Big Miracle (25 page)

He thought getting a mention on the news was a long shot. A crew was assigned to go with them to Alaska? He was ecstatic. Now there was finally something he could tell his brother-in-law that was true. There was no way Rick could back out. Hours later, Rick and Greg were standing in line at the Delta Airlines ticket counter for their flight to Fairbanks. The agents checking them in were so excited to hear they were going to help the whales, they shipped the six compact deicers at no extra charge.

KSTP called the contractors remodeling their recently purchased corporate jet and told them the plane would be needed the next day to fly an
Eyewitness News
crew to Alaska. The contractors worked all night to get the Gulfstream ready for its new owners. They removed a gaudy double brass bed and ceiling mirrors from the plane and replaced it with a modest bar. The plane's previous owner, bankrupt television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, thought drinking a sin.

Colonel Carroll didn't know what to make of the calls from Minnesota. He called Cindy in Barrow to ask her what she thought, but she had just left the hotel. Cindy was finally on her way to see the whales.

*   *   *

Geoff and Craig tried to prepare Cindy for the whales' worsening condition. Temperatures in Barrow were dropping by the day. The chain-saw crews could barely keep up with the new ice. The holes were freezing fast, and the barge was still at least three days away. As they drove their Chevy Suburban across the glassy smooth ice of Elson Lagoon, Cindy couldn't believe how isolated the three of them were. With all the reporters, whirling helicopters, and Eskimos with chain saws, she expected a hubbub of activity.

Instead, she encountered an overwhelming, almost deafening solitude. From the time they crossed onto the frozen lagoon for the seven-mile drive along the Point Barrow sandspit to the whales, she saw nothing but a barely discernible ski machine whining past far off in the distance. Even with the unblinking gaze of the world fixed upon it, the North Slope appeared no less hostile, no less alien, and no less inimical to life than at any other moment in its timeless existence.

They crossed over the sandbar that separated past from present. Their isolated world vanished in a sea of attention. The closer they got to the holes, the more people and activity they saw: ski “taxis” ferrying reporters to and from the whales, reporters conducting interviews at the water's edge. The contrast with the barren scenery on the ride out was surreal.

Eskimos could instantly tell who belonged on the ice and who did not. Cindy did not. Those who did belong wore blood-stained walrus and sealskin parkas and carried high-powered rifles slung over their shoulders to guard against polar bears. Those who didn't, like Cindy, stood shivering in brightly colored ski clothes, fashions better suited to alpine resorts than Arctic expeditions.

Geoff took Cindy to meet Arnold Brower Jr., who had been out all night with his team of Eskimos cutting open several new holes in the ice. She was amazed that he showed no signs of fatigue. An Inuit hunter often spent days on end exposed to the harsh elements searching for game to feed and clothe his family. Millennia in the Arctic enabled the Eskimo to withstand conditions that the hardiest white man could not. No one doubted the ruggedness of the VECO crews who broke the hoverbarge free of ice. But by watching them work, the white man soon learned that the Eskimos could have freed the barge faster with half the men and none of the suffering. They were a different kind of men. The Eskimos were built for the Arctic. It was their home.

The Eskimos cut ice at a feverish pace, oblivious to the temperature of minus thirty-five degrees. With no gloves or hats, and their coats unbuttoned, the Eskimos joked, laughed, and even performed traditional dances on floating slabs of ice. Cindy and her bundled but shivering fellow whites stood nearby, prime candidates for frostbite.

“Why would you come out to work in such cold?” this reporter naïvely asked a busy Eskimo.

“Cold?” the Eskimo responded with equal naïveté. “We're just out here enjoying the weather.”

Arnold knew of Cindy and Greenpeace long before she set foot in Barrow. For years, her organization fought against subsistence whaling. Under any other circumstance, these two people were enemies. To Arnold, Cindy was bent on the ruination of his people and their ancient way of life. To Cindy, Arnold and his people continued to senselessly slaughter an endangered and magnificent creature with increasingly modern tools. Brower realized this was a rare chance in the history of the Inupiat Eskimos. If he could win Cindy's friendship, maybe some way could be found to lessen the tensions dividing subsistence whaling villages and their environmentalist opponents. He eagerly extended a gloveless hand in a genuine desire to get things off to a good start.

