by Tom Rose
Marie was quick to pose coherent questions. She asked Geoff how the whales were discovered and what he thought their chances that they would either be able to escape or be harvested. Geoff said he didn’t know for sure on either count; all he knew was what he could see in front of him. The whales were not in great shape.
She then interviewed Craig, who sounded professional, factual, and concise, if a little stiff. His stark face matched the terrain. With the whales active in the background, Oran knew he was finally recording some good stuff. (If he only knew how good!) Craig told Marie that the Wildlife Management office had a rare chance to study a natural phenomenon he was not sure anyone had been able to see before. “Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough data yet to comment with any authority as to how these whales got stuck or what their chances might be to swim free,” said Craig. Little did he know what good practice these quick sound-bites would be for the gathering storm looming on their personal horizons.
Oran wanted Billy in front of the camera to lend authority to the story’s locality. Billy was an Inupiat whom everyone in town knew and who would make the setting more authentic, the story more compelling. And it would get critics off Oran’s back. As much better paid advance men for major party presidential candidates were proving at the same time down in the Lower 48, visual backgrounds were rapidly moving into the foreground of what critics now deemed to be “good” television.
As Billy and Marie began speaking into the microphone, one of the two larger whales rose to breathe and burst brilliantly into frame. Oran stumbled in the slush as he backed up for a wider shot. He couldn’t imagine a more powerful image. He couldn’t describe what he naturally intuited. These creatures had a remarkable pull over the imaginations of everyone who saw them. Here the whales were fighting for each breath in front of people who went to great lengths and not insignificant personal risk just to see them. Oran’s reaction didn’t seem much different than anyone else’s. It was more emotional than journalistic. It had to be—other than new data collected, there was nothing inherently journalistic about three whales either stranding themselves or being stranded at the very tip of North America.
What would become clear soon enough was that this story’s real drama was unfolding not under the ice but on top of it: people gathering to watch captive whales becoming themselves captive to their fate.
As Billy spoke, he motioned behind him to note the stressed condition of the baby whale. At that moment, the baby rose timidly through the ice and stole the show. Bloodied and tired, the desperate animal lay motionless. The pathetic creature seemed to appeal to the camera for help, as if it somehow knew its message would soon be transmitted to creatures of an alien but caring species. The audio came across the bleak landscape perfectly, but Oran wasn’t paying attention to the sound. He was spellbound by the immense power of the pictures he was shooting. Billy and Marie called and shouted his name several times before they got a response. They were trying to tell him they were finished.
“What do you mean you’re done?” Oran bristled. “Just keep talking, I don’t care what y’all say,” he bellowed. “Just keep talking. Nobody will listen to what you say; it’s the pictures they want to see and the pictures need some audio. This is just too incredible.” Everyone was astonished. They never saw Oran so insistent. How could he possibly be so interested in hearing what they already said three times? Oran beseeched them to keep up the charade. Marie asked Billy the same questions over and over.
Watching these whales was like being on a drug so good it had to be illegal. As much video as Oran got, he had to have more. He had long since forgotten about the cold. Was it cold out here? When he finally ran out of tape, the others convinced him it was a good time to head back to town. By the way, yes, it was cold. In the four hours they spent out on the ice, the shelf of what appeared to be solid ice had grown an amazing twenty-five feet or so out toward the whale hole. If the cold kept up, they would be able to walk all the way out to the whales by tomorrow. But that begged the central question: just how long could the breathing holes stay open? In any case, it was time for these shivering humans to get back to town.
The return trip on the back of the snowmobiles was even colder than the ride out. But after all the excitement, enough adrenaline was circulating to keep their blood warm enough to manage the ride back without too much discomfort. After a chance to warm up and grab a bite to eat, Craig used Geoff’s office to notify the Coast Guard about the trapped whales and to see if they wanted to send someone out to see if they could think of any way to help them. The closest permanently manned Coast Guard office was 1,200 miles to the south in Anchorage. He and Geoff thought the whales could easily be freed if there were a ship in the area to break a path through the soft slushy ice. Maybe the Anchorage office could authorize one of its North Slope vessels to cut a quick channel from open water into the whales, which at that point was still less than a mile. They didn’t need a big ship; certainly nothing like an icebreaker. The ice was still slushy enough for any medium-size ship to do the job.
