Big Miracle

by Tom Rose

  The helicopters increased power until, straining against the cables, the barge crept out of its last hole and started slowly sliding across the jumbled ice. The colonel and his men felt a brief flicker of hope. Maybe this would work. Their raised expectations were quickly dashed. No sooner had the barge started on its hopeful journey before it crashed back through the ice. It was the same old story, smooth sailing for five hundred yards followed by another setback.

  “It’s no use,” radioed pilot Gary Quarles. “I’m begging off this one. It’s just not going to work.”

  The colonel was disappointed but not surprised. In fact, he felt a certain relief. The heavy burden placed on his shoulders five days earlier was finally lifted. His men and the crews from VECO had done everything they could to move the barge. Nothing would work. The task was too daunting. General Schaeffer couldn’t ask any more. No one could. He took risks, but limited them so that none of his men or equipment would be exposed to any unnecessary danger. Sure the media would point their fingers his way. But as the commanding officer, he was prepared to take the heat. It was his job. He had no problem taking all the credit a few days earlier. Now the tables had turned.

  When Ron Morris got word that the barge was a lost cause, he ordered Arnold Brower Jr. and his Inuit crews to cut as many of their new holes as they could. It was too late to call off the rescue now. The whole world was watching. The whales had to be saved.

  Cindy Lowry couldn’t hold back her tears when she heard the double pull had failed. She watched Bone grow weaker with each passing breath. The new holes were wide enough and long enough for the three whales, but for a reason no one understood, they would not use them.

  By noon on Wednesday, October 19, day four of Operation Breakout, the Eskimos had cut a chain of fifteen holes stretching a quarter mile toward the open water lead five miles away. The thirty-foot-high pressure ridge separating the whales from the open water that meant freedom still loomed on the horizon. But for now, the rescuers concentrated on getting the whales moving in the right direction. They would worry about the pressure ridge when and if the whales ever got there. The difference between the high-tech means used to move the barge and the low-tech means the Eskimos used to cut through the ice wasn’t lost on Colonel Carroll. The barge was a failure while the chain-sawed holes seemed promising though still untested.

  Cindy called Campbell Plowden at the Greenpeace office in Washington to discuss alternatives to the hoverbarge. Plowden was one of the foremost whale advocates in the world; surely he would have a suggestion or two. At the beginning of the conversation Plowden apologized for the difficulty she had reaching him. Greenpeace had to hire eight temporary employees at the height of the Barrow rescue just to answer telephone calls from thousands of people around the world.

  Plowden suggested Cindy get in touch with a person who had been calling the Greenpeace office for days with an unusual offer of help. He was a man named Jim Nollman and he called himself an “interspecies communicator.” Nollman said he could coax the whales out of the original holes by playing back recordings of other whales with special underwater sound equipment. Cindy had heard plenty about Jim Nollman and not much of it was good, but she figured she didn’t have a choice. As far as she knew, Nollman was the only person in North America who had sound equipment capable of functioning in the Arctic. She accepted his offer of help and asked him to come to Barrow, promising to pay his expenses.

  Thin-blooded to begin with, Cindy couldn’t stay out on the ice for more than a few minutes before she started shivering uncontrollably. It took weeks for her teeth to stop aching from all the chattering. Her poor footwear held up so poorly she spent half her time lifting a leg off the bone-chilling ice and shaking it to circulate the blood in her numbed feet. Had she not refused to wear animal fur, most of Cindy’s physical suffering could have been avoided. She could freeze to death with a clean conscience.

  She and Craig walked back to the meager warmth of a small portable hunting shack constructed at the tip of the sandbar to give the Barrow whale rescuers a respite from the inescapable cold of the windswept ice. The tiny hut stood like a beacon at the edge of North America, a hundred feet from where the continent slipped beneath the frozen Arctic Ocean.

