Big Miracle

by Tom Rose

  Left in park, transmission fluid doesn’t warm up with the rest of the car. Throwing the truck into gear with all the lubricants frozen destroyed our vehicle in less than fifty miles. With a watchful eye out for polar bears, we removed our gear from the truck and lamely hitchhiked back to town. I reported the truck abandoned and passed by it for the next ten days on the way to and from the whales, wondering whether it would ever be claimed or just join other abandoned vehicles and garbage that clutter the sides of Barrow’s few roads and alleyways.

  By Thursday, October 20—day thirteen—Oran Caudle’s studio was on the verge of a meltdown. The night before, despite the chaos that threatened to engulf him, Oran managed to pull off a live broadcast of the ABC News late-night program, Nightline. Never before had Nightline broadcast from a more remote location. In New York, Ted Koppel wondered whether it was worth the risk to go live to Barrow. Only after Harry Chittick, the ABC producer on the scene, assured New York that they could pull it off did Koppel and his staff agree to give it a try.

  Dressed in parkas and sweatshirts, Ron Morris and Arnold Brower Jr. sat in aluminum folding chairs in the sparse setting of Oran Caudle’s studio. The backdrop was cluttered with empty equipment boxes. The picture captured by the studio’s one camera looked like it was shot by a tenth grader at a wealthy suburban high school somewhere in the Lower 48. Brower and Morris answered Ted Koppel’s questions about the whales that were piped in over a conventional phone line from New York. Like millions of others, Koppel wanted to find out what it was about these three whales that turned whale hunters like Arnold Brower Jr. into tireless whale savers. When Arnold’s answers fell short of what Koppel was looking for, Morris jumped to the aid of his Inuit colleague.

  “They responded like any other community would,” Morris said. “This is a humane effort. They were chagrined and felt sorry for these critters. It was the same kind of outpouring I see when other animals are trapped in Alaska.” Brower breathed a sigh of relief. ABC News correspondent, naturalist, and resident whale expert Roger Caras guaranteed Ted Koppel and his millions of viewers that the whales would never survive their ordeal.

  “I hate to be a wet blanket…” Caras said from the comfort of the ABC Manhattan studio. “They are exhausted, they are stressed, and they’ve got a gamut to run. There will be polar bears on the lookout for any animal that’s stressed or weak. Southeast Alaska, then British Columbia has many pods of killer whales, and the way these whales will be pumping with their flukes, will be very slow and will be detected as vibrations in the water by the killer whales who will close in. Then along the coast of Oregon, they’ll pick up the white sharks. Then, if they have any energy left at all after running this gamut of teeth, they’ve got to move all the way down to central Mexico. All without eating.

  “I don’t think they will ever get to Mexico. They’ll be lost from sight once they’ve cleared the ice and no one will ever know what happened to them. As much as I hate to say it, I don’t think they are going to get there.”

  The once underused facility was now a madhouse. More than twenty domestic and international networks and local television stations, jostled, argued, and threatened each other and a frazzled Oran Caudle for access to his studio and its transmission equipment. Oran didn’t know where to turn. It got so bad that by midweek, reporters just barged into the studio and without pause abruptly threw Oran out of his own office. His adulation of the network “big boys” quickly turned to scorn. They were turning his fantasy into a nightmare. They were rude, drunk, and had egos too huge to measure.

  One night, a technician from one of the other Japanese networks scheduled a feed to Tokyo but never bothered to tell Oran. When the technician’s time was approaching, he waltzed into the control room and, ignoring the crew using the room, turned on all his switches. But when he reached to adjust the audio level, he cranked it up so high that he blew out the fuses on the soundboard. Fortunately, it was one of the last feeds of the day and the only one left to transmit was Ken Burslem, the cheerful Australian. Had the wayward technician fouled up an American network’s transmission, they would have erected Barrow’s first lamp post from which to hang him. Oran was up all night repairing the damage and getting ready for the next day’s madness. The technician never apologized.

