to her sister's malady.

Meanwhile, Ederle Brothers Meats was a resounding success. By 1910 the family could employ a servant girl to help with chores and look after the children, which after the birth of a son, George, in 1911, and another daughter, Emma, two years later, now numbered five and would eventually grow to include seven. Gertrud, who had helped out behind the counter in the butcher shop, was able to give up that task and become a full-time homemaker. Although the butcher shop maintained a retail storefront, Ederle Brothers Meats was also supplying sausages and other items to other retailers, something that was becoming an ever more important part of the business.

Henry Ederle had built the kind of life that made America so attractive to immigrants in the first place. Not yet forty years old, by 1914 Henry was in virtual semiretirement. Surrounded by his loving family, Ederle was well respected in his community and financially secure enough to dabble in other businesses and invest his extra cash in real estate. That year he took the entire family on an extended trip back to Bissingen, Germany, to visit his mother and other family members, leaving the business in the custody of relatives. Upon his return, he began looking for a place outside the city to spend the summer, and, perhaps remembering that the Highlands had been his first glimpse of his new country, he finally decided on a cozy, two-room red wood bungalow fronted by a picket fence only a short walk from the water.

Early in the summer of 1915, only a short time after buying the cottage, Henry Ederle roused his three young daughters from sleep, and after a hearty breakfast, he led them out the door toward the beach. Trudy was ecstatic. Since her father was coming along this time, she'd get to go in the water.

The brief walk to the beach was a joy to the young family. Although the Highlands had once been a simple, sleepy fishing village, home to lobster fishermen and clammers who worked the flats at Sandy Hook, after the railroad came to Highlands in 1892 the nature of the community began to change. It was suddenly within reach of New York, and soon New Yorkers eager to escape the heat of the city for Highlands' cool offshore breezes and relaxed pace began making regular visits, turning the town into a popular summer resort. Steamships began to make regular stops at the Highlands, enabling people like George McClelland Jr., the son of the Civil War general and mayor of New York at the time of the
General Slocum
disaster, to spend the summer in the Highlands and commute to New York. By 1910, each summer the population swelled to three or four times its year-round total of around a thousand people. Many of these summer residents were German, Swedish, and Norwegian, for the High lands were easily reached from ethnic neighborhoods in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

As Henry Ederle walked with his daughters down to the beach that morning, the scene was still sleepy, yet by the afternoon the atmosphere near the water would begin to resemble a small-town carnival. Although Bay Avenue, the main thoroughfare, was still unpaved, it was lined with tourist hotels surrounded by large covered porches, like the Johnson, the Twilight, the Highlander, and the Overlook. With the hotels and other businesses connected to each other by wood plank sidewalks, Highlands reminded many first visitors of a frontier town. All day long small restaurants, luncheonettes, candy shops, soda fountains, clam shacks, and pool parlors bustled with activity as passengers disembarked from either the railroad station or the Patten Line Pier. Visitors strolled Bay Avenue in droves, filling the sidewalks, and young men in straw hats and girls carrying parasols flirted as they strolled along.

On hot afternoons when the sun burned through the morning fog and haze, the beaches filled rapidly. Since the time of the
Slocum
disaster, swimming, or at least wading in the shallows, was becoming more and more acceptable, particularly for children and younger people. As a print advertisement for a popular cereal stated, "Grandmother went bathing—girls like Molly go in for a swim." Although Victorian standards of dress and behavior were still in place, that was beginning to change. For the young the pursuit of fun was a goal in and of itself. At night the dance halls opened, and jazz and other music filled the air. Some halls and hotels sponsored special nights featuring German or Swedish music, attracting the new immigrants. Near the waterfront were arcades, carousels, and various games of chance. Visitors who could not afford a room at a hotel often pitched tents on the beach and made small fires from driftwood. Lights twinkled from boats offshore, and to the north the glow from the lights of Manhattan lit the sky.

The Ederle children—except for Trudy—had loved the Highlands instantly. There were other children everywhere, and there were always places to explore. A drawbridge crossing the estuary was an ongoing attraction, as neighborhood children goaded and dared one another into catching a ride on the structure. At the foot of nearly every street was a pier and a small beach, and there were larger beaches on Sandy Hook.

That was, however, the cause of some concern in regard to Trudy. Even though the surf was usually relatively gentle in Highlands proper, Sandy Hook was completely exposed, and in the estuary the tides ran strong. It was easy for nonswimmers to lose their footing and slip beneath the waters, and summers were often marred by accidental drownings.

There was, of course, no formal swimming program for children in Highlands, because there were virtually no formal swimming programs for children anywhere. Most youngsters learned to swim from one another, in secret, and often at risk, or by the tried, true, and incredibly dangerous "sink or swim" method, in which every success was counterbalanced by a terrifying failure that often left the child sputtering and in dread fear of the water for the rest of his or her life.

That is why, hand in hand, Henry was leading Trudy and his two older daughters to the Patten Line Pier at the base of Bay Avenue. There would be no relaxing in the summer cottage until the Ederles knew all their children could be trusted in the water, and now it was time for Trudy to learn how to swim. When they arrived they found a gaggle of children playing on the beach, picking through the seaweed washed up onshore by the gentle surf, throwing clamshells into the water, and splashing one another in the shallows. Farther out, older boys and young men thrashed through the water, trying to impress one another with their fancy overarm strokes. On the pier itself a few tourists simply gazed out over the water, taking in the view and the salt air of the fine summer morning, and a few fishermen sat on buckets leisurely casting their lines into the water.