Standing between them, Geoff could feel the tension and the opportunity. If Cindy accepted his hand warmly, great strides could be made. If she did so grudgingly, the damage might never heal. Cindy's pretty face instantly broke into a warm, radiant smile as she eagerly reached to grab Brower's hand for an emotional shake of friendship.

Brower looked at the woman and told her what she already knew. She needed warmer clothing. When Barrow saw a stranger freezing, they didn't ask whether they want to borrow clothing, they just put it on them. Seeing that she was on the verge of frostbite, he grabbed the fur ruff dangling unused around his neck and leaned over to wrap it around her brightly reddened cheeks. When she saw the fur, Cindy instinctively backed away.

Brower did not understand. Did she want to be his friend or not? He didn't know why Cindy declined his hospitality. Was she recoiling under the touch of a blood-stained whale killer or was there another, less offensive reason? Realizing her actions were being viewed as an affront, she profusely thanked Brower for his concern but told him she couldn't wear fur.

“Why not?” Arnold asked. “Are you allergic?”

“No, no,” Cindy said, laughing. “I just don't wear animal fur.”

Brower never would understand these crazy whites from the Outside. He told her the ruff was hers when and if she changed her mind. Cindy waited anxiously for one of the whales to surface. She still had not seen them. Two television cameramen jostled for position to get “good video” of the environmentalist's first day on the ice. The strong-willed Lowry was still a bit too unsure of her surroundings to tell the cameramen to back off. As Cindy walked toward the empty holes with Arnold, the cameramen were too busy arguing with each other about who stepped into whose shot to notice Cindy's discomfort. They probably wouldn't have listened to her anyway. Their job was to get the best video, not to win popularity contests. If that meant hurt or angry feelings, so be it. After the story ended and they were reprieved from this Arctic hell, they would never again see any of the people they were offending anyway.

Cindy could tell the whales apart before she even saw them. She absorbed every bit of information about the whales Geoff, Craig, or Arnold could give her. The pictures in the paper and on the news gave Cindy as much perspective as anyone. Now, it was her turn to wait those first long minutes until the whales finally surfaced. When Geoff and Craig initially observed them five days earlier, the whales held their breath for six minutes at a time. But in the last few days, the two biologists noticed a change. With the dropping temperatures, increased human activity, and ice closing in overhead, the whales started surfacing more frequently. Instead of every six minutes, the whales popped up every three or four minutes. Geoff and Craig guessed that this was a sign of increased stress. The more strain the whales felt, the less time they would spend below the surface. The baby whale surfaced much more frequently than the other two, a further sign of its frailty.

Malik noticed the new behavior first, but he kept it to himself. He didn't want to upset the people working hard to save the three whales. Perhaps the whales would resume a more normal diving pattern before anyone noticed anything was wrong. But after another day without improvement, Malik was no longer the only one who knew the whales were in trouble. On Monday morning, the baby whale could barely lift its head out of the water to breathe. It was bloodied and battered from repeatedly banging against the razor sharp edges of the hole. Cindy leaned over to gently comfort the sickly whale with the touch of her hand. She murmured encouragement as it heaved ragged breaths. Her heart ached for the little whale she called Bone because all the skin had rubbed away from the whale's snout. The name immediately caught on.

The Eskimos used their own Inupiat language to name the baby Kannick, or Snowflake. The two other whales would have their choice of several names, but none would stick. The Eskimos called the largest whale Siku, one of the hundreds of words in the Inupiat language for ice. The rescuers from the Outside called it Crossbeak, for its crooked jaw that never allowed the whale to properly close its mouth. The smaller of the two adolescent whales was given the Eskimo name Poutu, a uniquely Inupiat word referring to a specific type of ice hole. Those English speakers who called it anything at all, called it Bonnet.