  The producers from the three networks came to Oran and suggested he give them control of his studio until the story was over. They knew what they were doing, they assured him. Among them, the three producers had been in the business for more than seventy-five years. At what should have been the moment of his greatest professional triumph, Oran Caudle was being eased out of his own job.

  Oran asked ABC’s Harry Chittick why he and Jerry Hansen were so concerned about a meltdown. Chittick explained that like any major story from a remote or foreign location, their number one worry was access to the satellite. In the news business, Chittick said, competitors have two objectives. The first is dramatic footage and sound-bites. The second is to deny the same to their competitors.

  As Oran knew, Aurora I was the only satellite that could “see” a signal from Barrow, and Oran’s studio was the only facility that could access it in that remote part of the world. A single broadcaster could easily gain a monopoly on the story by buying all the available time segments on Aurora I, a technique known as “bird-jamming.” If one company could book all the time for itself, no one else could use the satellite. The bird jammer would face a pleasant dilemma. He could shut out all his competitors and keep the story for himself, making it an exclusive, or he could make a killing by selling segments of the time back to his competitors at enormous markup.

  A meltdown was the last thing Caudle wanted. He checked with Alascom, the company that owned the Aurora I satellite, to see if anyone was trying to jam it. They told him that the rush of last-minute orders enabled Alascom to raise its prices past the point where even the networks could afford to corner the market. Adam Smith’s invisible hand was so powerful it could even stretch to the heavens.

  Still, the American networks ended up with most of the time. After all, it was their story. Lucky foreign broadcasters like NTV and BBC had international affiliation agreements with American networks. Their footage was transmitted at times when their U.S. partners had excess inventory. The others scrambled for a few extra minutes here and there and paid exorbitantly for the privilege.

  Caudle was not just frustrated, he was getting frazzled. After all, it was his video that launched the story in the first place, and now he was being discarded like yesterday’s garbage. Worse still, he heard rumors that some of the Outside media were making fun of him and the frontier town he came to help settle.

  Suddenly, Oran had an unglossed look at the inner workings of network news. By comparison, the North Slope Borough television studio did not seem so bad after all. What struck Caudle were the endless arguments. ABC’s Harry Chittick yelling at NBC’s Don Oliver, the Japanese yelling at each other, and everybody yelling at CBS. For two straight weeks, Caudle and his assistants worked from four in the morning until well past midnight. The day began with live shots for the American morning-news programs. A steady stream of correspondents and camera crews pushed through his studio’s revolving door for the next twenty hours. Finally, and fittingly, each day would end with the media’s one true, unadulterated pleasure: Ken Burslem and his post-midnight “live cross” antics to Australia.

  Caudle and his North Slope television studio staff were reduced to walking zombies. His apple juice and granola breakfasts were replaced by coffee, coffee and more coffee. Colonel Carroll would have been proud. Out on the ice, coffee was served by the barrelful. Cutting new holes while keeping the existing ones open was now a round the clock effort. The initial few hundred dollars authorized by North Slope budget director Dan Fauske to feed a half-dozen Eskimos grew at the same exponential rate as the rescue itself.

  By the middle of Operation Breakout’s first week, Fauske’s costs had already ran into tens of thousands of dollars. It was
turning into one of the coldest Octobers in Alaskan history. Temperatures were already reaching minus forty degrees. Just a few months later, in January 1989, North America would record its coldest-ever reading of eight-two degrees below zero just a few hundred miles south of Barrow. It was so cold, dozens more Barrowans were needed to keep the holes open.

  With the mayor out of town and out of touch, Fauske knew it was his call. Like never before, and almost certainly never again, the eyes of the world were on his tiny hamlet. Fauske knew that if the whales died, and he hadn’t done all he could on his town’s behalf, the world might blame him. The conservative Fauske was faced with the risk of his life.

  He knew that if there was anyone who could save those whales it was Arnold Brower Jr. and the Eskimos of Barrow. Brower knew it too. Just as soon as Fauske gave Arnold the okay for new expenses, Brower was back asking for more. He got it every time.

