Big Miracle (48 page)

To those who spent time with the whales, even people like me who knew little about them, it was clear this trio possessed something special. Of the untold thousands of gray whales who have died in ice strandings throughout history, these were the ones that united the world. That alone made them unique.

But there was more. After twenty-one days of frozen confinement, the two surviving whales conquered more than ice-covered seas. They transcended the perceived bounds of their own species. Before the rescue, scientists believed that gray whales would not be able to swim through icy waters, even to save their lives. After two weeks of proving the scientists right, the whales in the end proved them wrong. Changing our perceptions of them forever, the two whales battered and bloodied themselves in the ice-thick water, knowing it was life's only route.

Before the rescue, science could offer no evidence that gray whales' behavior could be modified. Unlike the killer whale, the gray whales could not be trained. There would never be any gray Shamus. But from the moment the deicers were dropped to do their Minnesota magic in the new Eskimo holes, the whales were active participants in their own rescue. If any two whales on earth could overcome the obstacles encountered clearing Barrow's ice pressure ridge, these were the whales to do it, Roger Caras and his predictions of doom notwithstanding. Science was rewarded with evidence that gray whales were even more intelligent than previously thought.

The millions of people who watched the whale saga got one of two rewards. They were either overjoyed at the whales' freedom because they genuinely wished them well, or they were just so sick of hearing about them that they were relieved it was finally over.

The whales gave Vice President Bush a chance to jab Michael Dukakis: “I just hope they don't end up in Boston Harbor,” the nation's most polluted big city waterway, in Dukakis' state. For Michael Dukakis, the whales' freedom presented his self- destructing campaign with a Catch-22. At first, the Massachusetts governor's staff must have welcomed all the attention focused on the whales' crisis instead of their own. But when the story never ended, there was less time until the election, time they desperately needed to make up for blowing the huge lead they had as recently as Labor Day. The inept Dukakis campaign had to get back in the headlines. When it finally did, it was more bad news. Dukakis' dirty tricks manager John Sasso, fired then rehired for the same reason—his mastery of political dirty tricks—probably wished for the biggest trick of all: re-stranding the whales.

For Ben Odom, the senior vice-president of ARCO Alaska and one of the rescue's two biggest financiers, the rescue proved fortuitous. Soon after the whales swam free, the thirty-five-year ARCO veteran retired, just in time to leave on one of the industry's rarest and highest notes. His oil company had helped save two whales and softened the hearts of environmentalists everywhere.

Just six months after the rescue's final news story, Alaska, once America's most isolated state, was back in the news again. This time, the story was only too real.

At 9
P.M.
, March 24, 1989, the
Exxon Valdez,
a 987-foot supertanker, left the port whose name she bore en route to Long Beach, California. On board were more than fourteen million gallons of grade A North Slope crude oil pumped down from Prudhoe Bay through the billion-dollar 825-mile-long Trans-Alaskan pipelne.

After changing to an inbound shipping lane to avoid a glacial ice floe, Captain Joe Hazelwood turned over command of his vessel to Third Mate Gregory Cousins. It was 11:50
P.M
. Eighteen minutes later, Captain Hazelwood and the rest of the sleeping crew were jolted awake by a terrific screech which rang through the giant vessel as it struck a shoal just a few hundred yards west of Bligh Island.

The oil industry had spent the past twenty-one years warning Alaskans that supertankers were much more dangerous than pipelines. However, that lesson has not been needed, neither with the
Exxon Valdez
nor, apparently, any of the literally hundreds of tanker spills since.

In a calculated attempt to escape liability, Exxon blamed it all on Captain Hazelwood. For months, the company succeeded in convincing nearly everyone that Hazelwood was drunk at the time of the accident. In fact, there was no evidence to support the Exxon charge, an allegation every crew member denied. Ten hours after the accident, Hazelwood's blood alcohol level was higher than the Coast Guard legal limit but below the Alaska driving limit. Toxicologists said it was likely that Hazelwood reached his test levels by alcohol ingested after the accident, not before.