The biologists hoped their request would not be considered a big deal. Wednesday afternoon, they left a message with the Coast Guard duty officer who promised to pass it on. Later that night, a reporter named Susan Gallagher called the Coast Guard to see if anything newsworthy was going on. Gallagher was an Alaska night-beat reporter for the Associated Press. It was part of her job to phone the Coast Guard every night to find out if there were any late-breaking stories. The Coast Guard was constantly mounting search-and-rescue efforts to find lost or stranded hunters, whalers, adventurers, and who knows who else—especially late in the fall. But, a rescue effort for whales? That was a first. And within hours, the biggest rescue by humans of nonhumans in Alaska history—who knew, maybe even in all history—would be underway.
Gallagher dutifully took down the details as they were relayed to her by the Coast Guard duty officer and turned it into a nondescript, quick wire-service story. She couldn’t spend that much time on it as there were other, seemingly more important news—involving people—that had to get turned into copy before deadline. When the night editor of the Anchorage Daily News saw Gallagher’s story come across the wire, he decided to run it as a small item below the fold on the front page of Thursday morning’s edition. Six days after the whales were first discovered, a small story about them made page one—and with no pictures!
Lucky whales.
Gallagher wrote: “A trio of whales trapped by ice in the Arctic Ocean used two openings for life-saving air Wednesday as biologists sought help to free the animals. The three California gray whales apparently were swimming from the Beaufort Sea to their winter grounds off Mexico when they got caught in the ice east of Point Barrow a week ago, said Geoff Carroll, a biologist from the North Slope Borough. He said the whales’ movement kept open two holes in the ice, but those openings shrank as temperatures plunged and new ice formed. By Wednesday, when Barrow’s minus thirteen degrees set a record low for the date, the holes were 450 feet offshore.”
The chain reaction had begun. The next link in that chain was a television reporter at KTUU-TV, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage, named Todd Pottinger. Pottinger saw the front-page story in Thursday morning’s Anchorage Daily News as he got ready for work. Each day, work started with a morning assignment meeting that would determine which stories everyone was to cover in anticipation of that evening’s newscast. At the age of twenty-six, Pottinger had already been in the television news business long enough to know that whales always meant news. The minute he saw the story, he was sold. People loved whales. Whether they were beached, mating, or just swimming by, whales were always worth a segment—sometimes more—on the Anchorage evening news. The news director needed no convincing. Whales were sure, safe. It was Pottinger’s story to run with.
Pottinger flipped through his Rolodex for Oran Caudle’s phone number. Alaska was much too big for one local news agency to cover alone. Newspapers, wire services, and television stations rel
ied on freelance stringers across the state to report on the areas they couldn’t cover themselves. For TV stations looking for footage of any kind from Alaska’s North Slope, Oran Caudle was that man. He operated that region’s only modern television facility.
When Oran got to work that Thursday morning, a hand-scribbled message stating that Todd Pottinger from Anchorage had called was prominently placed on top of his desk. Oran was confused. He knew the whales would connect, but could Pottinger be calling about them already? How would he know about them? Oran himself had only just seen them the day before. No matter. Whenever anyone from Anchorage called, it was good news for Oran Caudle. It meant he had a chance to interact with someone in the state’s media capital, not to mention the opportunity to connect the North Slope Borough with the rest of the state. He watched Todd read the Anchorage news every night on TV up in Barrow and was proud to know him. The two were friendly and had worked together in the past. Part of Oran’s job was to assist outside television stations covering Barrow. While he was supposed to make sure that whatever coverage he helped outsiders collect would be favorable to the NSB, there was no real way to do that. Journalists were journalists; they report what they want. This wasn’t just a theory for Oran; he had been burned enough to know this to be the bitter truth. Barrow was too far for same-day delivery of the Anchorage Daily News, meaning he didn’t know yet that his whales were page-one news in the state’s most important city. Still, the instant he saw the message, he knew Pottinger had to have heard about the whales somehow.
