Big Miracle

by Tom Rose

  For almost an hour, the three men consumed as much sensory imagery as they could absorb. There was nothing they could do to actually help the whales yet since they still couldn’t reach them. All they could do was watch and learn. None of their training and experience prepared them for this. They knew how to study whales. They were paid to help Inuits hunt and kill them. They didn’t know how or even if they could help these whales.

  The whales were tantalizingly close … so close that the men were lured to test the ice. The three men trod upon uncertain ground, which of course was not ground at all, but frozen ocean. Giddy at their unexpected good fortune, they carefully walked out until the ice could hold them no longer. Now they were only fifty feet or so away from the whales. From what little they could see, the hole did not appear much bigger than any of the whale’s head.

  Billy went to his sled to fetch the hollow aluminum pole he used to probe ice. He scampered nimbly back to where Geoff and Craig kneeled at safety’s edge. Billy carefully measured a few paces beyond his companions and pushed the end of his pole deep into the hardened surface. He had to lean quite hard to get the ice to break. Once through, the pole easily probed the slush. Billy knew it would not stay slush for long.

  Craig held the camera under his parka to shelter it from the cold. The brittle film nearly snapped in the sub-zero weather. (The days of digital cameras had yet to arrive.) Learning from the past when he would rip or break the film from winding the spool too roughly, this time he wound deliberately and tenderly. The sun vanished behind a low-lying bank of thick Arctic fog as he waited for the whales to begin their next breathing cycle. He popped open the back of his camera to adjust for the changing light conditions by replacing the film.

  The forecast high for that Tuesday, October 11, was four degrees above zero degrees Fahrenheit, seventeen degrees colder than the average for this time of year. Since it seldom got that cold at that time of year without insulating cloud cover, the men knew they might confront “whiteout,” a dangerous but common Arctic weather condition. The slightest wind can trigger it by whipping the dry, almost weightless snow into the air, blending it so uniformly with the white sky that all else is obscured. Whiteout blinds everything in its midst, but since it usually sticks very low to the ground, the Arctic’s most deadly predator, the polar bear, which on its hind legs can stand up to fourteen feet high, uses the paralyzing condition to hunt defenseless prey. While aware of the danger, the three men were smart enough to be cautious but calm.

  The whales resumed surfacing after a four-minute dive, right on schedule. First the two larger whales, followed by the smaller one. Craig snapped his way through an entire roll of film in one such respiration cycle. He hurriedly reloaded his camera to shoot more before the whales dove again. He was tempted to get flustered, but remembered he was an expert, not a tourist. Suddenly it dawned on him that he could take all the time he wanted; the whales weren’t going anywhere. He could hang around the edge of the spit for as long as he could stand the cold. The next time the whales reached up for air, he could take even better pictures.

  For nearly an hour the men said barely a word. Then, when the silence was broken, all three spoke at once. Their exhilaration was tempered by their inability to help do much for these magnificent creatures. The whales seemed stuck in what looked to be a hopeless quagmire, yet they were rational and deliberate. They avoided the panic they must have instinctively known would doom them. Their fate was intertwined and they seemed to know it. The whales had to work together to survive, which required both leadership and cooperation. One of the three whales had to be in charge, but Craig and Geoff couldn’t quite figure out which one that was yet.

  It was a mystery that would remain unsolved until the very last hours of what was to be a nearly three-week odyssey. What was it that enabled the whales to prioritizetze, strategize, and improvise their own survival? Was it genetic code, sheer intelligence, or a combination? These were some of the questions that would dog biologists, rescuers, reporters, and millions of people around the world for the weeks to follow.

  The whales’ unusual surfacing was the most obvious unanswered question Geoff and Craig could not answer. By the late 1980s, the gray whales’ migratory and habitat patterns were well known; but only in its warmer, winter waters off the coast of Baja—not in the Arctic. Younger whales, especially grays, rarely wander more than a mile from shore. Shallow waters are safer waters—there was less room for killer whales and great white sharks, the gray whales’ two natural predators.

