North of Boston (8 page)

T
he receptionist's desk floats on gleaming white linoleum. The storied Florida sunshine pours through spotless floor-to-ceiling windows that have no doubt spelled ruin for countless birds. A woman in a pencil-thin skirt and fitted jacket greets me. Her shoulders are squared by epaulets; her pretty blond hair is folded into a smooth bun below the rim of her Navy cap. Her smile when I introduce myself reveals pearly, child-size teeth, with just a flashing hint of sharpness in the canines.

I'm disconcerted by the awful, cool hush of the place, which convinces me, paradoxically, that there's a great deal going on, but that it's all beneath the surface, behind the walls, on the other side of the closed doors we are now passing, our footfalls clicking noisily like two metronomes out of sync. By the time we enter Commander Stockwell's office, my fight-or-flight response has duly considered the likely outcomes of
fight
and determinedly cast its lot with
flight
. But it's too late to run; the comely receptionist recedes, leaving me in a spacious office, feeling trapped. If I'm Commander Stockwell's idea of a bionic woman, she ought to be more worried than she looks.

She gives a forthright smile, rising from her flag-flanked desk. Light brunette hair, sensibly cut, sturdy on her feet, midfifties. Short dry fingers that exert just the right amount of strong-but-warm pressure when they wrap around my hand. In civilian clothes, she could be your childhood friend's mother, the one who had more fun with the Girl Scout troop than any of the girls did. Right now she's doing a fine hostess routine, lobbing inquiries about my trip, my accommodations, my postdisaster health. With pleasure she relates a few of her city's main attractions. I must visit Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. The white sand beaches are unsurpassed, and the ocean has been described as
emerald
. There is no word but
gracious
to describe her demeanor, but still I can't relax. There are guarded gates at every egress of this compound (upon entering I was subjected to a thorough search), and the whole time she's talking, what I'm hearing is:
Welcome to my war palace, where you will be well cared for, and carefully observed.

We sit down across from each other, smiling like girl chums, and she starts as all good persuaders do, by telling stories:

March 24, 1999
. Marine Corps Physical Fitness Academy, Maryland. Seven elite marines, all trained as water survival instructors, capsize while paddling a war canoe across the Potomac River. They have seat cushions but no life jackets. The water temperature is 37°F. Within minutes, all seven have drowned, approximately 90 yards from shore.

October 28, 2005
. Sebasticook Lake, Maine. Two adults and a twelve-year-old girl, all wearing life jackets, capsize while paddling in 60°F water, in clear view of other boaters. In the time it takes rescuers to reach them, they have drowned as a result of hypothermia.

February 3, 2008
. Congaree River, South Carolina. A volunteer firefighter described as experienced comes out of his kayak on a small wave, struggles to get back in, but disappears under the water less than thirty seconds after capsizing. His submerged craft is recovered with grappling hooks four days after the accident. His body is never found.

Commander Stockwell spins her computer monitor to face me and runs a YouTube video in which a young woman, clad in a one-piece Speedo, bathing cap, and goggles, dives off a skiff into ice-clogged ocean water. In the background loom the blue glaciers of what appears to be Antarctica. A pale wafer of sun hangs low on the horizon as the swimmer surfaces and begins to stroke.

“Lynne Cox,” Stockwell explains. “Forty-five years old when this video was taken in 2002. You see her as she's about to become the first person to swim a mile in ice water. Most people would be dead in five minutes. She stayed in for twenty-five. Before that she'd swum the Strait of Magellan, Cook Strait in New Zealand, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Bering Sea. If you ask her why she does it, she can't say.

“And then there's this man,” she says, sliding a photograph across her desk. The beautiful arc of a near-naked male body, caught midair as it dives off an ice ledge into the sea. “Lewis Gordon Pugh. In 2007, he swam .62 miles across the North Pole in twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit water. In 2010, he swam across Lake Pumori on Mount Everest in thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit water.” She pauses. “Do you know why you're here, Ms. Kasparov?”

I nod. I've got the main idea.

“The Navy spends a great deal of its resources carefully selecting and training personnel for special underwater operations. We need to know why some people, regardless of their training level, succumb to hypothermia rapidly in cold water while others are able to adapt and perform their duties successfully.” She pushes away the photograph of Lewis Gordon Pugh with a trace of disdain, as if she's glad to be done with her theatrical opening gambit. “We know a great deal already, of course. The risk of hypothermia increases dramatically when low temperatures are combined with moisture. That's because water transfers heat from the body seventy times more efficiently than air. In very cold water, heat is sucked out of the human body with dangerous speed. Core temperature only has to fall to ninety-five, just a few degrees below normal, for hypothermia to set in.

“For most people there's also a gasp reflex, completely involuntary, followed by unavoidable massive hyperventilation. Even Pugh cannot avoid it. He reports that gulps of icy water rush down his throat when he is first submerged, but he is able through long practice to get his head above water and slowly even out his breathing. Most people find the shock of immersion so disorienting that this kind of control simply isn't possible. Obviously, if you gasp while your head is submerged, you may not come up again at all.” She sighs a little, but pushes through to the logical end. “Because of the gasp reflex, the lungs can fill up very quickly. Then water flows into the stomach, setting off another involuntary reflex, vomiting, which opens the airways again. Need I say more?”

I shake my head numbly, trying to avoid imagining the kind of death she's describing. It occurs to me that if I'd known these details before the collision, I would probably have been driven to panic and not survived. When I was in the water, I didn't know I was supposed to drown. Ignorance is bliss.