One of Oran’s biggest frustrations running Barrow’s TV studio and production facility was that whenever he thought he had a big story, he had to go begging for his downstate contacts to consider it. The Anchorage and Fairbank TV stations only seemed interested in bad news from the North Slope—making them, in fact, no different at all from TV stations anywhere else. The bad-news stories from the Arctic usually fell in one of a few predictable categories: corruption, crime, alcoholism, bear attacks, or the weather. But for North Slope weather to make news in Alaska? Well, it had to be worse than bad. It had to be awful. And those were not the kind of stories that Oran could push anyway as the seventy-five-degrees-below story was not one local tourism folks were keen to publicize.
Sure enough, when Oran returned the call, Todd wanted to know if anyone had anything new to report on the stranded whales. Whale news was always good news. Pottinger wanted to find out more and hoped Oran could help. Not only did Caudle know all about the whales, he told Pottinger, he had just spent several hours filming them.
“You mean you’ve got video of them?” Todd Pottinger excitedly asked.
“You betcha,” Oran proudly answered, employing the ubiquitous Alaskan idiom.
“Can you wait just one second?” Pottinger asked, conveying his own excitement as he put Caudle on hold. Todd’s hunch paid off. Before Oran could collect his thoughts, Pottinger came back on the line asking how soon Oran could arrange a satellite transmission of some of that footage down to Anchorage. He knew Barrow was home to one of Alaska’s biggest white elephants, a highly sophisticated satellite-transmission facility that stood just south of the town’s runway—the only year-round transportation link in an ambitious billion-dollar state project to use some of the proceeds from the oil-rich 1970s to connect Alaska’s rural villages and settlements with the outside world. But like many other ill-conceived projects of that free-spending era, the transmission facility was rarely used. Although the giant satellite dishes constantly received transmissions, they rarely sent much.
Oran told Todd he wasn’t sure the “send” mode of the expensive system even worked. Caudle couldn’t recall ever having used it. To him it seemed like a fixture misplaced from a different decade in the frozen tundra. Todd urged him to get an answer back to him as quickly as possible. In the meantime, Pottinger adjusted KTUU’s satellite dish in Anchorage so it could receive a transmission from Barrow, should one be sent. Todd didn’t have time to wait for Oran to call back. If he wanted to try to get some footage for that night’s newscast with time to edit it, Pottinger needed to book thirty minutes on the satellite immediately. He called Alascom, the telecommunications company that owned the $100-million Aurora I satellite launched in October 1982. Aurora I orbited 22,500 miles above the Earth connecting the once isolated forty-ninth state with the rest of the world by telephone, radio, and television.
Pottinger scheduled the feed for Thursday, October 13, 1988, at 1:30 P.M., Alaska Standard Time. On behalf of his Anchorage station, KTUU, Pottinger agreed to the $500 satellite time fee whether or not Caudle could figure out how to transmit by then. Meanwhile, Oran Caudle sent his only technician back to the transmission shed to see if he could tune in the video test pattern Oran sent him from his studio to the transmission complex outside the NSB building complex. On the very first try—without any tweaking—the test pattern came in perfectly. Oran called Pottinger to tell him that things seemed all set.
“Oh, by the way,” Todd mentioned matter-of-factly before hanging up, “KING-TV in Seattle wants to downlink the feed for their news.” The Aurora I satellite was parked in geosynchronous Earth orbit 22,500 miles above the north Pacific—making Seattle the only city in the Lower 48 that was able to “see” the Aurora I. This meant that whenever someone in Alaska wanted to transmit or receive a signal from beyond the Pacific Northwest “gateway,” the signal had to be transferred—almost always in Seattle—to a different satellite. This was called “looping.” Even though looping added 45,000 miles to a picture’s journey, traveling at just below the 186,000 miles per second speed of light, this detour took less than half a second.
