Big Miracle

by Tom Rose

  For veteran CBS cameraman Bob Dunn, it was a chance to prove that not even his graying hair and expanding girth could stand in the way of his cherished bravado. Age and experience did little to temper Dunn’s need to stay true to his image. For several days, he pretended to be Inuit by adamantly refusing to wear gloves. Even several severely frostbitten fingers did not put a stop to Dunn’s crusade to win the “respect” of the locals. To protect him from himself, a group of Eskimo hunters gave Dunn a pair of polar bear-skin mittens. They did not want anyone to confuse their Arctic fortitude with Dunn’s lunacy.

  Those second-wave of reporters had commandeered the few available vans, trucks, and ski machines, so the rest had a tough time getting around. The need of so many people to get out to the whales, combined with their inability to do so, gave rise to another short-lived Arctic tradition: daily transport auctions. Ride seekers congregated early each morning outside the Top of the World Hotel and shouted their competing bids to Eskimos with ski machines and dogsleds for rides to the ice. The most enterprising locals could now fetch four hundred dollars each way. When the market finally stabilized after everyone seemed to be in it, the going rate settled at around two hundred dollars or one hundred fifty dollars in cash plus a fifth of liquor.

  But, as KTUU reporter Todd Pottinger could attest, the high price did not guarantee much. Once he paid top dollar for his crew and equipment only to be dumped unceremoniously in the middle of the street after the driver somehow managed to plow into one of the Arctic’s few telephone poles. Pottinger’s insistence on a refund met with an incredulous laugh.

  Anyone without two hundred dollars for the return trip found themselves unceremoniously stranded until Randy Crosby’s Search and Rescue helicopter could arrange to pick them up. Those who could shake off the night’s excess and get out of bed early enough stood shivering outside the SAR hangar for helicopter rides out to the whales.

  As the Barrow sled-ride market matured, different levels of service emerged. First class transport included sleds outfitted with polar-bear blankets and down sleeping bags. Economy passengers were lucky to wrap themselves in a bloodstained but warm caribou hide. Sometimes revolted passengers had to share return sled or ski machine rides with a dead walrus or seal. Even so, it was usually the reporter’s stench that outstank the dead animal’s.

  Just four days after the first nationwide broadcast on NBC, almost every newspaper in the United States had featured the whales on their front pages. All three networks carried daily updates from Barrow. The whales were becoming the biggest story in America. They were even competing with the final weeks of a torpid presidential election. Compounding the nonevent’s absurdity, reporters outside the United States suddenly found themselves assigned to cover the story. If it was news in America, then it must really be news.

  I was one of those reporters.

  Moments before I unexpectedly found myself on the way to cover the story, I was good-naturedly ribbing my friend and colleague Carolyn Gusoff, who soon become one of the most respected professionals in TV news, for her interest in the story. At 6:30 P.M. on Wednesday, October 19, just as my quick call with Gusoff ended, the phone rang again. It was Takao Sumii in New York, the president of NTV, then Japan’s largest private television network.

  At the time, I ran a small (meaning me) television news service called N.Y. News Corp. It offered custom television coverage of news events primarily for foreign broadcasters by lining up the necessary freelance production and reporting pieces on a contractor basis. Takao asked me how soon I could get a crew to Barrow and be able to transmit reports back to Japan. I had no idea and did not know what to say. For the previous two weeks I had been in bed attempting to recover from a nasty and lingering case of mononucleosis. I was barely well enough to go to the office let alone the North Pole. I stammered in my halting (and now completely forgotten) Japanese. I could hardly turn down a job with my best customer. I told him he could count on me and ended up working feverishly to make sure that in fact he could.

  Thus began my own frantic preparations to make my voyage to the Top of the World. Carolyn Gusoff had the last laugh; I was going to cover the whales. I told Sumii he could count on getting a transmission within twenty-four hours. It dawned on me as I hung up the phone that I had no idea what my first step should be. I vaguely remembered hearing NBC reporter Don Oliver refer to something called the “Top of the World” in one of his reports. When I did connect with someone there, they answered the phone by saying they had no rooms available. This was my introduction to Barrow. “Thanks for the calling the Top of the World; we are completely full.”