  In normal times, the gray whale, like all whales, breathes while swimming parallel to the surface. The whale only needs to arch its back just enough to expose its blowhole ever so slightly above the waterline. But these were no ordinary times. The only way these whales could survive was to shoot out of the small hole like a submarine-launched cruise missile.

  “We have to get this on videotape,” Craig shouted. “These would make great pictures.” He wanted to get back to town to see if he could borrow equipment from local TV studio operated by the North Slope Borough’s public access channel. The two biologists tightened their hoods, pulled down face masks, affixed goggles, and throttled up. Craig looked at his watch. Four hours had passed since they first saw the whales. Getting to town and back before it got too dark would require operating on fast forward.

  Living in pre-Internet times, Craig was forced to find the studio’s phone number by actually looking it up in a hard-copy seven-page Barrow phone book. He called Oran Caudle, the director of the borough’s then state-of-the-art television studio and filled him in. He asked if they could take a video camera to get some footage of the stranded whales. Oran was intrigued. Originally from Texarkana, Texas, Caudle didn’t know much about whales—but compared to everyone he left behind in the Lower 48, he was a veritable expert. One thing he did know, however, was that the Arctic could all too easily devastate his expensive equipment. “Sorry,” he told Craig, “no can do.” While disappointed, Craig was hardly surprised.

  It wasn’t that the thirty-one-year-old Caudle didn’t want to share his equipment. He wanted it to be used as often as possible so long as it wasn’t ruined or lost at sea. He knew if anything happened to his equipment, getting any of it replaced would be hard to do. After all, anything would be more exciting than his current production job on the North Slope Borough’s employee benefits package. Oran was so anxious to get the hands-on television experience he knew he needed to get anywhere in the cutthroat, high-skilled, but low-paying world of TV production, that he was literally willing to move to the end of the world to get it. Ever the intrepid type, Caudle was always on the prowl to produce interesting and valuable local programming for Channel 20, the North Slope’s local public access channel, and these whales sounded like a chance to do just that.

  The more Oran heard the two men talk, the more he sensed this might actually be something interesting, really interesting. But rules were rules, and Caudle followed them. He told Craig there was just no way he could lend out any of the NSB’s equipment to nonauthorized personnel. After all, this was government property they were talking about. Sure, he could assign a camera crew and would just as soon as he could, but there was no way he could get any of his people out there until tomorrow at the earliest. As the light on his phone went off, the light in his head lit up: Caudle determined he would go out to the whales himself.

  Oran Caudle was a big bear of a man. His ready smile radiated genuine warmth. He endeared himself to almost everyone in Barrow, even Eskimos, many of whom resented a non-Inuit presence, let alone a successful one. But this was a decidedly minority view. Tales of racial tension between Eskimos and non-natives were greatly exaggerated, particularly by those seeking to profit from their grievance peddling. The worse the problem, the greater the need for more publicly funded “intervention” and “mitigation programs.”

  Locals joked that the intermarriage rate was over 100 percent—when you factored in multiple marriages. Barrow’s divorce rate
was the highest in the state—75 percent. Caudle’s own marriage recently ended in divorce. He was trying to rebuild his life, but Barrow was not the easiest place to do it.

  Despite a generation of being conditioned to view themselves as victims, self-reliance died hard in Barrow. In addition to being at the highest latitude on the continent, the small town at the top of the world was bigger, richer, and safer than ever before. Statistics that looked appalling when compared with other American towns—high rates of murder, rape, suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence—did not look nearly as bleak when measured against the only metric that mattered to them: their lives were measurably improved over that of their fathers and grandfathers. It was a bridge too far for many to even pretend otherwise.