Henry Ederle, too, carried a line to the pier, but not the fine filament used for fishing. Instead he held a twisted skein of clothesline. At the water's edge he stood his youngest daughter before him and, as her sisters looked on, he trussed the length of clothesline around his daughter's waist and torso with the practiced hand of a butcher who had spent years behind the counter wrapping meat, tying her securely, but not too tightly. Leaving her older sisters at Trudy's side, he then walked back up the beach and then out upon the pier, un coiling and playing out the line with each step, until he stood above his daughter and could look down on her from atop the pier.

He called down and encouraged Trudy to slowly walk into the water. She needed little prodding. Accompanied by Helen and Margaret, Trudy waded confidently into the waters as Henry Ederle walked a parallel path on the pier itself, taking in slack on the line as if his daughter were a fish he had hooked but was not quite ready to reel in.

Holding the rope securely in his hands, he urged his daughter into deeper water, all the while keeping a tight grip on the line. As she waded more cautiously out into the sound, the water rose up her body, first covering her knees, then her waist, then reaching up to her neck. With her sisters and her father offering words of encouragement, Trudy then took another few short steps, bouncing on her tiptoes on the bottom until, suddenly, her feet no longer touched.

She was floating, a strange sensation that was at once utterly new yet strangely familiar, a sensation that caused her first to gasp and then squeal, delighted to be suspended in the water, her arms and legs free to move about. Then, as she breathed out and lost buoyancy, she started to slip beneath the water and looked to her father with panic-stricken eyes, thrashing her arms and sputtering. He deftly pulled the rope taut and pulled his daughter to the surface, bobbing alongside the pier, where she grasped at a piling as she caught her breath and calmed down. Then, with Helen and Margaret often paddling along nearby, and giving their younger sister advice and encouragement, she slipped away from the piling and into the deeper water, paddling with her hands like they did, lifting her head up and kicking madly with her feet, trying to stay afloat.

With each breath more of her fear and anxiety gave way and in their place came peace and joy. Helen and Meg gently teased their younger sister farther out, periodically allowing her to reach out and hang on and catch her breath, wrapping their arms around her, laughing and smiling as she beamed back at them. Trudy was equal now, just like them, exactly the same, able to do what they did.

In a few short minutes Trudy completely forgot about the line tied around her waist, which her father now allowed to go slack. Then, as her sisters let go and dove beneath the water to pop up again and surprise her, for a moment she forgot everything and simply floated in the water, feeling the buoyancy of her own body and the gentle ocean swells that lifted her up and down but always held her, embracing her on all sides.

She could swim. And then her sisters popped back out of the water and reached out for her again, and she followed them into the waves, grinning and giggling as the three girls all floated together.

Trudy loved this feeling—nothing would ever be the same—and the ocean, which had always been a barrier before, now opened to her like another world, a place where there was nothing to block her view or stop her but herself.

T
RUDY WAS NOT
the first person to fall in love with the embrace of the sea and swimming.

In the spring of 1832, George Catlin, a slightly built, thirty-seven-year-old former attorney, paddled up the Missouri River from St. Louis in search of subjects for painting. He stopped some eighteen hundred miles later, just north of what is now Bismarck, North Dakota, where the Knife River, after winding several hundred miles through the lush grassland prairies, intersects with the Missouri. There Catlin made contact with two little-known bands of Native Americans, the two-thousand-member Mandan tribe, who lived in two adjacent villages at the confluence of the rivers, and their allies, the Hidatsa, a smaller band of about five hundred natives whose village bordered those of the Mandan.

They were not entirely unknown, having first been "discovered" by white explorers in 1738, and in 1804 Lewis and Clark spent time with the tribes. But where others had simply met the natives, traded for or simply taken what they needed, and moved on, in 1832 Catlin stayed and studied them, making sketches that he later planned on turning into paintings and taking detailed, written notes on all aspects of their culture.

Catlin felt far more comfortable among the Mandan and Hidatsa than he had been in either the courtroom or the drawing room where he had sketched many of the subjects of his portraits. They had looked down on him as if he were some kind of craftsman, like a boot maker, uninterested in the process of his art, solely concerned with whether the final product was flattering.

Then there were the critics, the swells with classical backgrounds who had journeyed to Europe and, even though they were American themselves, looked with disdain toward artists of their own nationality. They found fault with almost every painting Catlin had ever made, particularly taking him to task for his inability to render perspective. Anytime he was called upon to paint more than one or two figures, as in a group meeting, Catlin had struggled mightily, unable to capture the relative changes in size that denote distance.

The natives gave him no such criticism. To them, Catlin was a curiosity, but one upon which they cast no judgment. They soon grew accustomed to watching him sitting quietly and sketching upon a pad of paper, and gave him great latitude to move among them. He was no threat, made no demands, and was welcome to observe them as he wished.

Although Catlin convinced some natives to sit for portraits and spent hours observing both rituals and more mundane daily tasks, at other times he went off on his own, roaming the bluffs surrounding the villages, where he could view the Mandan and Hidatsa from afar. Nearly every day he witnessed the natives gathering along the shores of the Knife River, both for the purposes of bathing and for pure pleasure.