Big Miracle

by Tom Rose

  When it came to her own life, Cindy was no martyr. After working long weeks on the Bristol Bay lease sale, she intended to take the rest of the week off. Nothing could spoil the hard-earned and long-planned weekend with Kevin she had already postponed several times. Thursday morning, October 13, Cindy Lowry slept in. Figuring she wouldn’t miss the paper she referred to as “The Anchorage Daily Snooze,” Kevin took that morning’s edition with him to his office. While he casually glanced at the front page, one headline caught his eye. It read “Ice Traps Three Gray Whales.” He decided against calling Cindy who he hoped was still sleeping after her busy week. Stage-managing raucous publicity stunts was exhausting work.

  A local Anchorage reporter named Jeff Berliner wasn’t so thoughtful. He woke Cindy up at home to ask what she knew about the three whales. To the Alaska press corps, Cindy’s phone was referred to as “enviro quote.” Whenever reporters needed a source to quote on an environmental issue, Cindy would always oblige them, whether or not she knew any more than they did.

  Jeff’s call was the first instance she heard about the stranded whales. If Cindy didn’t know, Berliner told himself, maybe it wasn’t a story. Cindy thanked Jeff for the call and promised to get back to him as soon as she found out anything. The instant she hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was Geoff Carroll calling from Barrow. The biologist figured that if anyone could help him help the whales, it was Alaska’s most famous whale hunter. Cindy Lowry was his man.

  All Geoff knew for sure about the whales was that they were California grays. He didn’t know their sex or ages although one was a baby and the other two seemed to be adolescents. Geoff told Cindy that unless a path through the ice could be cut to the open water, the whales would die. Any ship with a strong, steel reinforced bow could probably do the job, he told her. The night before, the two biologists spent hours on the phone asking Coast Guard personnel around the country for help.

  At the time, the United States Coast Guard only had two icebreakers on active duty, a fact Alaskans knew well. Many had long argued unsuccessfully for more. Neither of the ships were available to help the biologists. One ship, the Polar Star, was limping its way through the seventeen-foot-high ice floes to clear a commercial path through the Northwest Passage, while the other, the Polar Sea, was undergoing extensive repairs in its Seattle drydock.

  Whale strandings were common in Alaska. When whales were imperiled near Anchorage, Cindy always tried to help. So did lots of folks. In fact, the last time whales became stranded nearby, Cindy and her dog, Denali, were almost killed trying to save them. That August, a group of Beluga whales beached themselves just south of Anchorage. They were exposed and helpless on the mudflats of Turnagain Arm, the body of water to the south of Anchorage. The Arm was known for its immense tidal surges called bore tides. Unlike regular tides that gradually ebb and flow, bore tides formed high-crested walls of water that moved at up to thirty miles an hour.

  The group of whales Cindy was trying to help had become stranded by a bore tide, finding themselves trapped on the Arm’s mudflats. Cindy knew that if they were not helped immediately, the whales would die before the next tide could bring the sea back in to save them. Before launching her own private rescue, Cindy reported the stranded whales to the Anchorage office of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). NMFS was the federal agency responsible for enforcing the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, passed by the U.S. Congress primarily to help endangered whales like those stranded on the Turnagain mudflats and, later, the three trapped whales in Barrow. Even though NMFS didn’t help her as much as she would have liked, Cindy obeyed the law requiring citizens to report stranded animals.

  NMFS employees took emergencies reported by Cindy Lowry with a grain of Greenpeace salt. “It’s her again,” they seemed to lament. “It’s that crazy but lovable environmentalist again.” She constantly cried “stranding.” If NMFS responded every time, they would exhaust their annual rescue budget in the first quarter of the year. They told her there was nothing they could do for the beluga whales stranded on Turnagain Arm. If they were going to be saved, Cindy Lowry would have to do it herself.

  Stranded out on the flats, dry skin was the biggest danger the whales faced. To a person, dry skin meant minor irritation easily alleviated by applying moisturizing cream. To a whale, it meant death. Without water to cool their warm-blooded bodies, the whales would overheat and die. Cindy called her surprised boyfriend at work and told him she needed him to help her scoop water from tidal pools over the stranded whales.

