CAN SHE BREAK THE ICE? : Despite a Chill in Relations, Lynne Cox of Los Alamitos Plans to Swim Into the Middle of the Red Army

Lynne Cox got the idea to swim to the Soviet Union in 1976, the year of America’s bicentennial.

“The idea of swimming from the United States to Russia and across the international date line--going from today to tomorrow--was appealing,” she says.

The more she learned about it, the less appealing it got, but the Los Alamitos woman seems drawn to it just the same. Lynne Cox plans to swim to the Soviet Union in August.

The distance is only 2.7 statute miles, from America’s Little Diomede Island to the Soviet Union’s Big Diomede in the middle of the Bering Strait off the west end of Alaska, but the water temperature will be between 34 and 39 degrees.

If it were any colder, she could walk. Two California men tried that last January, when the strait was frozen solid. Soviet soldiers arrested them, worried them for a while, then sent them back.

One other time, a Frenchman rode a sailboard across and, again, the Soviets were not amused.

But this is no lark for Cox, 30. The Soviets will know she is coming.

Cox has been thrashing through various bodies of water around the world since she was 15, lifting the commonplace enterprise of channel swimming to the limits of her imagination.

“Each swim is a different challenge,” she said. “It’s not like swimming the 100-meter freestyle over and over again.”

Whatever else it may be, the Bering isn’t boring. From late May until December, when it freezes, water flows from the Bering Sea north to the Chukchi Sea through the 50-mile channel between the Seward Peninsula and the Chukotskiy Poluostrov. The tiny, rocky Diomede islands in the stream are divided by the international date line and an ideological gap that Cox first considered 11 years ago.

“Initially, I’d gotten information that the water was 42 degrees and I thought it was possible,” she says. “At that point the coldest water I’d swum in was the mid-50s, so I thought I’d just put this in the background and do colder swims and see how I did. I kept stepping it down.”

Two years ago she swam in Iceland, where the water was 40 degrees, and through the ice in Alaska’s Glacier Bay at 37 degrees.

“While I was doing those swims I was doing core temperature measurements--the internal body temperature--and finding out that my internal temperature hadn’t dropped during the swims,” Cox said. “The surprising thing about it is that my normal body temperature is 97.6, and before I got in it was 99.5, and after I got out it was 99.5.

“That’s not supposed to happen. It’s supposed to drop, and it’s supposed to drop fast, and the harder you exercise, if you’re not energy efficient, it’s supposed to drop even faster. The cool blood from the outside gets pumped in and then pumped back out.”

The swim will be part cultural exchange and part scientific experiment, perhaps with Soviet scientists joining American and English colleagues in a practical study of hypothermia.

“We’re going to use a system of leads that will be hooked up to the boat (with) long, long cords,” Cox said. “They’ll be monitoring skin temperature, heart rate and core temperature.

“A lot of times you can’t tell when somebody is going into hypothermia. You can see some of the signs--sort of a blue pooling in the shoulders, the fingers starting to come apart as you lose fine motor control, a graying in the face and a discoloration in the feet. The other thing that happens is you become real disoriented. You can’t distinguish the water and the sky. On a real long swim, that tends to happen, too, especially at dawn when everything looks gray.

“These are signs I’ve seen in other swimmers, but a lot of times you can’t tell, and that’s what’s dangerous about it.”

Cox has never suffered the phenomenon.

“No, but I’ve been real cold,” she said. “In Glacier Bay I had one boat beside me guiding me, and then a small rowboat that was acting like an ice breaker to break the pan ice, which is like a quarter of an inch thick.”

Little Diomede Island is about two square miles of steep, rocky slopes 26 miles off the Alaskan mainland. It’s the westernmost point of the United States, a few degrees longitude west of Hawaii, and is populated by 158 Alaskan Eskimos, true blue Americans all, who live eyeball to eyeball with a Red Army garrison, estimated at 20 to 40 troops, over on Big Diomede. There are no civilians on that island.

It is believed that nobody has ever tried to swim from one island to the other. Pat Omiak, the mayor of Little Diomede, said that Cox’s most serious problems would be in the political channels.

Omiak, speaking by phone from the store in the island village of Ingalik--the only phone on the island--said, “I suppose it will be up to the State Department and our next-door neighbor.”

He referred to the Soviets as “our neighbors” several times. Apparently, the Soviet presence is hard to ignore.

“Every morning you wake up and you open your curtain and there’s the island,” Omiak said.

“They sure hate to see anyone walking over there without a reason. We don’t like to see that happen, either.”

Charles Lean, an area biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, based in Nome, said, “It’s a nervous situation.”

Airplane flights to Little Diomede cease when the ice runway breaks up in May, but the residents receive mail once a week by helicopter and supplies from the mainland by 30-foot walrus-skin boats called umiaks. Mostly, though, islanders live off the harsh environment.

“They’re crabbing right now,” Omiak said. “They haven’t launched a boat for the spring hunt. Maybe later. Seals are still good at this time, as long as it doesn’t get too warm.”

The island needs no automobiles because there is no place to drive and no road to drive on, “only trails,” Omiak said.

But it isn’t entirely cut off from civilization.

“We have television,” Omiak said. “My boy is watching ‘Sesame Street’ right now.”

There is no hotel, but accommodations are not a problem for visitors.

“As long as they’ve got sleeping bags, that’s fine,” Omiak said. “We’ve got room here in the fire hall and an electric range downstairs and a refrigerator with a freezer on top.”

Cox’s swim may be the biggest event ever for Little Diomede but, on the phone, Omiak didn’t seem very excited about it.

“Well, you know how people are,” he said. “They just want to try something to make a big headline.”

Joe Coplan of U.S. Swimming, the governing body for the sport in this country, is project director for the attempt. He specializes in long-distance swimming events and recently wrote the rules for the Federation Internationale de Natation Amateur (FINA) that runs the sport world-wide.

Although U.S. Swimming and FINA are neither sanctioning nor financing Cox’s attempt--essentially, she’s on her own politically and financially--U.S. Swimming has endorsed it as a credible venture. It could boost interest and participation in the first FINA-approved world championship long-distance swimming event that is scheduled for Perth, Australia, in 1990.

One obstacle is gaining approval of the Soviets to land on Big Diomede. Negotiations are under way on two or three fronts, and Coplan doesn’t think there will be a problem, despite the recent embarrassing incident involving Mathias Rust, the 19-year-old West German pilot who landed a light plane in Red Square.

That will be outweighed, Coplan believes, by the spin-off of the warm, cultural climate generated by last summer’s Goodwill Games in Moscow and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost , or openness.

In the end, the major problem may be money.

“We’re looking for sponsors,” Coplan said.

Because of the logistics and the support team required, the project is budgeted at $160,000, considerably more than any of Cox’s previous efforts, which were primarily funded by her earnings as a free-lance writer and her father, a radiologist.

But once there, the primary problem will be in swimming the strait.

Ordinarily, Cox would negotiate the straight-line distance of 2.7 miles in a little over an hour. “But the current is just incredible,” she said. “It hits the floor of the Arctic Ocean and curves back, so you have all sorts of weird currents. It’s going to be like swimming across a river with lots of whirlpools. I hope I can make it in under two hours.”

She has been training with daily three-hour swims in the Pacific off Seal Beach but complained, “It’s warm. The lifeguards say it’s 64. I think it’s as high as 67.”

For Lynne and the scientists, it can’t be too cold. She will wear neither grease nor wetsuit because that would render the experiment pointless.

“This is the coldest swim I’ll ever be able to do,” she said, “because after this it’s ice.”