A swimmer freestyling through a shipping lane is a bit like a snail crossing the freeway. The situation is just as glamorous, and there tend to be few spectators. But when Leslie Hamilton, a thirty-one-year-old accountant, swam a record-breaking clockwise lap around Staten Island last month, the biggest challenge wasn’t dodging garbage barges or intractable tankers with staunch, Soviet names like Salacgriva and Yasa Madura. It was lice. And she was saved by her bikini.
“Fifteen minutes in, I was, like, ‘Oh, fuck,’ ” Hamilton said, floating in the greenish water under the Goethals Bridge at the end of her fourteen-and-a-half-hour swim. “My skin was crawling the whole time.”
Sea lice often come from the pin-prick-size larvae of Linuche unguiculata, the thimble jellyfish. They catch on bathing suits and, wherever the fabric touches a swimmer’s body, release tiny stinging cells onto the skin. These “bites” are slightly painful and very itchy. As Hamilton swam, she could feel lice under her fingernails and beneath the bridge of her goggles. When she pulled herself out of the water, she had hundreds of welts on her stomach. The day after the swim, to ease the itching, she loaded up on antihistamines and soaked in a tub of vinegar. “I smell like a salad,” she said over the phone.
Hamilton’s route around the borough—she is the first woman known to do it—had been in the works for eight years. She is as battle-hardened as swimmers come. She once swam into a shark in South Carolina and was back training the next day. She swam for eight days down the Hudson, from Catskill to New York Harbor, getting dangerously light-headed in the water after gashing her leg open under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.
For the first hour of the Staten Island lap, beset by the lice, she kept thinking, “I am going to D.N.F.”—short for “did not finish”—“they’re stinging me everywhere.” Instead, she traded her one-piece for a bikini bottom and swam bare-chested through the night, to keep the larvae off her skin. At sunup she put a top on and resumed swimming.
Two kayakers kept her company. Just past 10 A.M., after ten hours in the water, she stopped off of Tottenville for a regular half-hourly snack of carbohydrate powder, Advil, and Super Sour Scandinavian Swimmers candies. She looked up at Terry O’Malley, one of her kayak-borne escorts. “The water’s still seventy-eight degrees?” she asked.
“Yeah,” O’Malley said. “But a lot more people have peed in it round here.”
Hamilton and her flotilla were entering the swim’s most polluted stretch: ten miles up Arthur Kill, past trash compactors, the site of what was once the world’s biggest landfill, and a graveyard for submerged, rusting boats. The entry in the trip’s logbook for that section: “Smells terrible.”
Paula Croxson, a neuroscientist from Bolton, England, observed Hamilton’s swim and put notes in the log from one of two small support motorboats, as an official rule-keeper. “She’s braver than me,” Croxson said, laughing. “I wouldn’t swim in this.” Croxson swam a lap around Manhattan last year and has a blue-ringed octopus tattooed across her shoulder to commemorate it. But she found the Staten Island water particularly noxious. When her boat’s pilot, Thomas Crystall, switched on his propeller, the black water turned a putrid green.
“There are fish here,” Croxson said, hopefully, to Crystall, mentioning that they’d noticed men fishing.
“We saw a bunch of fish jump out of the water earlier,” he agreed.
“That could be a bad sign,” Croxson said. “Maybe they’re trying to leave.”
Even in cleaner water, marathon sea swimming might just be the gnarliest sport around. Between the dark thoughts in the water during hours of training and the Vaseline in dark places, many (her co-workers and fiancé included) will never quite understand the reasons Hamilton chose this hobby, or this swim.
For one, she’s made history: Hamilton is the first person on record to swim around Staten Island since 1979, when a local social worker did it (taking five hours longer than Hamilton did). She also loves New York’s water, preferring it to the skyline. Next month, she will be married on the banks of the Hudson, up in Poughkeepsie.
But really, she explained, she is drawn by what she calls “the emotional acceleration.” “Coming off such an uncomfortable situation, there was a sense of just being free,” she said, when she finished. “I think you have to go through a lot of crap before you’re rewarded with that feeling of zen.” Being uncomfortable makes everyday comforts exceptional. When she was writhing in the water at four in the morning, the prey of invisible lice, she kept it together by backstroking under the Verrazzano and screaming, “Tits out for Staten Island!” ♦