  Kevin was mortified. Was he hearing this suicidal suggestion from the woman he loved? A woman he knew to lovably nuts, but thought possessed some sanity? Anyone foolish enough to ignore the huge red danger signs warning people to stay off the mudflats stood a good chance of miring themselves so deep they couldn’t get out. The mudflats were more dangerous than quicksand. The more you resisted, the deeper and firmer the mud would clutch you. If the mud did not pull you all the way under, you could watch until the incoming tide consumed you in a wall of water.

  With the elections coming up, this was Kevin’s busy season. Kevin was—you’ll never guess—a political consultant for liberal Democrats! But Kevin was more level-headed than Cindy, more practical. Then again, so were most people. He didn’t want Cindy to become Greenpeace’s latest martyr. After repeated but unsubstantiated assurances that she wouldn’t take any unnecessary chances, Cindy still could not convince Kevin the whales were worth the risk. Only when she threatened to go alone did he relent.

  Like ice strandings in the Arctic, tide strandings of the kind Cindy and Kevin were now witnessing were natural and common occurrences. But their routineness did nothing to quench Cindy’s zeal. She loved animals. An animal in distress meant distress for Cindy. Before he could unfasten his seat belt, Kevin found himself screaming at Cindy out his open window. Seconds earlier, Cindy and her dog bolted out the open door and onto the deceptively solid floor of the arm. In his haste to urge them back to safety, Kevin banged his head on the window frame.

  Just a few hundred feet out on the dry waterway, Cindy screamed for help. Like a stealthy predator, the oozing mud grabbed Cindy’s left leg and pulled her deathward. Between her frantic cries for help, Cindy desperately tried to reassure her dog, Denali, who was fighting his own losing battle against the deadly flats.

  Sinking against the encroaching and unmistakable sounds of the fast-approaching bore tide, Cindy and her dog didn’t know what to do. Her final solace was knowing that her death would mean life for the beached whales.

  The last thing Kevin Bruce wanted was to be eulogized as the “horn-rimmed hero.” Vaulting across the protective guard rail, he bounded onto the flats in a daring effort to save Cindy and her dog. Finally reaching them, Kevin wisely ignored Cindy’s appeals to help her dog first. In just three minutes, the mud had already pulled Cindy waist deep. Cindy and her dog watched the wall of water threaten to consume them.

  But Kevin turned his back, concentrating instead on pulling Cindy to safety. When she was free, she grabbed Denali by the scruff of his neck and pulled him out of the thick mud with one hard yank. They sprinted back to the shore. When they reached it, the water turned from demon to savior. They cheered as it rushed over the whales.

  When she heard about the whale stranding in Barrow, Cindy immediately thought they must be beached like the belugas in Turnagain Arm. Until it was explained to her, she could not understand what Craig and Geoff meant when they talked about “shore ice,” “open leads,” and the need for icebreakers. The Arctic seemed as remote to Cindy in Anchorage as to anyone in the Lower 48.

  By the close of business Thursday, October 13, Cindy did not know nearly enough to mount an effective campaign to save the Barrow whales. But by the time Kevin got home, something told him that his long-awaited weekend would go the way of all the others. That something was the look on Cindy’s face. The seeds for still another mission of mercy had been firmly planted in her. This was just the sort of c
risis Cindy lived for and just what Kevin feared. Cindy loved Kevin, but truth be told, she loved whales more. He knew it. She knew it. Everyone knew it. Every time he started to think otherwise, there was another stranding to remind him.

  At 6 A.M. Friday morning, Cindy’s phone rang. It was Geoff Carroll in Barrow. After apologizing for waking her up, he told Cindy that the local television cameraman’s footage appeared just hours before on the NBC Nightly News. The three stranded whales were a national story. Cindy Lowry was in business.

  She jumped out of bed and into the shower. Before she could finish rinsing the shampoo out of her hair, the phone rang again. It was her boss, Campbell Plowden, from Greenpeace’s Washington office. He coordinated all the organization’s whale activities. While he did not see the NBC report himself, he heard about it and wanted to know if Cindy thought Greenpeace could play any kind of role. Plowden would leave the decision in Cindy’s hands. If she could justify a realistic effort to help rescue the stranded whales, Greenpeace would pay the bill.