  * * *

  Except during whaling season, more than 70 percent of Barrow’s workforce was unemployed. To help alleviate one of the modern era’s most chronic by-products, Barrow created a local employment service called the Mayor’s Jobs Program in the mid-1980s. To Fauske, helping the whales seemed like the perfect chance to put both the under-used program and Barrow’s unemployed people to work. Brower posted a sign on the job board in the main hallway of the borough government building. Hundreds of out of work Barrowans, some more sober than others, and a surprising number of whites stood in line for a chance to earn twenty-one dollars an hour cutting holes out on the ice. It would cost the borough more than $100,000.

  The small rescue Cindy Lowry organized just five days earlier was now a massive, professional operation. It employed hundreds of highly paid laborers from the Mayor’s Jobs Program, VECO, ARCO and the National Guard. But for all the added reinforcements, the whales wouldn’t swim beyond their original hole. Ron Morris needed help. He summoned two top whale biologists from the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle. Maybe they knew a way to lure the whales away from the icy death that awaited them in the first hole.

  That first hole was now one of many in a sea of ice stretching out to the open lead. But it was the only hole the whales would trust. They couldn’t bring themselves to leave it. During the day, they could surely see the light from dozens of other new holes cut in front of them. No one, not even Malik, could figure out why the whales would not move. He thought that if they let the first hole freeze over, the whales would have no choice but to swim into the new ones. Cindy said it was just too risky. Malik wasn’t convinced enough to argue.

  The longer the whales lingered around their first hold, the less strong Bone became. The baby whale was so weak, Cindy wondered how long it could hold on. What would happen, she thought, if the other whales moved? Would Bone have the strength to move with them? Watching Bone suffer tested Cindy, but she found a reserve of strength. Everyone on the ice admired Cindy’s compassion. It was genuine, no doubt about that. If the whales belonged to anyone, they belonged to Cindy.

  Although she had no official role in the operation, she was the most important person on the ice. She was beyond question and above reproach. No one, not even Ron Morris, dared take any action without first winning Cindy’s consent. People watched with fascination as Cindy stroked each of the tired whales with her soft, caring hands. And with Bone, it was special. Because it was the most vulnerable and least likely to survive, Cindy grew particularly close to it, and to everyone’s amazement, Bone seemed to grow. The baby whale seemed to respond to her encouragements. Remarkably, Bone always surfaced near Cindy no matter where she stood around the hole, like an infant instinctively able to locate its mother. Somehow the baby seemed to know that the tiny maternal presence on top of the ice was the key to its redemption.

  But as close as the two appeared to grow, Bone drifted closer to death. As it slipped away from Cindy’s hand, her once-buoyant spirit started to sink along with it. Nothing seemed to work, not the barge, not the president’s phone call, not the new Eskimo holes, and certainly not the interspecies communicator. While the other two whales looked weak and unresponsive, the baby was downright listless. Cindy and Ron were fighting despondency. By the night of Wednesday the 19th, twelve days after they were first discovered, the whales seemed doomed. No matter how precise the Eskimos’ hole-cutting technique had become, it seemed that as soon as they could open up a new one, it would start to freeze over. Drifting snow blown by thirty-mile-an-hour winds quickly turned the open holes to slush, threatening to entomb the whales before morning.

  15

  Minneapolis Comes to the Rescue

  Just as hope was fading, help was on its way. After flying all night, Greg Ferrian and Rick Skluzacek, the Minnesotans bearing deicers, finally arrived in Barrow. Throughout the trip from Minneapolis, Greg never told the truth to his brother-in-law Rick or Jason Davis from Eyewitness News. He did not inform them that Ron Morris refused to authorize the use of their deicers. Greg told Rick that everything was set for their arrival at the top of the world.

  When he first heard about it, KSTP’s Jason Davis thought the idea of following two local boys trying to save three whales up near the North Pole sounded like a great adventure. But the instant he deplaned, Davis’ enthusiasm evaporated. They were nearly blown over by a thirty-mile-an-hour wind that made January in Minnesota seem balmy. Rick’s first hint that things weren’t going quite as smoothly as predicted came when Greg admitted the two had nowhere to stay. A minor detail, Ferrian promised.