Just six months after glowing from their greatest public high, the oil industry was reeling from its deepest low. The good will they worked so hard to generate in October drowned in eleven million gallons of solidifying oil that oozed its way down Alaska's coast.

The extent of the environmental damage predicted by the experts was thankfully highly exaggerated. While much sea life died, how much was never known. What was known was that the sound and its rich commercial fisheries recovered far faster and more completely than anyone expected.

Among the potential victims were the very whales Alaskan oil titans ARCO and VECO expended themselves to save. More ominously, Exxon also endangered more than two-thirds of the entire gray whale species that swam through the Sound to and from Mexico. With the food chain poisoned, biologists could only hope that genetic mutations caused by the toxins would not be passed on as permanent species changes. The biggest company in the industry that worked so hard to save three whales was now accused of endangering the entire species. Exxon got its due, with costs run into the billions, but unfortunately at the whales' expense.

The oilman's nightmare became the newsman's dream. Lambasted by a late-waking American public, the press returned to Alaska in a big way. Coverage of the disaster dwarfed that of the whale rescue, as it should have. Many of the same reporters assigned to Barrow in October packed their bags in a similar rush to head to another Alaskan port of call, Valdez, a thousand miles south of Barrow. That was the reporters' reward.

Sitting in VECO's Anchorage headquarters on Sunday, October 30, all Billy Bob Allen could do was stare at his desk calculator. Tallying up what his company just spent to save the whales, the liquid crystal displayed an astonishing figure: $350,000. How on earth had he let himself go through that much money? Shortly after the Exxon catastrophe, Allen got his reward. VECO won the prime contract to clean up the mess. The contract would soon mushroom to hundreds of millions of dollars. VECO's new image of whale-saver helped Pete Leathard, Allen's chief executive, land one of the biggest contracts in state history. If whales ever get stuck again, Leathard won't waste a minute to rustle ol' Billy Bob from his Colorado ranch.

The first environmental job Bill Allen took brought him fame, the second brought him fortune. Billy Bob Allen's environmental conversion paid off. Greenpeace whale coordinator Campbell Plowden waited nine months for his reward. On August 2, 1989, the Republic of Iceland announced a two-year moratorium on all commercial whaling. The crisis that brought Prime Minister Steingrimur Hermannsson's government to its knees half a year earlier finally became too much. Iceland could no longer fight the economic clout of an increasingly united world. Iceland had no choice but to get out of its seven-million-dollar whaling business.

No country on earth seemed more remote from Barrow, Alaska, than Iceland. It seemed the most unlikely place to become embroiled in the affairs of a place like Barrow. Yet the tiny seafaring nation perched halfway between the Old World and the New was turned on its ear by the whales of October.

While Iceland killed seventy-five whales in 1988, it also fell prey to a crippling economic boycott costing it more than $50 million, nearly four percent of the tiny nation's gross national product, the Soviets, who slaughtered more than twice as many gray whales that same year, sent two icebreakers on a three-day diversion. The Soviets reaped praise, Iceland scorn. While serenading Moscow with cheers of “Hail the Whale Savers,” the world taunted Reykjavik with jeers of “Boycott the Whale Killers.”

The Soviets masterfully buried a hundred years of plunder beneath the bow of the Finnish-made
Vladimir Arseniev
while Iceland lost thousands of jobs. The Soviet Union was the hero, Iceland, the goat.

Japan, the foreign country most interested in the whale rescue, was the world's single largest whaling nation before Operation Breakout, and was the single largest whaling nation more than a year later, killing 1,200 whales in 1988 alone, almost ten times as many whales as the rest of the world combined. The rescue that captivated so many viewers from Hokaido to Honshu did nothing to stop Japan's relentless pursuit of endangered whales. Not only did Iceland quit whaling while the Russians continued, but the Soviets were rewarded just a few weeks later. The United States, still smarting from the Soviet whale rescue, rushed tens of millions of dollars worth of emergency supplies to Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia, following its devastating earthquake. Channels opened just weeks before between the United States Coast Guard, the U.S. National Guard, and the Soviet Merchant Marine were used again to get as much assistance to the Soviets as quickly as possible.