  Plowden knew the International Whaling Commission’s rules on the subsistence hunt allowed the Eskimos to kill any whales they could catch even though they ate only bowhead. He was afraid the Eskimos might claim the whales before anyone tried to rescue them. He wanted Cindy to find out if there were any plans to kill the whales to fill their quota.

  In his long fight against subsistence whaling, Campbell Plowden knew as much as anyone about the practice and thought it awful. The ardent whale advocate knew the Eskimos were not subsistence hunters at all. He was right. Missile launchers, time-released bombs, and outboard motors did not bear much resemblance to pre-modern whaling. Plowden couldn’t understand how Barrow with its $80-million high school and $400-million Utilidor water system could even be allowed to call itself a “subsistence village.” As for Barrowans, they couldn’t grasp how a highly paid K Street liberal lobbyist 7,000 miles away in Washington, D.C., got off trying to tell them how they could and could not live their lives.

  Cindy called Geoff and Craig back and asked them if they knew of any local plans to harvest the three whales. The biologists confessed that even if there were plans, they would likely hear nothing of them. Barrow’s newcomers often charged the locals with furtively keeping to themselves, particularly when dealing with one with environmental leanings.

  The IWC delegated authority to regulate the local hunt to its local subsidiary, the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC). Craig called the AEWC office in Barrow to see if there was any talk of harvesting the trapped whales. Craig learned that yes, in fact, there was such interest. A few local captains had asked for permission to harvest them. A meeting was scheduled for 7:30 P.M. Saturday October 15, in a classroom at Barrow High School to hear the request.

  Craig was surprised. After three days with the stranded whales, he couldn’t help but feel attached to the helpless giants. These creatures had struggled against fantastic odds to survive as long as they had. His boss always reminded him never to get emotionally involved. Why did he feel so attached to three whales foolish enough to strand themselves under the growing Arctic ice? Craig knew that if presented with data on the stranding in the abstract, he would say the whales’ death was a good thing: natural selection, survival of the fittest, a cleansing of the gene pool. But knowing the whales as well as he did, Craig suffered with them. He wasn’t thrilled with a thought of a few greedy hunters harvesting three whales that no one wanted or would use.

  Craig called Cindy and told her that the whales’ fate would be decided at a special meeting the next night in Barrow. Cindy was on the move again. The national interest in the whales could only improve their chances, she reassured Craig. She told him to tell NBC’s Don Oliver about the meeting. Maybe he would cover it. It was the same tactic human rights campaigners used to aid political prisoners in repressive lands, Cindy explained. The more people on the Outside who knew about the whales, the more pressure they could put on the Eskimos to spare them.

  Rarely did such meetings deny whalers permission to harvest. Cindy and her allies had less than twenty-four hours to mount a campaign effective enough to block the Eskimos. If the committee voted to approve the request, the whales would be killed the next afternoon, right after church. The defiant whalers didn’t yet understand the power of a few Outside television cameras. The Outsiders were always giving Barrowans a hard time about their whaling. What business was it of theirs anyway? In fact, if the meeting went as planned, some whalers would probably offer to take Dan Oliver and Russ Weston on their ski machines to film the kill.

  Since she planned to take the rest of the week off, Cindy arranged to remodel Greenpeace’s Anchorage office. They were busy with buzz saws and power drills and she couldn’t get any work done there even if she wanted to. She holed herself up in Kevin’s H Street condo and started working the phone. The simplest way to free the whales was to have a ship come in and break the ice. Campbell Plowden told her he would try to find an icebreaker from Washington while she should use her Alaska contacts.

  She called Alaska Governor Steve Cowper’s Juneau office. Cindy called the governor’s deputy chief, David Ramseur. Sometimes he helped, more often he didn’t. Cindy voiced an impassioned appeal as she told Ramseur the story of the trapped whales. Environmental activism was a lot like sales. Cindy had to convince the people in power that taking action was worth the investment in political capital.

