Big Miracle (12 page)

If the other networks wanted in on the game, they needed to get moving. Time was wasting. If they worried about money, they could never play. By whatever means they could muster, ABC and CBS, not to mention CNN, had to figure out how to get their own video of the whales on the air to close their own Friday night newscasts. They tracked down Oran through a graphic NBC News superimposed on the footage it used the night before. It read, “Courtesy of the North Slope Borough.”

At first, nobody at the networks knew what the “North Slope Borough” meant, let alone what it was, but finding out was the very thing reporters were trained to do. They called Alaska directory assistance and got the number for the North Slope Borough. When they asked for the person responsible for the video that appeared on NBC News the night earlier, the switchboard operator transferred them to Oran. The first calls Oran returned were from the networks. After talking to CBS, ABC, and CNN, he found his freelance camera services at the center of a two-way bidding war. CBS and ABC crews were on the way to Barrow. But until they got there, they needed Oran Caudle to help them get the footage they had to have for their Friday night broadcasts.

Until the other networks put their own footage on the air, this story was an NBC exclusive. People interested in finding out more about the trapped whales would tune in Brokaw and tune out Peter Jennings (ABC) and Dan Rather (CBS). NBC had the obvious advantage—Don, Jerry, and Steve were already on the ground and transmitting.

CBS and ABC wanted in on the game. They asked Oran to go back for “fresh” video of the whales. Each time they spoke to him they raised their cash offers by hundreds of dollars. As he could not serve two masters simultaneously, Caudle sold his exclusive services a day at a time. In the end, CBS won the Day Two Oran Caudle sweepstakes by agreeing to pay him two thousand dollars to arrange one trip out to the whales. That was the going rate for exclusivity.

“Wowee, I can't believe it,” Oran exulted in his north Texas drawl. He would make in one morning more than he would in a week and a half with his job at the borough.

Oran knew CNN could never compete with the cash offers made by the networks. These were the halcyon days of network news; immortalized just the year prior by the Hollywood hit movie
Broadcast News,
which starred William Hurt and Holly Hunter. But Caudle personified the subtle change seeping over American TV viewers. He preferred CNN; not because it was CNN necessarily, but because it was a full-time news network. At six o'clock every morning, it ran the Barrow temperature. Oran felt that any network that acknowledged Barrow deserved to be acknowledged itself. He would give CNN free use of the footage he shot for himself the day before as long as it gave the borough credit on the air. The twenty-four-hour news network was only too glad to accept.

Oran barreled into Russ Weston as he ran out the door in his hurry to get back to the whales before dark. In his exuberance, Oran told Russ that the other networks were sending up their own crews. “Isn't that great?” he asked. Needless to say, Russ did not quite share in Caudle's enthusiasm. Russ's exclusive would soon enough be no such thing. From now on, he would have to compete with his competitors for the story that up to that point was his alone.

The transmission facility was destined to start heating up with activity. Since only one signal could be transmitted at a time, Oran knew the task of handing out the time slots would fall in his lap. Had Oran been at the Anchorage International Airport that Friday afternoon, he might have gotten a glimpse of what would soon be descending on his quiet studio over the next two weeks. The normally quiet MarkAir ticket counter hummed with unexpected activity for the afternoon flight to Barrow.

MarkAir was more than the only commercial and freight airlines serving Barrow. In a village with no land or sea routes, it was Barrow's lifeline, its only physical connection to the outside world. Without it, the town would find itself stranded. Outside of government, it was Barrow's biggest business, the source of everything from food and gasoline to transportation to all away games for the Barrow High School basketball team. The three daily flights carried much more than people. They carried the town's future, supplying virtually everything modern Barrow needed to survive its brutal environment.

MarkAir's new fleet of Boeing 737 jets had movable bulkheads. Usually, the front two-thirds of the cabin on Barrow-bound flights held cargo. Even at $337 for the cheapest one-way seat, MarkAir couldn't afford to give up the cargo space unless the plane was full.

But after this afternoon, the agents faced a rare problem. There were more people trying to get to Barrow than there were seats on the plane, including more than a dozen people from CBS and the other Anchorage television stations. Behind them calmly stood the local representatives of the national wire services. To them, Alaska was home. But even they could not fathom what Barrow would bring.