“For a long time we relied on training to prepare our soldiers for sudden cold-water immersion. We have an ocean simulation facility and an experimental test pool in which we worked under the theory of habituation. We believed that coaching our divers to withstand progressively colder temperatures would help them change their physical and mental reactions, and to some extent this proved to be true. But overall, habituation has proved to be a failure. The body's main responses to cold—constricting blood vessels near the skin, shunting blood to the body's core, and shivering—simply did not improve significantly. And there appears to be no consistent way for most divers to control their gasp reflex, even with months of practice.”

“But what about the cold-water swimmers?” I ask.

“Interesting, isn't it? Cox and Pugh have remarkable physiologies, extremely high pain thresholds, and exemplary mental toughness. But none of that adequately explains what they're able to do. The fact is that successful cold-water swimmers raise more questions than they answer: Why can some people develop Cox's and Pugh's abilities while others can't? How do you train for it? What draws athletes like Cox and Pugh to the unusual activity in which their bodies are designed to excel? How can a person
know
if he or she has capacities that remain hidden until experience itself calls them into action? How many other people have these abilities, and how can they be identified?

“You see, Ms. Kasparov, we're really just beginning to understand the physiological and psychological components of survival in extreme conditions. In the future we'll be able to give new recruits a battery of physical and mental tests that will allow us to place them immediately into the positions to which they are most suited and most likely to succeed—optimizing results while minimizing casualties. But we're still far from that goal.”

I have a slightly sick feeling in my stomach. Maybe it's the offhand use of the word
casualties
. In another minute I'll find out exactly what she wants from me. I'd like to get this over with so I can go to the beach.

She offers me an uneven demi-smile in which I see a bit of the sycophant bursting through. “No one's ever done what you did, Ms. Kasparov. Not Pugh, not Cox. Forty-eight degrees, four hours. Unheard of until now.”

“And you want me to—”

“Undergo testing. Medical, psychological, genetic. Allow us to observe your responses in a simulated extreme environment.”

“How long will all this take?”

“A few days. No waiting around, I promise. You'll be our top priority.”

The vagueness of her answer bothers me, but I can't think of a reason to object. I'm taking today and tomorrow, a Friday, off work and had planned to spend the weekend enjoying the beach anyway. Stockwell gives me a time and place to report the next morning, assures me that Eileen, the receptionist, will personally see to any needs I have.

By the time I make it to the beach, it's late afternoon and a bit chilly. I sit down on my hotel towel, watch the birds wheel overhead and the sand crabs trundle around. After a while I go into town for a cheeseburger, stroll under some palm trees, go to bed early in a mauve room so climate controlled I feel as if I've been vacuum-packed. I get that awful chain-hotel feeling, like I could be anywhere—Paris, Hong Kong, Detroit, or Schenectady. Or nowhere. My dreams seem to wander, unsure where they belong.

Over the next two days I'm given every medical test known to man. I run on a treadmill hooked up to machines; I blow into a tube as hard as I can. My blood is analyzed; my brain is mapped. I spend an entire evening in the cardiopulmonary laboratory, where I'm subjected to respiratory function tests and aerobic performance measurements before, during, and after what the Navy calls thermal exposure and what I call freezing to death. I take an IQ test, fill out a biographical survey, give information about every member of my family—a short task, given that neither Milosa nor Isa was given to family reminiscences. I tell the story of the collision over and over again. I surrender my DNA.

Everyone I meet is perfectly polite, which I dislike. It's hard to tell one individual from another when they all act the same. Ron, Bob, Bill, Jane—interchangeable as far as I can tell. And the weather: one perfect day following another. It gets boring after a while. I feel as if I left the best part of myself in Boston and need to go back and find it again amid the bad drivers and dirty streets.

Finally I'm told it's time to take the plunge. Sunday is a day of rest, so my cold-water swim is scheduled for Monday morning at nine, which means I have to call work and get another day off. The swim will take place at the Experimental Test Pool, a fifty-thousand-gallon freshwater indoor tank measuring fifteen by thirty by fifteen feet. Eileen takes me to see it. There's a medical and engineering deck, a communications suite, full video capability, and pressure and gas monitoring. About six people will be present, she says, including a doctor and a sports scientist. She gives me a one-piece bathing suit, bathing cap, and goggles. No flip-flops, which disappoints me. I tell her I would have liked them in green to match the cap. She smiles prettily because I'm such a good sport.

She explains that I'll have something to float on in the pool, just as I did in the ocean, though I've been told over and over that activity is essential to maintaining body heat. A transmitter strapped to my chest and linked to a laptop will show my heart rate and breathing rate, and they'll use a thermal imaging camera to measure heat loss. The swim will last until it's dangerous for me to continue, however long that takes. Maybe a minute, maybe an hour, or four. But I'm trying not to think that far ahead. She tells me in all seriousness to avoid testing the water with my toe before I dive, and I almost laugh out loud maniacally. Now I can think of nothing but the initial pain and shock. The pool sustains temperatures ranging from 34 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Based on the results of the testing so far, the Navy will set the thermostat for me at a numbing 40 degrees.

Patriotism is the only motivation I can find for agreeing to undergo this bizarre experience, and that doesn't go very far. I suppose, on a deeper level, I'm also cursed with the human need to know who and what I am.

—

I spend a few hours at the beach Sunday morning, have lunch, and return to the hotel room. I fall asleep and wake with a start from a nightmare about drowning. It seems almost more terrible than reality because it's part of my own mind. My lungs feel seared from seawater; there are phantom traces of salt on my lips. My heart doesn't know it was only a dream: it's beating in a frenzy, bent on survival. The hotel clock's digital display says 3:36 p.m. I slept less than an hour.