THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Parting the Waters : On Monday, Lynne Cox of Los Alamitos will attempt a symbolic ‘peace swim’ in the Middle East’s Gulf of Aqaba. In some ways, it’s a goal she’s been building to for 22 years.
Lynne Cox begins her final miles of training in U.S. waters by facing the shore and crashing backward into the surf. She is going against the current again, and she does it with a childlike grin you can see from the across the sand.
The regulars watching her from the pier wave at the Los Alamitos swimmer who, during 22 years of setting international endurance records, has become something of a hometown hero.
It started at the tender age of 15, when she shattered the women’s and men’s world records for swimming the English Channel. She went on to become the only person to brave 40-degree water and swim Russia’s Bering Strait and has made history by crossing the Beagle Channel between Argentina and Chile, the Spree River between former East and West Berlin, the shark-infested waters of the Cape of Good Hope and Siberia’s Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest and coldest freshwater lake.
Now, Cox and her half-dozen crew members are in Israel, where Monday she will mark a six-year quest by attempting a 14-mile swim across the Gulf of Aqaba--a symbolic “peace swim” in waters that link Israel, Egypt and Jordan.
“I don’t know what it’s going to take to get into Jordanian waters,” she says after ripping off her blue goggles following the three-mile training swim. “It always comes down to the last minute. . . .
“But after all of the work, it’s always great to finally get into the water. It’s like being an artist. You’ve put out all the paint, and you’ve gotten everything ready, and you can finally pick up the brush.”
Quietly articulate, the 37-year-old brunette seems an interesting blend of political intellect and athletic ability.
She has thrown out the many medals and trophies collected over years of competitive swimming. She still lives with her parents, teaches swimming, lectures, does some writing. She makes it clear that she is not the kind of American athlete who shills for running shoes or breakfast cereal. All she wants, she says with a bashful smile, is a world without war.
For this swim, she finds a special irony in the fact that she will be stroking all 14 miles of the two-day effort against the current.
“They asked me if I wanted to change my course and swim the other way,” says Cox, who scheduled the event to celebrate the Camp David accords and the ongoing peace process between Jordan and Israel.
“But against the current really describes the whole thing,” she says, “and the whole peace process.”
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Just three years after Albert Cox, a radiologist, and his wife, Estelle, an artist, moved Lynne and her swimming siblings to Southern California from New Hampshire in 1970, Lynne made her mark by swimming the English Channel.
“My parents were a stable influence of encouragement,” says Cox, whose brother David, 39, runs a recreation department. Sister Laura, 35, is a geneticist who coaches swimming, and sister Ruth, 32, coaches water polo and teaches.
“I remember that they used to give us swimming lessons in the bathtub when we were really little,” she says. “We started competing (in New Hampshire), but all of the good coaches were in California, so they moved us out here.”
It was after the English Channel swim when Cox became intensely interested in the world around her. By her late teens, she was already focusing on global peace efforts.
It wasn’t a tangible decision, she says, that lead her to meld her athletic ability with her visions of joining countries at odds. Now, the days when she swam for trophies and medals seem like a lifetime ago.
“I don’t even remember exactly why I threw (the trophies) out,” she says. “We used to have them displayed all over the place, but I was done with that. They went into a box, and then in the trash. I don’t swim for that anymore.”
There was not one particular event that made Cox the altruistic person she is today, but there came a time when the swimming for records just didn’t cut it. She majored in history at UC Santa Barbara and learned about the give-and-take involved with attaining peace.
“It’s the idea that a little compromise on both sides can build a bridge, and by allowing me to swim, they’re all doing that,” she says. “It takes a good many years to build a bridge and just seconds to blow it up.”
Her parents, retired, say they find it difficult to understand their daughter’s drive and motivation, yet they watch in awe as she pieces together each history-making swim.
They say the Gulf of Aqaba event is of special concern in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s current threats and the sudden mobilization of U.S. forces to Kuwait.
“We worry about her safety because it’s a very volatile part of the world today, with a lot of out-of-control people. But we just keep our fingers crossed and hope everything goes smoothly,” her father says.
Lynne’s parents have other concerns, including the their daughter’s personal and financial future. Although she works once a week at Beach Physical Therapy in Seal Beach, travels the corporate lecture circuit, teaches summer swimming lessons and picks up some free-lance writing assignments, her income is modest. She says marriage and children will come “maybe some day.”
“It’s hard for us to understand why she does this and why she keeps doing this,” says Albert Cox. “Lynne is going to do what she feels she has to do. We don’t push her; we just assist her.”
Cox is undecided about her future and says that she hasn’t had time to settle into long-term relationships. And when asked how long she intends to pursue her historic swims, she gets mildly defensive.
“I don’t think that anyone’s ever said that I’m too old to be doing this. You’re old when you’re old,” she says. “Why should you be limited by someone else’s expectations?”
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Symbolic as they may seem, the efforts of Lynne Cox have indeed led to compromise.
When the borders were closed in 1948, Eskimo families from America’s Little Diomede Island and the Soviet Union’s Big Diomede Island were restricted from seeing one another.
But three months after Cox crossed the 2.7-mile Bering Strait in 1987, the gates were lifted.