Crates of heavy television equipment began to pile up in front of the ticket counter. Luckily for MarkAir, Ed Rogers was in the Anchorage office and not out checking up on cargo operations at one of the airline's remote sites deep in the Alaska bush. Rogers served as the director of cargo sales for MarkAir and instantly saw both the revenue potential and logistical problems of the unexpected passengers and their baggage. He wouldn't think of turning away full-fare paying passengers along with the fees he would collect from their excess luggage; but with those fees would come costs. He ordered the preloaded cargo off-loaded to make room for seats in the front two-thirds of the Barrow-bound Boeing 737. The cargo taken off the passenger flight was flown up later in the day on a special plane. Rogers kept everyone happy and made MarkAir a handsome profit in the process.

Instead of waiting impatiently for the aircraft to be reconfigured, several of the reporters wandered to the airport's watering hole for an afternoon pick-me-up. They had no idea this would be their last chance to buy a drink legally. Under most circumstances, Barrow was dry and drinking was illegal. In the cabin, mock panic accompanied word that Barrow was dry. One of the stewardesses sought help from the cockpit. The captain's sardonic announcement confirming the rumors only fueled the fake outrage. Stewardesses quickly took their serving carts to quiet the good-natured clamoring for last shots. With one trip down the aisle, every bottle of alcohol was gone. The more seasoned Alaska hands calmly sat through the hubbub, reassured by the bootleg caches of liquor stashed away in their luggage. Once the administered drugs took effect, the cabin calmed down.

The pilot wakened his slightly inebriated passengers (it's never too early for a drink if you are a reporter) on descent to Barrow with news that he had permission from Randy Crosby's air traffic control station in Barrow to make a low-pass flyover above the stranded whales. The trapped whales were not just a national news item anymore. Now they were a tourist attraction.

The influx gathered pace for the next ten days. The Top of the World Hotel started auctioning off beds, as opposed to rooms. People in town for the long-planned mayor's conference and other business returned to the hotel after their day's work to find themselves squeezed inside suddenly shared rooms they had booked and paid in advance as sole private rooms. Making matters worse was that their new roommates weren't normal people; they were rude media types. Since the invading hordes gladly paid three hundred dollars a day for beds in shared rooms, the hotel was willing to take the heat from their displaced guests.

Barrow had never seen anything like it. The current attention, although it had only just started, dwarfed the coverage of the only other event in Barrow to interest anybody on the Outside. On August 15, 1935, a plane crashed ten miles south of Barrow, killing both of its celebrity passengers: legendary humorist Will Rogers and famed aviation pioneer Wiley Post. The few daring journalists who actually reached the remote site back then aptly named the tragic site of the crash “Desolation Point.”

The world had changed by 1988. There were satellites, regularly scheduled jet flights, and ski machines. Modern Barrow had running water and a choice among Innuit, American, Mexican, and Chinese cuisine. With all its imported social ills, Barrow had so far managed to avoid one of the most pervasive problems in the Lower 48: homelessness. When the affliction struck, its source was completely unexpected. Suddenly the town was overrun by an influx of reporters with nowhere to stay.

Barrowans started clearing floor space in their homes to accommodate as many Outsiders as they could. The shivering and exhausted members of the fourth estate had little choice but to subject themselves to extortion if it meant escape from the elements. They paid a minimum of one hundred dollars each just for the privilege of sleeping on a cold floor in a private home. If you wanted accoutrements like mattresses, sheets, blankets, even running water, you had to pay for them. Many of these suddenly entreprenurial hosts were flexible in the compensation they would accept. The reporters learned quickly that what cash couldn't buy, whiskey would. Word spread back down the food chain that folks en route to Barrow should stock up on spirits to help grease their way toward a smooth and warm landing. A hundred-dollar bill wrapped around a bottle of J&B secured more than one vacant bed.

The large loophole in Barrow's prohibition was seized upon with alacrity. It was a top priority for many reporters. A not-so obscure provision allowed nonresidents to apply for temporary liquor import licenses. As everyone knew, the applications were available at the Barrow City Hall, which became the site of an almost endless line of those seeking an exemption from the harsh sentence of temperance. Locals roamed the line offering hundreds of dollars to those willing to use their permits to help them illegally resupply their own caches. Once Outsiders—in this case, reporters—got their permits, they made arrangements with their bureaus for shipments of Barrow's preferred medium of exchange. Thousands of dollars worth of beer, wine, and hard liquor were shipped overnight express by the caseload. Ed Rogers's joke was that the MarkAir cargo storage area was beginning to resemble a wholesale liquor warehouse.

Some newsmen phoned in their complaints to their more comfortably assignment editors, decrying Barrow's lack of amenities and begging for relief. Others thrived in the “hardship.” In fact, it wasn't hardship as much as it was novelty. Each privation endured was a badge they could later point to as proof of their ability to report under varying levels of adversity.

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.