Big Miracle

by Tom Rose

  The whale rescue would unite environmentalists and oilmen, Inuits and whites, Alaska and the Lower 48 states, the United States and the Soviet Union, and two people seven thousand miles apart who would meet and marry.

  Lucky whales.

  2

  From the Edge of the World to the Center of the Media Universe

  On Saturday morning, October 8, the day after Roy Ahmaogak found the three whales, he and Malik drove their ski machines along the Point Barrow sandbar to the spot where Roy had seen them. As they got closer, Malik’s windswept face lit up. He had an intimate kinship with whales that environmentalist do-gooders had a hard time understanding. From miles away, Malik knew enough about whales and their environment to see that the three whale spouts were hanging unusually close to each other.

  Malik grew excited as they approached. Roy grew relieved to see the whales had made it through the night. The two Eskimos parked their five-hundred-pound ski machines on the snow-covered sand at the edge of the spit. The ocean ice was too weak to hold the machines. In fact, the area around the whales wasn’t really ice at all. It was still just a thick slush, but hardening by the minute.

  The closer Malik got to the whales, the more he wondered why they didn’t just swim away. Were they too afraid to swim out to open waters? Maybe they were afraid to leave the breathing hole to explore the unfamiliar water farther out toward the open channel? In the Arctic, the autumn’s weather was always the most unpredictable. Did the whales know that, too? It was impossible for man to predict ice conditions for more than a few hours. Perhaps the whales’ internal weathermen were no better?

  Malik feared that if the whales did not make a move soon, the ice would harden enough around to really strand them. To complicate matters, he also knew what the whales knew: that if they left this hole, they might not find another. What would happen if they ran out of air before they got back? What if they became disoriented under the ice? The answer to these questions was obvious: They would drown. The gray whales were unlike their cousins, the bowhead whales, who would have had no problem breaking their snouts through the thick slush to breathe. Malik lost count of the number of bowheads he missed over the years as they dove under large ice patches to dodge his harpoons. He was surprised to see how different these gray whales seemed.

  Malik and Roy stood on the beach (or maybe on sea ice near the beach—they couldn’t be sure), waiting for the whales to surface. Sure enough, each one surfaced in its turn every few minutes to breathe. It was their constant surfacing in the same place that kept the ten-by-twenty-foot hole from freezing over. In all his years whaling, Malik never saw anything like this.

  He would have loved to get closer, but this was as far as they could get. The ice was too thick for his boat to get through but not strong enough to support a man’s weight. Unable to do more than watch, the two Eskimos climbed on their ski machines and headed back to Barrow.

  Inuit whalers from the tiny inland village of Nuiqsut, eighty miles southwest of Barrow, learned about the three whales from radio reports broadcast across the region. Several of them gathered at the hamlet’s single telephone (remember, there were no cell phones yet) to call their colleagues up in Barrow. Malik was nonplussed to learn how quickly folks down in Nuiqsut were to harvest the stranded whales. Why shouldn’t they be? The whales were there for the taking. And since the whales were fated to die, why was the ocean bottom more entitled to reap their bounty than the Inuits of Nuiqsut? The “old school” that valued whales not for glory or profit but only for survival was in fact, no school at all. It was myth: the pseudocosmopolitan product of modern environmentalism that aimed to delegitimize the modern by glorifying the past—even if it meant falsifying it.

  When the twentieth century finally got to Barrow, the century was already half over. But the Barrowans quickly made up for lost time. Everything changed … and fast. Most of the change was welcomed, but not all of it. Subsistence whaling was formalized at the very moment whales ceased being a subsistence source. Whales would never again mean the difference between life and death, but instead took on the same meaning the modern world had placed on them since the eighteenth century: commerce. The whales, so central for so long, became a luxury almost overnight. Many Eskimos were apprehensive about how modernization would affect them, but not enough to turn back the clock. The uncertainty of present-day times sure beat the certainty of death by starvation every winter.

  Modernity meant it was now possible to put the soon-to-die whales to good use. Rather than letting them drown, harvesting the whales would inject tens of thousands of dollars into the local economy by providing several hundred people with work for a day or two.

  As Malik and Roy watched the whales gasping for each breath, they knew these whales weren’t trapped where they were found by accident. The very geography that threatened to entomb the whales allowed them to be discovered and, in the end, rescued. The whales were caught among the sand shoals at the very tip of a narrow five-mile-long sandbar marking the northernmost tip of Alaska stretching north–northeast until it slipped into the sea. At its widest point, the Barrow sandspit was a hundred feet across. The far end lay nine miles north of modern Barrow. The fragile earth barrier was all that separated the calmer waters of the Beaufort Sea from the raging tempests of the Chukchi Sea.

  The whales gravitated to the sandspit, which served as a natural windbreak, allowing them to feed more comfortably in its shelter. But when the calm Beaufort Sea water started to freeze, the whales did not realize that the waters just across the spit—which were much rougher—were still ice-free. If the whales had been any farther from shore they would never have been discovered because they wouldn’t have been stranded.

