Big Miracle (30 page)

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 whales' 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.

A minute later, there was a commotion in the hallway. When Rick peered out the door he saw Geoff and Craig hurriedly knocking on every closed door in the building. Craig spotted Rick and cried, “There you are. We've been looking all over for you.”

The biologists just returned from the ice. Conditions were deteriorating. The holes were freezing again. “The whales are losing it,” Geoff told them. “I don't think they're going to make it through the night.”

“Screw Morris,” Craig barked when Rick muttered something about waiting for the coordinator's call. “We've got to get those things on the ice.” They loaded two of the deicers into the ice and snow covered bed of Craig's pick-up truck. They drove back to Search and Rescue to try and find a portable electric generator to power the deicers. Randy Crosby told them the heavy crosswinds made the already risky proposition of flying at night too dangerous. As they waited for conditions to improve, Rick and Greg passed out sales brochures to the dozen or so nightshift journalists waiting for any news to report. Among those handed a brochure was Geoff and Craig's boss, Dr. Tom Albert, the director of the North Slope Borough's Wildlife Management office.

After his appearance on
Nightline,
Ron Morris went back to the hangar. It was 10
P.M.
, Wednesday, October 19, and Tom Albert was waiting for him. He angrily shoved the brochure in Morris's startled face. “Either we harvest those whales or you give these guys a chance.” Albert stormed off before Morris could answer. At around 11
P.M.
, Randy finally found a portable Honda generator in the back of his hangar. After he replaced the spark plugs and cleaned the carburetor, the small Japanese generator smoothly purred to life. It was loaded, along with the deicer, onto a SAR helicopter and flown off into the pitch-black Arctic night. Hovering above the black void, Randy searched for the lone light of the hunting shed erected on the edge of the sandspit. When he was directly over it, he switched on his landing lights to look for a safe place to set his chopper down.