By the time all the arrangements were made, it was 11 A.M., leaving Oran Caudle only two hours to reduce the hours of whale footage shot yesterday down to a twenty-minute satellite-ready package. For a network news producer who did this kind of thing every day this would have been no big deal. But Oran Caudle was not a network news producer. He did not do this every day. To him it was a very big deal indeed.
A sudden fear seized Caudle. Could he do it? The footage he shot for local Barrow television was going not only to Anchorage, but also down to Seattle. He always wanted to work with real news professionals. Now he was getting a chance. Oran locked himself in the edit suite where he frantically fast-forwarded through two-and-a-half hours of videotape, screening it for the best shots.
The phone rang. It was Todd. He had called back to reassure Oran. When they last spoke, he had sensed Oran to be a bit on the nervous side. Todd told him to relax. No need to make every edit perfect, he said. That was a job for KTUU’s editors.
The task, when completed at 12:15 P.M., did not in hindsight appear so daunting. Now, Caudle needed step-by-step instructions on what to do next. He called Todd, who told him to put the edited cassette into the tape machine. Caudle waited for a pattern of color bars to appear on his screen accompanied by the familiar sound of the test tone. When it came through, he was looking at the picture coming back to him in Barrow from the Aurora I. Everything seemed to be working.
Todd Pottinger’s report that he saw the same thing at the same time on his monitor down in Anchorage confirmed that all systems were go. Patiently, Pottinger talked Oran through his first live television transmission. “Whenever you’re ready,” Todd said, “just hit the Play button and we’re in business.” Todd couldn’t believe how good the video was. The instant he saw the first shots of the whales, he knew this would be a big television story. He just had no idea how big.
Minutes later, KING-TV in Seattle called to tell Oran that NBC News was rushing to arrange an immediate transmission of Oran’s footage to New York. Something about Tom Brokaw wanting to run it on the NBC Nightly News. At their boss’ suggestion, Brokaw’s producers were always looking for a unique, visually appealing story to end the show. When the three trapped whales came up during Thursday morning’s conference call, NBC News bureau chiefs readily agreed with the Los Angeles bureau that if the video was any good
, the whales might make a good “kicker,” TV slang for the story that ends each newscast.
Oran could hardly believe what he was hearing: His story on NBC Nightly News? He was just glad Todd didn’t pass on that bit of news before they finished transmitting. He was already a nervous wreck. Now he was a speechless nervous wreck. It wasn’t so long ago that Caudle was covering local beauty pageants back in Commerce, Texas.
Thursday, October 16, 1988, at 12:30 P.M. Alaska Standard Time, the three frightened whales still concerned only a handful of people in a small Eskimo town straddling the top of the world. Hours later, 15 million Americans saw them for the first time. (Back in 1988, people actually watched the NBC Nightly News.) They watched as the whales gasped for air. It was a sudden and unexpected diversion from the day’s big news: the closing weeks of the 1988 presidential campaign between Republican Vice President George H. W. Bush and Democrat Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.
The moment the first image of a stranded whale appeared on a television screen at KING-TV in Seattle, no one could have imagined that days later, America would turn its attention away from its great quadrennial event and direct it instead toward the nonevent of three California gray whales trapped in frozen waters off the continent’s northernmost point.
But for those assigned to cover the story, it was even harder to prepare for the world they would soon enter, the world of Barrow, Alaska—a world like no other.
3
The Eskimos: 25,000 Years Below Zero Degrees
In 1826, an Arctic explorer named Thomas Elson took one of history’s great adventures. One day, while exploring Alaska’s northern coast, Elson took a step 25,000 years back in time. He stumbled upon a string of prehistoric Eskimo hunting settlements along the edge of the world’s northernmost periphery. What Elson did not know at the time was that he had discovered evidence of a people whose very existence defied human logic. These people not only managed to survive longer than any other known civilization, but they did so in the world’s harshest known environment, one where life itself seemed a miracle.