  Still, the obstacles were formidable. Aside from the isolation, the desolation, and the cold, there was the darkness—three months of insufferable, inconsolable, and complete darkness. Oran had to create his own support system that many locals simply inherited. He joined the Barrow Calvary Baptist Church. Its geographically tailored message that “only in darkness can small lights shine bright” had special resonance three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. After church on Sunday, October 9, he talked with some of his fellow worshippers about the whales Roy Ahmaogak found two days earlier. Almost everyone in town seemed to have heard about the stranded whales.

  Caudle knew about gray whales not from books or Sunday-night nature specials on PBS, but from seeing them near the shore. Even when he didn’t see them, proof of their presence was all around him, from the slimy barnacles that were always washing up on shore when not iced over, to the bounty of whale meat enjoyed during the long winters. If he could get close enough and the video proved interesting enough, Oran thought he might produce a twenty-minute evergreen segment for Channel 20. If there was anything that interested the people of Barrow more than whales, Caudle sure didn’t know what it was. Aside from government, Barrow had only one industry and that was whaling.

  Wednesday morning, October 12, 1988, came early for Oran. All mornings came early for Caudle; a self-described night owl. The division between day and night, taken for granted in more southernly climes, took on a completely different meaning in the Arctic; a meaning very hard for a tunik (white) like Oran Caudle to adjust to. In Barrow, a midnight in summer means broad daylight, while a winter “high noon” is marooned in pitch-dark blackness. The time of day just didn’t mean the same thing. Humans react like other animals in the Arctic. During the long season they sleep more; during short season, they sleep less. Psychologists call it “seasonal affective disorder”; everyone else called it “the winter blues.”

  It was all Oran Caudle could do just to sit up in bed to grab the remote control. He clicked on CNN, which at the time was the only cable news channel. It was his (and everyone else’s) link to the outside world. He showered, shaved, and downed his daily breakfast: a granola bar and a can of apple juice. Hearing the first bars of the music jingle for the show Sonya Live signaled it was 8:00 A.M., Alaska Standard Time and his cue to be out the door—which was just as well for Caudle, who couldn’t stand the high-pitched Sonya Friedman and her lowbrow show. He slipped on his new felt-lined boots his mother had bought for him. Caudle thought they looked ridiculously large, but since they managed to keep his feet warm in temperatures down to eighty degrees below zero and everyone else in town wore them, he made his peace with them. He wasn’t sure how long he would be out on the ice, but at least his feet wouldn’t freeze.

  Craig had warned Oran that unless the ice grew stronger overnight, fifty feet was as close as they could get to the whales. Maybe Oran could use the expensive zoom lens he persuaded the North Slope Borough into buying. This was the first time he took it out of the box since it arrived air-freight from Seattle three months before.

  He packed a sensitive directional microphone that he stored along with batteries, assorted cables, and plenty of blank videotapes in specially lined cold-weather bags. He loaded it all into the back of the TV studio’s white Chevy Suburban. Oran and two technicians picked up Billy Adams and together they drove to Craig and Geoff’s office located out at the old Naval Arctic Research Laboratory, known to everyone as NARL. NARL was a sprawling complex that combined old World War II Quonset huts with more modern prefabricated buildings on wooden stilts at the northern edge of town. NARL used to be the center of town and a key component of U.S. national defense. Before the rise of satellite technology, NARL was the site of a massive radar station designed to warn against a transpolar nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. It looked a bit like NASA(National Aeronautics and Space Administration) drawings of futuristic Mars or moon colonies set against the backdrop of strange and hostile surroundings; and in truth that is very much what NARL really was. There was not another permanent man made structure between NARL and the North Pole.

  When Oran, Billy, and the technicians arrived at NARL at 8:30 A.M. Wednesday morning, they found the biologists looking worried. Craig and Geoff thought that time was running out for the whales. The National Weather Service said temperatures could fall to forty degrees below zero out on the ice. With such cold, the whales’ only hope was for wind to keep the sea from freezing, but the forecast predicted no wind. Without wind, the holes would freeze and the whales would drown before the day was out.