  She enticed Ramseur with some tempting political bait. If the governor could use his influence to get the Coast Guard to dispatch an icebreaker to Barrow, Cindy promised that the first-term Democrat would win brownie points from Alaska’s small but noisy environmental crowd. Ramseur was unmoved after listening to Cindy’s offer. “What do you want us to do?” he asked. “I’m not interested and the governor’s not interested.”

  From previous dealings with the governor’s top aide, Cindy knew Ramseur had an impatient streak that didn’t mix well with her hunger for action. Instead of trying to reason with him, Cindy upset him more by barking back. While her mind told her that aggravating him was counterproductive, she went on. She knew she had lost this round. Cindy promised Ramseur she would find other means to save the three whales. Ramseur didn’t want Cindy to hang up mad. He offered to listen with so long as neither he nor the Governor could be used to lure others into promising help.

  Cindy’s phone rang again. It was the wife of an oil executive who made Cindy promise never to identify her. Cindy jokingly called her “Jane Whale.” Ms. Whale asked if she knew anything about those whales that appeared on NBC News the night before. When Cindy said she knew quite a lot about the whales, Jane Whale was thrilled.

  “You see,” she said, “I know a way we can get them out.” Cindy’s back straightened as she pressed the phone closer to her ear. The woman on the other end of the line said she knew Pete Leathard, the president of VECO, Inc., Alaska’s largest oil construction company which had a huge operation at Prudhoe Bay. Jane told Cindy that Leathard saw Brokaw’s broadcast the night before and was so moved by the pictures of the whales that he wanted his company to help save them.

  “How can he help us?” Cindy asked, unable to disguise her contempt. Why would an oilman, the enemy and her moral inferior, be interested in helping three trapped whales. Only her likes were enlightened enough to love animals. It must be a stunt, a hoax, or a PR ploy, thought the master of PR ploys.

  “No, no,” the woman tried to reassure her. “Leathard’s serious.”

  Jane told Cindy that VECO owned an ice-breaking hoverbarge built to supply construction materials to build offshore oil rigs in the Arctic. For all the accepted wisdom about the oilman’s greed, little attention was paid to the risk that same man was willing to take to provide more oil to an expanding industrial economy. Unlike in warmer climes, drilling offshore in the Arctic is only possible during the short summer season when the ice cap thaws enough to even permit exploratory drilling, with the average cost of each sunk well—successful or dry—about $200 millio
n.

  Mukluk Island was just such an example. In 1984, amid predictions of a great discovery, three oil companies joined forces to build the only platform then stable enough to withstand the shifting ice and harsh winds of the frozen Arctic Ocean. The hoverbarge supplied materials used to build Mukluk Island, a man-made gravel island in the middle of the Beaufort Sea. At the time, Mukluk Island was the biggest and most expensive oil rig ever built, costing nearly $2 billion. All they struck was seawater. Its failure marked the end of North Slopes drilling activity for nearly two decades.

  The $4-million hoverbarge commissioned to manage the ill-fated enterprise was but a rounding error of the dry well. Leathard was sure the barge could cut through Barrow’s ice. It was designed to float on a cushion of air and to break through the thick ice by displacing water under it. Since it was of no use, Leathard thought VECO’s chairman and founder Billy Bob Allen wouldn’t object to lending it to the rescuers in Barrow.

  If Allen had any doubts, Leathard thought he could assuage them by pointing to the national news coverage of the story, guaranteeing VECO some exposure. The “industry,” needed positive publicity. An oil company helping rescue three stranded whales was like money in the bank. Leathard was convinced the hoverbarge would work and was determined to prove it.

  Jane Whale told Cindy that all Leathard needed was a helicopter powerful enough to pull the 200,000-pound barge out of its frozen berth. The barge sank a few feet deep into the thawed permafrost during the Arctic summer, freezing it deeper into the ground each winter. Cindy’s contact needed help locating a helicopter suitable for towing the barge 270 miles northwest to where the whales were stranded.

  “The only type of helicopter that can pull a load that big is the Skycrane,” she said. “A Sikorsky CH-54 Skycrane.”