Late Monday afternoon, word got to Arnold Brower that Colonel Carroll was making little progress with the hoverbarge in Prudhoe Bay. Brower and Malik urged Morris to start thinking of alternatives in the event the barge did not work. Up to that point, there were no other options. It was the hoverbarge or bust. Morris said waiting was the only thing they could do. Morris's lack of Arctic experience limited his ability to think of new ways to help the whales. Instead, he continued to insist that Colonel Carroll would soon free the barge.

“But what if it doesn't come?” Arnold Brower asked impatiently. “Then what do we do?”

“You guys are the experts,” Morris said defensively. “You tell me.”

Malik suggested cutting new holes. Maybe the extra room at the surface would ease the whales' distress. Brower thought it was worth a try. He gathered three men with chain saws and instructed them to cut open a new hole twenty-five feet by twenty-five feet, about a hundred feet west of the existing hole.

When they first expanded the original hole, Arnold and his men cut huge blocks of ice that they hitched to the back of a truck to pull them out of the water. Each new block they moved convinced them that they had created a most inefficient system. When Geoff nearly fell into the icy waters while trying to lasso a rope around an ice block, Malik and Arnold realized they had seen enough. Malik started cutting much smaller chunks of ice, pushing them under the frozen ledge with the long aluminum shaft of a light harpoon used for seal hunting. Now, it took just minutes to open up a new hole. There were no trucks and no ropes, just a few Eskimos with chain saws and poles.

The Eskimos walked a hundred feet farther, ready to do it again. Malik paced off the dimensions of the new hole. He and Arnold sawed through the perimeter of the rectangle Malik had marked with the sole of his sealskin mukluks. Then they cut the floating island of ice into pieces small enough for one man to easily shove under the edge of the surrounding rim. The Eskimos improved with practice. Each new hole took less time to cut than the one before.

But the whales would not move. They stayed in the first hole, the one they knew. Malik thought the activity at the original hole kept them from moving on. He asked people to move away from the old holes to see what the whales would do without any humans to lure them. None of the media moved. Like others, CBS cameraman Bob Dunn nodded his head agreeably and said, “Sure,” but he didn't budge. Malik did not understand. Why did he say he would leave and then not move?

Even though each of the networks had hours of whale footage by Monday, October 17, the video of the whales was just too compelling. Reporters always had to chase their subjects. Now, their cameras, microphones, and pens could take all the time in the world recording the magnificent, if not tragic images of three glorious whales trapped in tiny holes. After traveling so far to see them, it was impossible to get up and leave.

Everyone's footage was so equally spectacular, the cameraman joked they were on the fast track to the first collective Emmy Award for television news photography. The conditions were so perfect, nobody could lose. Even I took great pictures. As with the fully automatic 35-millimeter cameras sold since the start of the decade, all you had to do was “focus and shoot.”

The pictures transmitted back to the Lower 48 were so consistently stunning, the networks kept wanting more. The better the video, the more of it the networks aired. The more they aired, the more enthralled the public became. The more enthralled the public became, the more pressure was put on the rescuers to save the whales. Almost as fast as the story broke, the rescue was controlled by a force beyond anyone's control, the force of collective human fascination. Operation Breakout was on autopilot, the first “focus and shoot” story of the television era.

When the biggest event in Barrow's history broke, the town's top leader was nowhere to be found. The North Slope Mayor, George Ahmaogak, left town a week earlier, before the whales were national news, to attend an Alaska Federation of Natives meeting. But when the meeting ended and Barrow was the center of the world, the mayor didn't come back. For days, no one knew where he was or when he would return.

All the attention must have frightened the beleaguered mayor. George Ahmaogak was embroiled in controversy over more than the allegations of drinking and domestic violence. Not only was the coverage of the whale story on autopilot during the rescue's early days, so was Barrow. It might not have had an official leader during those critical early days, but it still had its continued responsibilities. Arnold Brower called Dan Fauske, the North Slope director of finance. In the mayor's absence, Fauske was the only person authorized to tap the borough's treasury. He asked Fauske for money to feed his hungry men. Fauske planned the borough's $200-million annual budget. Surely the borough could afford a few hundred dollars for doughnuts and coffee. Fauske agreed.