Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World Read Online Free PDF

at age nine the youngest of Ederle's three young daughters, the view was nothing but a tease. She could not swim, and because she could not swim she was not allowed to go alone with her two older sisters to the beach, to play and splash in the water with other children. While her sisters frolicked with other kids in water and let the waves toss them about, Trudy had to either stay home or wade in water below her knees. Margaret—Trudy always called her Meg—and Helen were allowed to go farther out where they could dive under the water and bob around like corks. During a recent visit to Germany, where each spent hours with their many cousins and other relatives at a familiar swimming hole, both Meg and Helen had learned to swim, mastering the dog paddle and the breaststroke. Trudy had gone to the swimming hole, too, but once, when she was playing in the water and everyone was turned around and looking the other direction, she had slipped in just over her head and had to be pulled out, sputtering, to shore. She hadn't come close to drowning, not really, but it had given her father and mother a start, and now they were protective, maybe even overprotective, of their youngest daughter.
    Trudy didn't think it was fair that Meg and Helen could go to the beach and that she could not unless either her father or mother or one of her many aunts and uncles was with her. She particularly didn't think it was fair that she couldn't go with Meg. She worshipped her older sister, who had doted on her as she was growing up as if she were a special doll all her own, and now Trudy followed Meg everywhere and tried to do everything Meg did.
    Now she sat roughly in the sand and began taking out her disappointment by digging into it with a stick—well, it just wasn't
fair.
Why, she must have wondered, did they even bother coming to the Highlands instead of staying home in New York, when she wasn't allowed to go to the beach and go swimming?

    The fact that Heiner Ederle owned a summer home in the Highlands was a measure of just how successful he had become since immigrating to America twenty-five years before. He had arrived in 1892 as a sixteen-year-old after a one-week journey on the steamship
Havel
of the North German Lloyd Line. One of twenty children, for twenty hard-earned dollars he had left his family behind and booked passage in steerage for the trip from Bremen to New York, spending most of the voyage crammed on a noisy lower deck with little sanitation, poor food, and no privacy. When the ship approached New York Harbor on the morning of May 25, 1892, Ederle's first glimpse of America was likely the hills that gave Highlands its name, for the first sight most immigrants from Europe gained of the United States was not the Statue of Liberty or the skyline of Manhattan, but the dark silhouette of what geologists know as the Atlantic Highlands in New Jersey. The most prominent headland along the Atlantic coast south of the state of Maine, the Highlands rise more than two hundred feet above sea level, topped by the massive, brownstone lighthouse known as Twin Lights, then the brightest lighthouse in North America. Ocean travelers could detect Twin Lights' glow while still seventy miles from shore. At twenty miles the lights themselves became visible, and soon after one could see land. If Heiner Ederle, who soon after arriving at Ellis Island would anglicize his name to Henry, was looking for a sign that his journey to America would prove to be both wise and profitable, the Highlands would be that sign. His first view of the United States would point him toward his family's destiny.
    When he arrived in New York, Ederle found a welcoming environment. There was already a large, vibrant, and supportive German-American community, and unlike among other immigrant groups, such as the Irish, most German immigrants were craftsmen or semiskilled workers. Although Henry Ederle listed his occupation as "laborer" on the manifest of the
Havel,
in