  When they pushed open the hut’s flimsy door, Cindy and Craig were welcomed by several friendly Eskimos taking a break in the cramped but relatively warm quarters. They offered the two visitors Styrofoam cups of piping hot coffee which they both gladly accepted. Cindy noticed the uncut chunks of muktuk that the resting crew chewed on as high-energy snacks. She wanted to ask them how they could eat whale meat at the same time they were working so hard to save the three whales stranded just a few hundred feet away.

  For the Eskimos, the answer was simple. The creatures they were working so hard to save were not whales they depended on. The Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow ate bowhead, not gray whales. It was their very dependence on the whale that led Malik, Arnold Jr., and now dozens of other Inuit volunteers to come out and help the troubled grays. Inuit tradition revered whales.

  Before heading back to the ice, they asked Cindy if she wanted something to eat. In addition to whale meat, the shack was stocked with walrus, seal, even some polar bear meat. When she said she didn’t eat meat, they offered her raw fish instead. After having stood out in the freezing cold all morning, she was so hungry that it sounded tempting. As long as it wasn’t meat, Cindy would gladly eat it.

  “Here, dip it in some Eskimo butter,” said the Inupiat worker who handed her a piece of frozen fish on a toothpick. She quickly plunked the fish into the yellow odorless liquid and popped it into her mouth. The instant her taste buds registered the unusually pungent flavor, she gagged and wretched uncontrollably. Cindy’s unprepared palate was in violent revolt. When she regained control, she lamely looked up at the concerned workers and asked exactly what it was that stopped just short of making her vomit.

  “Probably the butter,” came one guess.

  “What’s wrong with butter?” Cindy asked to a chorus of laughs.

  “You see,” said one Eskimo, “it’s not your kind of butter.”

  “Well, then, what kind is it?” Cindy asked impatiently.

  “It’s from seals,” the man answered quietly. “It is seal oil. We call it Eskimo butter.”

  That was all the explanation Cindy needed. She shuddered in disgust and walked back out into the cold.

  In the twelve days since the three gray whales were first discovered, the scene on the ice changed dramatically. It was almost unrecognizable from the time Craig, Geoff, and Billy Adams, their Inuit guide, first went to verify the reports that three whales were stranded off the end of the Point Barrow sandspit. That cold October Tuesday, the three men saw three whales struggling aimlessly against the uncaring force of Arctic nature. The landscape was bleak and gray. There wasn’t a soul within ten miles of the six creatures. The three men never dreamed they could save the whales. The most they hoped to accomplish was to study them until they died. Maybe they could publish a study in a marine biology journal.

  Now, the most distant edge of North America had become the center of the media world. Heavy traffic traveled on the glassy smooth ice of the frozen lagoon whose western boundary was marked by the sandbar. A tiny corner of an endless, silent and motionless universe suddenly became an oasis of noise and activity. Speeding helicopters broke the hush by buzzing continuously over the increasingly crowded whale site. What started as three men visiting a like number of whales clinging to a lone hole, became hundreds of people surrounding dozens, and soon hundreds of freshly cut holes that would eventually stretch seven miles toward the western horizon.

  Until the Exxon Valdez spill six months later, the October whale rescue was the single biggest media event in the history of the state. The hundred and fifty journalists assigned to Barrow formed the largest press contingent ever to invade any part of Alaska for any reason. But of all the places in the Last Frontier, reporters chose to gather themselves and
their expensive technology around a few tiny man-made ice holes at the top of the world, the most remote edge of America’s most remote state. At the rescue’s height, there was one reporter for every seventeen residents of Barrow.

  14

  Barrow: Frostbite for the Big Time

  Within a few days of the president’s call to Colonel Tom Carroll, at least twenty-six broadcasting companies from four continents were transmitting their version of events from the overworked control room in Oran Caudle’s studio. Less than a week earlier, the facility had never before been used to transmit. Its huge white satellite dishes stood as a powerful testament to money many Alaskans thought poorly spent.

  Now Oran’s facility transmitted footage of the whales almost twenty-four hours a day, to every corner of the globe. Suddenly, Barrow was the most glamorous byline in all the world. Vendors from across the state flew into Barrow to start hawking their wares. T-shirts of many different designs each proclaimed their own version of the same theme: I’M SAVING THE WHALES.