  That night, over beers, some of Malik’s whaling friends asked him what he thought about harvesting the three gray whales. Malik shrugged with disinterest. He didn’t see the point of killing them so long as there was a chance they could swim free. If they couldn’t escape, then all bets were off. He took no pleasure in seeing animals suffer, but then again, he took even less pleasure seeing his fellow human beings suffer. Why should Barrowans be deprived of benefiting from the whales if there really was no way to help them?

  Malik thought there must be some way to help the whales overcome their fear enough to get them to start swimming. Because they were young, they had probably never seen slush before and simply assumed it was ice. While the whales acted like they were trapped, as of Saturday afternoon, October 8, they were not. Later that night, reports of the stranded whales started to trickle through town. The newer, younger whaling crews clamored for permission to harvest the whales.

  However, they weren’t allowed to do anything until Craig George and Geoff Carroll had the chance to study them, but the two biologists were hunting caribou in the tundra, and weren’t scheduled to return until Monday. Craig and Geoff helped start the local government’s Department of Wildlife Management in the early 1970s. The job offered these two adventurers a chance to study whales in a way other biologists could only dream of. Their management responsibilities were not just to protect local wildlife, but also to help locals hunt and kill it. In particular, the most important part of their job was to help the Eskimos hunt and kill bowhead whales.

  The two conducted an annual census of the bowhead whale population for the North Slope Borough (NSB), Alaska’s equivalent of a county. What they found would be the basis for negotiating next year’s quota with the International Whaling Commission. Geoff and Craig exemplified a remarkable fact of modern Eskimo life. The Inupiat Eskimo lived primitive lives by conventional American standards, but they were smart enough to hire the best modern expertise their money and influence could buy. The Eskimos had no shortage of help to manage their stormy entrance with the modern world—which is what made so much of it so stormy.

  Herein lay another hard to break media myth about native peoples in the United States, Alaska in particular—that their hard-bitten plight was the consequence of government disregard. In f
act, on a per capita basis no other group of Americans received even close to the level of federal and state assistance annually disbursed to native peoples. By the 1980s, federal and state aid to these peoples was massive enough to transform entire communities into little more than state wards. The government micromanaged the land they lived on and the houses they lived in. The government not only paid for, but directly delivered, their health care, which goes a long toward explaining why it was the worst in the country. Dozens of federal departments and agencies had their own designated “native American” programs, nearly all of which were available to Alaskans. And that’s just the feds. By 1988, the state of Alaska had its own fully developed but largely redundant assistance bureaucracy.

  The consequences for native peoples in places like Barrow were somewhat incongruous. What but government could produce poverty in people with relatively high per capita incomes? What entity but government could shorten the life spans, deepen the chronic health problems, and increase the rates of social and family dislocations as they increased involvement? Naturally, the worse government assistance made things, the more activists would clamor for more government assistance. By 1988, the federal trusteeship imposed upon native-Americans as supposed to compensation for federal crimes committed against them was proving more calamitous than the crimes themselves.2

  The greedy talk of slaughtering the gray whales appalled Malik. He knew it would reflect badly on his people. The young whalers sounded like the prospectors who were looking to stake another claim. It pained him to imagine all the careless whaling crews in a mad dash to kill three useless whales. At best, they would be used for dog food.

  Before leaving on their weekend hunting trip, Geoff and Craig reported Roy’s discovery back to their boss, Dr. Tom Albert, 1,200 miles to the south in Anchorage. Albert wanted them to check on the whales before they left, and to report back to him on whether they believed the animals would survive the weekend. In his brief dispatch back to Albert, Geoff offered his prediction that the whales would be gone by Monday—not dead, but en route on their 7,000-mile journey to winter breeding grounds.

  Geoff and Craig were required to investigate each reported stranding of any animal on the government’s endangered species list. Protected from the rusty harpoons of commercial whaling fleets since 1947, while still on the endangered list, gray whales were flourishing. By 1988, biologists estimated there were 22,000 gray whales, an all-time species high. As the old joke goes, the nearest thing to eternal life on this earth for people is work at a government bureau—and for animals, placement on the endangered species list.

  While whale strandings were common, the confluence of events regarding this whale stranding would be a cascading series of “firsts.” Geoff and Craig would be the first biologists to actually observe gray whales naturally trapped in ice. Gray whales may well have been familiar to nature lovers and whale watchers along the Pacific Coast of the Lower 48, but precious little was then known about them in their Arctic environment. The closer the two could get to the whales, the more they could learn about the animals’ behavior under extraordinary stress. Locals long knew whales died under the ice, but until now, scientists could only theorize as to how and why it happened. On Tuesday morning, October 11, 1988, four days after the whales were first discovered, Geoff and Craig would get to see them firsthand.