  I asked for the names of other hotels. The receptionist referred me to the only competition in town, the Airport Inn. By the time I reached the inn by phone, the hotel operator told me they, too, were full. I beseeched this second woman for help. Did she know any names? What about paying for sleeping in someone’s home? I needed some accommodation before I started hiring a crew. She gave me the name of a man called Rod Benson. His brother owned the Airport Inn and he might be able to help me out.

  I quickly made phone contact with Benson, who sounded like a very nice man. He told me we could stay with his family in his home for two hundred dollars per night. Unaware that the price he offered me was in fact a bargain, my response must have sounded quite ungrateful. Like everyone else, I had no choice. I asked him what we should know and what we should bring. His answer was a memorable one.

  “Everything is expensive and no one takes credit cards—that is what you should know,” he said directly but politely. “As for what you should bring: long johns and liquor.” He laughed.

  Twelve hours after getting that first call, I found myself in Anchorage, where I waited at the airport to meet the flight from Tokyo carrying Masu Kawamura, the NTV reporter assigned to story. He would be my boss while in Barrow. We decamped at the iconic Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage to await the arrival of my hired N.Y. News Corp. cameraman Steve Mongeau, who was due in early the next morning from Toronto.

  We were more worried about how to transport our liquor than we were about making sure we packed appropriate clothing. I spent about five hundred dollars on liquor from Alaska Distributors, a huge wholesale liquor warehouse and less than one hundred fifty dollars on boots that I thought would work in the coldest of climes. They were clearly better than low-top Nike, but my feet still got awful cold.

  The Friday-morning flight to Barrow from Anchorage was filled with reporters as well as the regulars: the oil professionals and roughnecks heading back to their shifts at the huge Prudhoe Bay facility, which was the flight’s second and primary destination. By this time, several of the oil companies had started their own remarkable involvement in what had already become a full-fledged rescue operation. I sat next to a early-middle-aged Inupiat woman with jet-black hair and deep-set brown eyes that rested atop prominent cheekbones. Her name was Brenda Itta, returning home to Barrow after participating in an Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) conference in Anchorage.

  This articulate woman was not at all upset about the coverage, but for the life of her, she couldn’t understand why her tiny frontier town had suddenly become the subject of such attention. She wished the whales well of course; everyone did. But why the big deal? Whales died back home all the time just as whales are born all the time there. It’s called wildlife, and in the Arctic there is so much of it, no one pays too much attention to individual wildlife. She couldn’t understand why they were more important than the AFN meeting she just attended or the North Slope Mayors’ Conference presently taking place in Barrow?

  Brenda Itta’s unknown world and its fascinating people had not as yet sparked much interest from the correspondents starting to straggle into Barrow. None of us came to Barrow to report on the story of this amazing town and its remarkable people. We came to tell the world about something that happened so often no one familiar with the phenomenon could understand our interest. The routine stranding of three whales under a p
atch of ice was about as newsworthy in and around the North Slope of Alaska as a deer hit by a truck on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. What made this stranding extraordinary was that nobody outside Barrow knew anything about whale strandings because they had never been seen before. But now, with a stranding just twenty miles from a state-of-the-art satellite uplink Earth station and broadcast production center, these whales’ story could be seen and heard by anyone with a television, anywhere in the world.

  Had the facility been located farther away, or had the whales been stranded just out of eyeshot, these whales would have met the same fate that befell untold dozens every year prior to 1988 and in every year since 1988. This brutal lesson of media obsessions was made all too tragically on Saturday night, October 22, 1988, during the height of the whale frenzy. Right across the street from the Barrow fire department, a small, poorly constructed driftwood house erupted in flames, killing three small children in the worst Barrow house fire in years. The Karluk Street fire station was empty that night. The men had gone home early for some much needed sleep—they were near exhaustion after working eighteen-hour days all week to help to save the whales.