  Pepe’s Mexican restaurant had to open earlier in the morning and close later at night to accommodate the several hundred Outsiders with no place else to eat. Fran Tate, the owner, was no stranger to national media exposure. She courted it at every opportunity. The mere fact that she owned a Mexican restaurant within striking distance of the North Pole landed her on the set of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal long before any reporters bothered to come to Barrow. Fran Tate insisted the increased hours were for the convenience of the press, but the skeptical media suspected that she would stay open as long as she could to charge her customers what they considered outrageous prices.

  Harry Chittick thought the fact that Pepe’s could charge twenty dollars for their greasy version of a hamburger and get away with it was as newsworthy as anything happening out on the ice. He was right. The ABC News producer wanted to get a sound-bite from one of the out-of-town media while he was paying his oversized bill. Chittick’s cameraman readied himself right by the cashier. When CBS cameraman Pete Dunnegan paid his bill at the cash register, Chittick’s videographer recorded Dunnegan turning to the camera, sticking a toothpick in his mouth, and shrugging. “Twenty-one bucks for a cup of coffee, hmphhh,” he said, scratching his head. “Must have been the extra sugar.” That humorous sound-bite closed that night’s ABC’s World News Tonight broadcast.

  It was also the perfect close to Pepe’s culinary career for Pete Dunnegan. Fran Tate was livid when she saw his quip on her TV. At dinnertime, she cut Dunnegan off at the door. In front of his colleagues, she told him never to set foot in her restaurant again. Dunnegan happily obliged. He was the envy of the press corps. The rest of us had no choice but to suffer Pepe’s gastrointestinal consequences. The more Barrow and the three whales made news in the United States, the more interest foreign broadcasters showed in reporting the story themselves. In the two days following the president’s call to Colonel Carroll, British, Australian, and Canadian television crews arrived in Barrow, adding further bait to the fever-pitched frenzy at the top of the world.

  But most intrigued by the whale story were the Japanese. By the time the rescue reached its crescendo, three of the four national networks had crews in Barrow. They marveled at America’s latest bizarre obsession. They were less interested in Bone and its skinless nose than they were in people like Cindy Lowry, who cared so much about the tasty creatures. They wanted to explore what it was about three whales that could so completely unite almost everyone in a nation as huge and diverse as the United States.

  Takao Sumii, the president of the Japanese NTV network phoned me the evening following President Reagan’s call. It was Wednesday, October 19, day twelve for the stuck whales, and day five for Operation Breakout. He tried to explain what it was about the American media his network was seeking to cover. I may have been a journalist, but I was also a TV viewer. I could see the emotional pull of the story although I couldn’t figure out the dynamics of its rise in prominence or urgency. To me, it seemed like the story from Barrow started out about whales but evolved into one about the media. Only after I arrived in Barrow did I begin to understand how true that was.

  On the MarkAir flight from Anchorage to Barrow, Masu Kawamura, the NTV correspondent, told me my job was to report on the media’s coverage of the event, to give the Japanese viewer a sense of the episode’s absurdity. Like other Americans, I guess I wanted the whales saved but didn’t lose too much sleep about it. Not knowing any of the background or complexities that led up to the rescue, I was no more or less interested than the next person. It was that widespread attachment and fondness for the endangered animal that created the story in the first place. I watched anxiously as the whales slipped closer toward what looked to be an inevitable, pathetic death. Knowing nothing about the Arctic and its conditions, I cursed that damned colonel who the networks said was the one who couldn’t get the barge to Barrow. I was exactly what the Japanese assigned me to analyze.

  In Japan, whale meat was an age-old delicacy. The Japanese wondered what it was about the tasty mammals that seemed to so strongly touch the hearts of Westerners. They resented the international pressure that forced them to pretend to have ceased commercial whaling. Far from stopping their slaughter of the great creatures, the Japanese just put a new, benign name on it and went right on whaling.