  The bearded biologists loaded sleeping bags, flares, and emergency survival rations onto wooden dogsleds hitched to the backs of their ski machines and were ready to go. But they didn’t know where exactly they were supposed to go. They needed a guide to help them find the exact spot of the stranding on the featureless and endless horizon of frozen sea. Since Roy was not available, they asked Billy Adams, a skillful hunter who, having seen the whales on Sunday, knew where they were. Besides, Billy would be good company. He had his own ski machine and a great sense of humor. The three men encased themselves in a hybrid mixture of modern and traditional cold-weather gear needed to keep them, if not warm, then at least able to function in the mind-numbing temperatures that would consume them as they sped out across the frozen sea.

  As the sun rose just above the southern horizon, the trio traveled along Barrow’s only road until it abruptly ended along with Alaska’s northernmost coast seven miles north of town. From there, it was still another five miles to the whales. When they got as far as they could on the ski machines, Billy led them on foot the rest of the way toward the very tip of the soft-surfaced sandbar. Craig stopped to marvel at the surroundings. He squinted to view the sandbar. Remarkably, the Arctic Ocean’s frozen glare can be blinding even under heavy overcast skies, which made this tiny sliver of what remained of North America hard to see.

  As it tapered off into the sea, the total and uniform solitude overwhelmed him. Not a trace of life: no vegetation, no variation in scene, no visible image of anything. A void without end. Stark. Disconsolate. White. “Magnificent desolation” were the words first spoken by Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin Buzz Aldrin nineteen years before to describe the surface of the moon. It came to Geoff’s mind, but he knew the desolation that seemed so omnipresent on top of the ice was in fact a bountiful habitat teeming with an extraordinary cacophony of life on the underside of ice. Walrus, seals, polar bears, and of course whales thrived on a copious abundance of sea life almost impossible to quantify.

  The three men stood on the frozen sandspit, gathered their bearings, and waited for spouts. They would know one way or another in a matter of minutes. If the whales were alive and still using these holes to breathe, it wouldn’t be long before they came up for air. If the men saw no sign of the whales within five or six minutes, that would have been the end of this story. The whales would either have made it to open seas or they would be dead by drowning. As much as Geoff and Craig hoped the whales were free, they still wanted to see them. They had already begun to construct the scientific line of inquiry they would try to compile if they could collect enough data.

  As two minutes became three, Geoff and Craig had a sinking feeling. Three minutes became four. The banter trailed off, overtaken by silence. At four minutes, resignation crept into acceptance that the whales were gone. Then, at the moment Geoff started to collect his things for the return trip to Barrow, Billy heard a low rumble gain momentum and traction. Sure enough, the mammoth head of a barnacled and slightly bloodied gray whale poked through the ice. The whales (one at least) had made it through the weekend but were fading fast. Craig, George, and Billy cheered with joy. They punched their fists through the cold air, shaking hands in congratulations for the vicarious achievement they rejoiced in.

  Like a locomotive letting off steam, the whale exhaled. Only a warm-blooded mammal could make that deep gargle. “FFWWWSSSSHHH,” the whale belched. As soon as it filled its giant lungs, the whale slipped its head back into the hole and disappeared into the black sea. The displaced water rippled through the weak ice surrounding the hole, freezing as it moved. Then, a second rumbling. Another huge head, this one bigger than the last, fit into the hole with barely any room to spare. Looking through binoculars, Geoff could distinguish one whale from another by the pattern of barnacles on its snout. This second whale swallowed its portion of air and vanished as quickly as the first.

  From what Geoff and Craig could observe, the whales stayed under as long as they could. They seemed to be protecting, even guiding each other. It sure looked as if the whales had worked together to develop a breathing system designed to allow them to share the hole. They pulled their heads back under and away from the hole to give each other a turn to breath. Remarkable. This behavior was new to Geoff and Craig. Nothing quite like this had ever been seen by anyone before. Neither biologists recalled learning or hearing anything about whales acting so cooperatively in any similar life-threatening predicament.

  After the second whale surfaced there was a long pause. What happened to the third whale? Roy Ahmaogak reported seeing three. They didn’t have to wait long to have that question answered. The third whale eme
rged; much smaller and much more timidly than the first two. It looked battered and tired. Nearly all the skin on this whale’s snout appeared to have been rubbed off; probably from having scraped up against the sharp edges of the air hole. It swam with much less authority than the other two whales.

  It seemed like the larger and older whales stayed under longer in order to give the smaller whale more time to breathe. How old was this third whale? Was it a baby … or somewhat older? Geoff and Craig could not immediately tell, but that it was a young one they had no doubt. When the two bigger whales surfaced, they rammed up through the sharp sides of the hole. Whales are many things but self-destructive is not one of them. The whales weren’t purposely trying to hurt themselves; they were trying to expand their shrinking air hole. Their ramming kept slush from turning to ice. Here was more evidence that these whales possessed a keen and sharply developed social intelligence.

  Billy knew a bowhead could break breathing holes in ice up to half a foot thick. These grays had trouble even with soft ice. No wonder it was grays and not their bowhead cousins that drowned under the ice. Each whale took several turns breathing and then dove for about five minutes. Craig dug into his knapsack and probed for his 35-millimeter camera. He had borrowed it from the borough to document the whales. Whatever photos he took would belong to the government. But this was a fantasy performance; he wanted copies of every shot for his photo album.