  An electrical short in the bathroom started the fire which killed eight-year-old Delia Itta, her sister Irene, two, and their baby brother Miles Steven, ten months. No one in Barrow accused anyone of negligence. The house was a veritable fire trap. Once ignited, the wall’s combusted like dry tinder. The house was so quickly engulfed that even if the firemen had been on call and at their posts, there was very little chance they could have saved any, let alone all of the lives lost. The house contained neither smoke alarms nor adults at the time of the fire.

  That very night Barrow played host to the highest concentration of national and international journalists and television cameras, maybe in the world. Not a single mention of the tragic deaths of the three children was made in any of the whale stories prepared for broadcast that evening or the next, including my own.

  It wasn’t until the saga neared its conclusion that broader, more fundamental questions about the story’s real significance—that is, what was so important about a natural and not uncommon Arctic whale stranding—started to get asked. Did the naturally stranded whales deserve all the effort and attention they got? Was the coverage proportionate to the event? Little mention about our remarkable experiences in Barrow was made in our stories, packages, or dispatches. Then again, those were the days when reporters were not supposed to become subjects in their own stories. We were sent to cover the whale strandings. These were all good and important questions, but their asking would come later. In the meantime, our job was to cover the whales and their rescue.

  On the plane, Brenda spoke a good deal about her family’s history and the problems her Inupiat people were having coping with some of the challenges of modern life. Her people had a terrible problem with alcohol. Everyone knew that. Few tried to hide it. She didn’t strike me as terribly optimistic when asked about long-term prospects. The flight’s first stop was in Fairbanks, Alaska’s second city, roughly 450 miles north of Anchorage. As passengers deplaned, several commented on their reluctance to get off. It sounded to them as though the rest of us were headed into quite an adventure. Brenda commented in passing at her distaste for those who tried to smuggle liquor into Barrow, as if it didn’t have enough already. I nodded in agreement, hoping she had nothing to store in the overhead compartment above her, which was stocked with my own bootleg whiskey.

  Only then did it dawn on me that Rod Benson’s comment to me on the phone about making sure I brought alcohol was made more than in jest. Barrow was hooked. The whale extravaganza presented an unexpected opportunity to massively increase local illegal stocks and to make a killing in the process.

  It seemed like everyone brought booze. Others brought it for the same reason I did, to help them do their jobs in a strange town. It didn’t take long to realize why the Inupiats, and no small share of Anglos in Barrow either for that matter, had such a problem with alcohol. Two days after we arrived, we had the same problems; some would say even worse.

  Life in Barrow is about one thing: staying warm. We spent six to eight hours each day on the frozen windswept ice atop the frozen Arctic Ocean gathered around small holes that grew more crowded by the day. People drank in the morning before going out to the whales to get warm. When people weren’t fighting on the ice, we drank bourbon from each other’s flasks to stay warm. When we got back to town, people drank until they either went to bed or passed out. The mixed blessing of an irritable stomach allowed me to live my Barrow adventure pretty much alcohol free. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to drink much, it was that I couldn’t drink much then, or since.

  “It is too cold to be sober,” went a common refrain. The warmest buildings were rarely heated above fifty-five degrees in winter, because most people rarely took off their coats indoors. It would take some time before the visitors did take their coats off upon entering a home or building from the outside cold to keep the air inside their coats and close to their bodies warm.

  The novelty and excitement of our new universe was short-lived. The overwhelming oppressiveness of Barrow almost immediately started competing with the wonderment. We were suddenly in a dark, cold, and inebriated environment that challenged most of the laws thought to define normal human existence.

  Quick to sense a change in the attitudes, performance, and energy levels of their crews after in Barrow, the networks decided to start rotating crews in and out of town to make sure no one spent more than a week unrelieved. I wasn’t relieved and didn’t think myself at all unlucky. I not only endured, I loved it. This was no hardship. It was a blast. Besides, each swapped crew meant new people and new booze!