  The 1986 International Whaling Commission convention banned what was left of commercial whaling for five years. As signatories, the Japanese faced economic sanctions if they didn’t comply. The Japanese proposed a compromise. Norway, Iceland, Japan, and the Soviet Union would agree to give up commercial whaling if they could continue to hunt whales for “scientific purposes.” Fearing no accord at all, other IWC agreed.

  Before the ink had even dried, the demand for whales within the Japanese “scientific community” skyrocketed. Japanese “scientists” discovered they needed 1,100 “samples.” But no one knew what it was these “scientists” wanted to “study.” Roughly the same number of whales could now be killed for scientific purposes after the moratorium as were killed for culinary purposes before the moratorium. Call it “culinary science,” perhaps?

  Japanese “scientists” bought whale carcasses from domestic sources as well as Norwegian and Icelandic whalers. When the scientists completed their “research,” they sold the carcasses back to the whalers who then resold them to Japanese food wholesalers. To the Japanese and other clear thinkers, this whale rescue made little sense. How were these three stuck whales different than three stuck Texas shorthorns? Why not just sell the whales to Japan and make some money rather than spending money to save livestock that were meant to be harvested in the first place?

  When we arrived and were met by Rod Benson, he tossed our bags into the snow-filled bed of his natural gas-powered Chevy pickup, and drove us straight out to the whales. We were several hundred yards out to sea before I even realized we were driving on the ocean. That’s right. Driving a Chevy on the Arctic Ocean.

  After traveling from New York, Toronto and Tokyo, the first thing any of us saw at the top of the world was a strange smiling man sitting in a canvas director’s chair at the edge of an ice hole in the middle of the frozen Arctic Ocean. He was singing a strange chant he said was destined for the whales that were nowhere to be seen, deep underwater. Trying to escape his rhapsody, I started thinking maybe Masu Kawamura, our Tokyo correspondent, was right. Was Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole really that far-fetched?

  We were then introduced to Geoff and Craig, who were busy calming Cindy after an unexplained altercation with Jim Nollman, the interspecies communicator. What I didn’t know at the time was that Cindy was arguing with Nollman about his insistence on playing South African guitar music instead of the whale sounds he promised her from Seattle.

  Then, standing on the edge of the ice hole, I was struck with an unexplained, stinging pain, first in my left eye, and then, seconds later, in my right. It felt like a sharp object was cutti
ng through my closed eyes. I knew it must have had something to do with my contact lenses but I couldn’t get at them. My eyelids were frozen. In the instant it took to blink, the tiny droplets of condensation at the edge of my lashes froze my eyelids together, closing my eyes. My contact lenses had frozen to my eyes and my eyelids were stuck together. I hadn’t even been out on the ice for five minutes. Sensing my disorientation, an Eskimo walked over and helped me to his idling car. My eyes quickly defrosted. I thanked him profusely and wore my glasses for the rest of the trip. Acts of extraordinary kindness were the rule, not the exception, in Barrow.

  Rod Benson dropped us off at the Top of the World Hotel so we could check in with our NBC associates. They were NTV’s American network partner. I introduced myself to NBC producer Jerry Hansen. With a smile, he assured me our trip to Barrow would be a memorable one. Delighted to get it off his hands, he playfully tossed me the keys to a battered old Chevy Suburban NBC rented earlier in the week. “It’s all yours,” he said with obvious relief. No matter how bad it might have been, I said to myself, it certainly seemed more inviting than spending several hours a day hanging onto the back of a speeding dogsled in windchill temperatures dipping to minus one hundred fifty degrees.

  Jerry gave me the standard instructions. “Never turn it off, and fill it up every night.” There was only one gas station within 100,000 square miles. That, combined, with the Suburban’s poor gas mileage made it a good bet I would remember where it was. What Jerry neglected to tell me was never to put the automatic transmission into “park.” On only our third day in Barrow, the truck’s frozen transmission died halfway between town and the whales. Only after we collectively cursed the damned garage that charged us two hundred dollars a day for a truck that didn’t work did we realize that the Chevy broke down because no one taught us how to operate it.