“The borders were open to them, and they were allowed to move and talk to each other, and to see what had happened to their families after (so many) years,” Cox says. “That makes me feel good.”
She was toasted at the White House by President Reagan and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
“In the opening paragraph of Gorbachev’s speech, he referred to Lynne by name,” recalls friend and longtime supporter Barry Binder. “That was something extraordinary.”
Since the day he met her at one of her speaking functions six years ago, Binder and his wife, Betty, have backed Lynne’s idealistic efforts. From his Los Alamitos Boulevard real estate office, she makes calls and sends facsimile correspondence to the countries where she needs approval for her latest mission.
“What I first noticed was her enthusiasm, her spark and her willingness to do something different,” Binder, 53, says. “She’s very focused on what she does and has an air of innocence about her. When she’s around, it helps people to keep things in perspective.”
Binder joined Cox and her support team two years ago when she swam across Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable lake in the Andes between the border of Bolivia and Peru. After that swim, she was covered all over with mysterious, quarter-size welts--bites from “some sort of organism” in the chilly water.
“I still don’t know what bit me, but they sure itched,” she says. “I never saw anything in the water; that’s what was so perplexing.”
People seem to be drawn to Cox, not necessarily because of her record in the water. Surfers, beachcombers, parking attendants--even the real estate agents in Binder’s office--all act as if they are longtime friends.
Her crew consists of Binder, a Newport Beach physician, a pilot, a Los Angeles dress-designer friend and a shipbuilding couple from Northern California who will maintain the tracking boat.
“She’s a good friend, and I believe in what she’s doing,” Binder says, adding that all of his contributions to her cause are strictly “out of pocket.”
“I don’t think Lynne sees a limit to what she’s doing in the next five or 10 years. She sure has the ability to do other swims,” he says. “It helps Lynne to have someone to talk to, someone who supports what she’s doing.”
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Nicely dressed in a blouse, earrings and skirt, Cox is packing meat tenderizer to treat possible jellyfish stings, drafting a letter to the mayor of Eilat in Israel and cheerfully talking about the bright-colored swimsuit she plans to wear.
An hour before, she was slicing through the 65-degree ocean off Seal Beach, relieved that the rain from the previous night didn’t leave the water too dirty. Swimmers worry about such conditions, she says, for they can cause horrible ear and sinus infections.
“It sounds funny because of what I’m about to do,” says Cox, who adds that the water temperatures in the Gulf of Aqaba will be in the mid to high 80s, with 100-degree sunshine.
“But I want to swim. I don’t want to get sick.”
She’s had her typhoid and gamma globulin shots and is packing “major amounts of sunscreen.” She’s not sure if she will wear a swim cap, afraid it might retain too much heat.
“At this point, you just keep going,” says Cox, who contends that what she’s about to do is much more than swimming against the elements--and much more than soaking up the spotlight.
She says she’s worked for six years to bring this swim together, and it hasn’t been easy, but she seems to thrive on the difficulty of it.
Everyone involved in the peace swim--which goes from Taba, Egypt to Eliat, Israel, and then on to Aqaba, Jordan--says that getting the American swimmer into Jordanian waters had become a furious, fax-driven endeavor.
The day before she left with her crew last weekend, all the clearances were in place: a blessing from Jordan’s Queen Noor, approval from Reuma Weizman, wife of Israeli President Ezer Weizman, and the nod from Ahmed Maher El Sayed, Egyptian ambassador to the United States.
“It’s a difficult process, and you have to make sure you do everything right, down to the wording in each letter. One wrong word could cancel the whole thing.”
Cox rubs her eyes and muses a moment, never putting down her all-important address book. She changes the subject to the climate of the Middle Eastern gulf and how it has been described to her, talking as if she was leaving for a holiday resort.
“On hot, sweltering days, the heat creates this sort of distorted haze over the water, and on a clear day, you can see both countries from both sides. It’s supposed to be spectacular.” Back to business. Cox looks at the time, apologizes, and places a call to friend Thomas Pickering, U.S. ambassador to Russia and an ardent supporter of her peace swims.
“I have to call him by a certain time, and it’s so hard to get these time differences straight,” she says with a childlike giggle. “You would think I would know by now.”
Lynne Elaine Cox
Age: 37
Background: Born in Manchester, N.H., Jan. 2, 1957. Moved to Los Alamitos in 1970.
Family: Daughter of Dr. Albert and Estelle Cox, retired. Sisters: Laura, 35, a geneticist in San Antonio, Tex., who coaches swimming and referees water polo, and Ruth, 32, a special education teacher in Cerritos, who coaches water polo. Brother, David, 39, runs a parks & recreation department in Price, Utah.
Passions: Making global “peace swims,” writing, public speaking.
Plans: “Everyone always asks, ‘What are you going to do next?’ There are a lot of swims out there, but I don’t feel the pressure of always having to go one goal beyond.”
On Accomplishments: “When you’re young, you want the praise; you want the trophies. But when you get older, you don’t need that anymore.”
On Unrest in the Middle East: “By allowing me in the water, Egypt, Isreal and Jordan will be compromising with one another. My hope is that projects like these will lead to other projects, and it will somehow help in bringing them together.”