But the rescue's greatest reward went to Colonel Tom Carroll and White House aide Bonnie Mersinger. After weeks of increasingly intense telephone conversations, Carroll finally went to Washington to meet the woman who had captured his heart. Passing through the tunnel separating the two United Airlines concourses en route to his connecting flight in Chicago's O'Hare Airport, the colonel found his once sturdy stomach quivering to the hypnotizing allure of the new-age music and neon light show swirling above the long moving walkway.

What was he doing, he asked himself. He called Bonnie, who managed to maintain remarkable composure when in fact she was just as anxious as he.

“Aren't you even a little nervous?” he asked her, desperately hoping she shared his angst.

“Nope,” she said confidently. “I'll see you in two hours.”

The nervousness she had confidently denied just a few hours before suddenly gripped her as she watched the plane carrying her beloved colonel taxi toward the gate. Maybe she had gone too far too fast. How would the seemingly staid colonel react to her welcome present: a stretch limousine waiting outside the terminal to whisk the new couple on their first steamy, skylit tour of the nation's capital. Her fears quickly vanished after a long, passionate embrace.

Tom Carroll and Bonnie Mersinger were married on August 12, 1989. They live in Anchorage where they can be seen driving a silver Maserati sporting a license plate emblazoned with dark blue letters that read:
GR WHALE
.

Thomas Carroll was quickly promoted to Brigadier General and realized his life's career ambition when he was named Adjutant General of the Alaska National Guard. Tragically, General Carroll was killed in a plane crash on approach to Juneau International Airport in 1992.

Two years later his widow, Bonnie, founded the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, designed to help loved ones of fallen servicemen. In the intervening years, TAPS has created a national network of more than 25,000 grieving families it tries to link up with one another and with mental-health and military professionals to learn to cope with sudden death. Its work assumed national importance on September 11, 2001.

Notes

1. The Hunt

1
The current town of Barrow derived its modern name from Point Barrow, America's northernmost point, named by English explorer Frederick Beechey in 1825 to honor British admiral Sir John Barrow. The Inupiat name for Barrow is
Ukpeagvik,
or “place where snowy owls are hunted.” Maybe that's why the name Barrow is now used by all.

2. From the Edge of the World to the Center of the Media Universe

2
Per-capita income for American Indians living on reservations remained low through the end of the century. The 1999 U.S. census found Indians living on reservations earned $7,846 per capita compared to $14,267 for Indians living off reservations and to $21,587 for all U.S. citizens. Terry Anderson—Property and Environmental Research Center
http://www.perc.org/articles/article1355.php

Acknowledgments

That I had the odd thought of writing a book about such a seemingly odd event wasn't odd in and of itself. What was odd was that it actually happened.

The idea first struck me on my way home from Alaska. I didn't have the first clue about where to go or how to get there. I called Rich Bock, publicity director for N.Y. News Corp. at G. S. Schwartz & Company in New York.

Not only did he call back less than two hours later with the name of an agent, but had already scheduled a dinner meeting with her that very night. “Anything else?” he asked before jumping on the crosstown bus for the Knicks game.

Margaret McBride, the perfect agent, found the perfect publisher, Hillel Black.

His most indebted nephew learned long ago, Nobody Argues with Uncle Bob, particularly when he's right.

Thanks to Suzy Tucker at Klineman, Rose and Wolf in Indianapolis for transcribing long hours of audio tape interviews.

Graciousness is a Richardson family gene. Take Michael's cousin, Nancy Bigelow. A long-lost penniless cousin shows up with an equally destitute stranger on the step of her one-room log cabin outside Fairbanks, asking just to stay one night. “No problem,” Nancy offered. “Just as long as you know it's twenty miles to the nearest indoor plumbing.” Almost a week later, we were still there—stranded, smelly victims of the coldest week in the history of North America.

It took nearly eight months to write this book. Eight months in which special thanks are due to my friend and associate Mike Kelly.