  They called the Top of the World Hotel from the airport. “Booked” said the receptionist. It was the same story at the Airport Inn. Greg stood in line waiting to ask the Eskimo woman behind the MarkAir ticket counter if she knew of a place they could stay. He noticed a large cardboard sign written in Magic Marker and hung by a string at the head of the line.

  “All raw whale, seal, walrus, and polar bear meat must be stored in leakproof packages for shipment on MarkAir.” When he turned around to point out the odd sign, Rick was already focusing his pocket camera to take his own shot. When Greg reached the head of the line, he asked the overworked agent if she knew of any accommodations. He tried to joke that the trip from Minneapolis was a bit too arduous for a commute. Nonplussed by his poor attempt at humor, the agent suggested he call the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL) north of town.

  “North of town?” asked a befuddled Greg Ferrian. “I thought this was as far north as it gets?”

  “NARL is as far north as it gets,” came the response. They loaded their six deicers into the back of an Isuzu I-Mark taxi and climbed aboard for the five mile ride out to the northern tip of the continent. When the driver told them the fare for the short ride was fifty dollars, they realized they had not only reached the edge of their continent but the edge of their means. They arrived at NARL just in time to claim two of the last guest rooms in the remarkably tidy facility. The sterile smell of a hospital hung heavily in the air. In case either of them was burned with chemicals or acids while conducting one of their Arctic experiments, there was a red emergency shower nozzle in the hallway outside their room.

  From the television reports he had been watching before leaving Minneapolis, Greg immediately recognized the North Slope biologists Geoff Carroll and Craig George as they dragged their weary feet and aching bodies into their office across the hall. Ebulliently, he introduced himself to the exhausted duo, who had returned to their office to escape the whales, if only for a few minutes. Greg asked for just a moment of their time to explain the deicers they had brought all the way from Minnesota at their own expense.

  “These machines can keep your ice holes open,” Greg assured Geoff. “That’s our business.” Geoff thought it was worth trying the machines but he dreaded the idea of yet another sleepless night on the bitterly cold ice worrying about polar bears mauling him. He knew though that the whales needed help. The remarkable string of luck that had brought the whales this far seemed at an end. The dropping temperatures only deepened the w
hales’ dire straits. Craig told Greg and Rick they had to find Ron Morris. The biologists promised help, but they had to get away from Morris first, if only for a few hours. The coordinator had turned the whole rescue into a media circus and he was its ringmaster. For their own sanity, they needed a break.

  Geoff told the two Minnesotans that the best way to catch Morris would be to wait for him at the Search and Rescue hangar. Craig drove them to the hangar at the end of the runway and introduced them to Randy Crosby. They waited two and a half hours before Morris landed in one of Crosby’s helicopters. With a slight wave of his hand, Morris tried to brush off Greg’s insistent appeals. “All I’m asking is that you let us tell you about our machines.” Greg pleaded. “You have to at least give us that much. After all, we just spent thousands of our own dollars to try and help.”

  “All right,” Morris relented, “I’ll give you a minute and a half to explain them.” He listened to Rick’s short but plaintive explanation while carefully examining his fingernails in a conspicuous attempt to show his disinterest. Standing up to walk out of Crosby’s office, Morris doubted the deicers would work. Even if they did, he added, he thought they would make too much noise. Rick pleaded with Morris to at least let them try the deicers. After all, the Coast Guard successfully used them to keep open a fifty-square-yard hole in the middle of a frozen Lake Superior. Unimpressed, Morris told them to go back to NARL to await his decision. He said he would call them with a definitive answer.

  Rick and Greg returned to their tiny room now cluttered with ice melting machines, and waited for Morris to call. After more than two anxious hours, they could wait no longer. Rick had to know whether his trip was a total waste of time and money and exactly how to kill his brother-in-law who dragged him into it. Around 6:30 that evening, they called Morris at the Airport Inn. His wife told them he could not be disturbed. He was preparing for his Nightline appearance.