  The ride out to the whales took longer than Oran expected. When the six of them brought their ski machines to a halt ten yards from the snow-covered beach, Geoff and Craig were amazed at how much new ice had formed overnight. The whales were right where the biologists left them. They continued their grim dance. The baby seemed steadier, taking more regular breaths. Billy Adams crept out to see how much farther he could walk. He was able to get much further beyond his earlier footprints. Remarkably, his tracks from yesterday looked as if they were just made—proof of the Arctic’s low humidity and quiet winds. At this rate, the whales did not have long to survive.

  Too excited to lament their fate, Caudle was spellbound just by the sight of the whales and almost dropped his camera. Craig told him to calm down. “Just relax, these whales aren’t going anywhere,” he assured him. “Take your time. Do what you have to do to get ready. The whales don’t have much choice; they have to wait for you.”

  This was new. Here were three animals in their natural habitat that could be treated as though they were props back in his production studio. Normally in the wild, photographers are lucky to get any pictures. Oran calmed himself down and set up his camera. Equipment failure was still his main worry. At forty degrees below, any failure was not only possible, it was likely. Still, even if his gear worked, Oran wasn’t sure how long he could keep it working. It was more than cold; it was dangerous, both for him and his gear. When he breathed the bitter air too deeply, it singed his lungs. In weather this cold, bones become brittle and easily break.

  When Oran looked into the viewfinder, he saw only fog. He knew not to rip the camera apart to get at the droplets of water causing the condensation. There was only one thing to do. He put the camera on the tripod and waited for the inside of his camera to get as cold as the outside so that the condensation would vanish. Geoff and Craig noticed the whales were still not comfortable with all the commotion on the top of ice. The animals most likely feared the men’s footsteps were those of a prowling polar bear. Breathing holes are favorite stalking grounds for polar bears. Like fish in a barrel.

  The trapped whales were extremely vulnerable and they knew it. Every time they rose to the surface, they were dangerously exposed. A polar bear could kill a giant whale with one devastating swipe of its paw. The whales tried to stay underwater as long as they could. But sooner or later they had to face whatever was stomping around above them. They had to breathe.

  While Oran fiddled with the expensive equipment, Geoff and Craig tallied the effects of the whales’ predicament. They tried to think of ways to nudge the whales toward open water. The ultimate question was whether they could influence gray whales even if they coul
d come up with a plan to do so. Oran asked Craig to sit down so he could take his first pictures of the whales surfacing in the background. He lifted his heavy twenty-five-pound video camera onto his shoulder, focused the zoom lens, and squeezed his thumb against the soft rubber record button. Caudle lumbered about trying to record every aspect of the whales. He put the camera on a tripod and filmed Billy Adams testing the ice in the foreground with the whales bobbing their gigantic heads against the stark white background.

  Since the water was rapidly freezing, Caudle wanted to know how far the solid ice now extended. Would it be safe to walk right out to the edge of the breathing holes by the next morning? Billy Adams thought it might. In a guttural Eskimo accent, he said, “If the holes aren’t froze over, we could probably get close enough to pet ’em.”

  Oran had an idea. “Let’s do some interviews,” he suggested. “We can edit them to go with the pictures of the whales for local TV. Which one of you guys wants to be interviewed?” Caudle inquired of his captive audience. Since the film would be shown on the local channel, Oran had to get some local flavor. That meant Billy or his assistant Marie.

  Of the six people now on the ice, Marie seemed best suited to conduct the interviews. She was director of public information for the North Slope Borough. She was also Geoff Carroll’s wife. In spite of her title, she didn’t agree at first; Oran had to coax her. Geoff and Craig pretended to be completely absorbed in their various tasks. They were collecting lots of new data they would need to analyze, but they were also camera shy.

  Oran assured Marie she looked great. Besides, if she didn’t, who would ever know? After more playful prodding, she agreed to question her husband and then Craig. Oran thrust the microphone into her hand and pushed the Record button. “Go ahead,” he said with one eye squinted shut and the other buried in the viewfinder. “Ask him what he is doing out here and what he thinks of the whales.”