  Just like the Eskimos we simultaneously patronized and romanticized, too many of the traveling television bards adopted the worst of their ways with ease. Liquor jokes, liquor stories, liquor threats—they all became the shared metaphor of the media horde. First went our sobriety, then went our hygiene. We didn’t care much for our appearances—those of us who had a lifetime adjusting to our less-than-primetime looks had an easier time sliding into sloth than the on-air talent. The hassle and expense of hygiene was an annoyance to those not already preoccupied. It became a nightmare for those who were.

  My first morning in Barrow, after the ordeal of undressing the layers upon layers of clothing in a freezing bathroom, I looked forward to a long and lustrous hot shower. As I stepped in, it occurred to me that the tiny cloth on the towel rack was my towel. I almost decided not to take a shower at all. Why bother? But I got in and deeply breathed in the steam. More than the warmth, it was the moisture I longed for. Barrow was one of the driest spots on earth—a frozen desert. Its cold, dry air parched the throat and cracked even the toughest skin.

  My quick escape didn’t last long. It ended when the hot water suddenly turned ice cold. And I mean ICE cold. Rod was none too pleased with me, and this was his way of showing me that. Water, I did not then know, was far from the ubiquitous resource so taken for granted by Outsiders. In Barrow it was the most precious and expensive of resources strictly rationed by the North Slope Borough. Rod wanted me out of the shower. Shutting off the hot water worked like a charm. Any more long showers, he told me, and he would start up charging me for our water use.

  One of Rod’s neighbors got a big laugh out of his ability to sell five-minute showers for fifty dollars. He claims people paid it. Who knows? Those of us unwilling or unable to afford what we previously thought to be normal use of indoor plumbing learned quickly to adapt. When in Barrow do as Barrowans does. These indignities were hardly indignant in the end. We did have indoor plumbing after all.

  Certainly a far cry from the manner in which many Arctic peoples’ still heard “nature’s call.” It wasn’t just the twenty-five degrees below zero temperatures. It certainly wasn’t the fear of being seen. It wasn’t even the danger of freezing exposed and sensitive body parts. It was the damned dogs.

  Our firs
t night in Barrow saw those of us from N.Y. News Corp. and NTV gathered around Rod Benson’s Formica bar for a late-night bull session. Rod played the fine host and basked in our excitement at finding ourselves in his world; a world we did not even know existed twenty-four hours earlier. The heavy smell of scotch and stale cigarette smoke permeated the cold, dry air. Rod got up and announced he needed a few moments but would be right back.

  On the way out the door, he picked up a roll of toilet paper together with a thick wooden stick that were resting together on an old metal chair. As soon as the door slammed behind him, the sounds of excitedly barking sled dogs shattered the quiet of the Arctic night. Not sixty seconds later, Rod, his aplomb perfectly intact, was back in his house comfortably seated. What was all the racket? we asked. He just smiled. Soon enough we would find out for ourselves he promised. Whether or not Rod really needed to go, or was just having fun at our expense, we will likely never know and it is just as well.

  The barking dogs were the omnipresent sound of Barrow. Whenever one was outside, no matter the time of day or night, barking and howling dogs could always be heard, either close by or in the distance. But they were always there. They were Alaskan sled dogs, much closer in temperament and genetics to wolves than to dogs. These were work dogs, not pets. They were an incredibly tough breed of dog reared especially to pull heavy sleds in the Arctic. They lived outside year-round. They were everywhere. They weren’t wild dogs; they were owned work dogs. Yet they seemed to roam the town at will. Knowing that the hungrier they are the better they perform, sled dogs are purposely underfed by their owners. Consequently, they are constantly on the prowl for supplemental nourishment.

  Human scent often means a dog’s next meal—one way or another. Their keen sense of smell could easily locate someone attempting to relieve himself outdoors and track even the most well-hidden person at his most vulnerable moment. Almost the instant a person reached for his trousers, packs of canines were barking madly as they raced toward their victim.