Big Miracle (11 page)

A week to the day after the whales were discovered, an American television crew was walking down the sturdy but loud aluminum steps that would allow them to descend from the elevated airport hanger to plant their feet squarely on the frozen tundra. When the first blast of cold air hit them, they knew they would be in for a rough ride. It wasn't that they left behind what they should have brought, it was that they didn't own what they should have had, nor did they even know how to get it.

When their NBC producers in New York and Los Angeles sent them to Barrow, Hansen and Oliver had no idea how long they would be there or under what conditions they would be forced to operate. There was nothing unusual about that. Such was life for the vagabond television news fraternity. Their job required them to be ready to go anywhere, anytime. More often than not, the “anywhere” was someplace strange, often violent and frequently remote, and the “anytime” was now.

After more than twenty-five years in the business, Oliver kept learning that just when he thought he had covered about all the kinds of stories there were to cover, another one would come his way to prove him wrong. As he gazed out at his surreal surroundings, Oliver instantly knew he was in for another unprecedented adventure.

Unlike Russ who had worked in Barrow before, the NBC crew assumed that there would be no broadcast facilities on site. So they brought virtually an entire TV station of their own packed tightly into twelve large and heavy metal cases. The cases were filled with cameras, waveform monitors, vectorscopes, batteries, cables, editing equipment, and camera heating pads.

But buried in the safest catacomb was the Los Angeles bureau's newest piece of equipment. They had been waiting for it for years. Only when both protagonists in the eight-year-long slaughter known as the Iran-Iraq War started attacking unarmed oil tankers in the Persian Gulf in late 1988 did the NBC Bahrain bureau agree to transfer their portable $17,000 gyrostabilizer back to the states.

Attached to the outside of a camera, it allowed steady pictures to be taken from a flying helicopter. When Oran Caudle casually pulled out his own gyrostabilizer the next day, Don Oliver nearly fell out of the open-doored chopper. Barrow's gyrostabilizer was even more sophisticated than the one Oliver liked to brag about.

Before leaving Los Angeles, the producer Jerry Hansen checked to see that someone at the assignment desk would take care to assure accommodations and ground support were arranged once they arrived in Barrow. Hansen had one request. He wanted his own room. Don Oliver may have been a great reporter, but his snoring was too much to bear. Luckily they were the first to Barrow; had they arrived any later, Hansen would have been forced to use the snoreproof earplugs he packed just in case. The town's eighty hotel rooms were going quickly. To allow for late-arriving competitors and the rising value of a warm bed, the hotel started renting beds, as opposed to rooms.

This wasn't the first time NBC News reported from the Arctic. But they had never before done it with so little preparation. As he was walking out the door of his Burbank, California, office Jerry glanced up at the map on his wall. Just where was this place Barrow? As he squinted to better familiarize himself with the little speck on his map it finally started to sink in. Barrow really was at the top of the world. When he stepped off the plane, a blast of Arctic air hit him square in the face with the force of unexpected exhilaration. Barrow was the top of the world and he was here.

Even though there were only four miles of total road in the town, Jerry, Don, and the rest of the crew still needed a way to get themselves and their heavy gear around Barrow. To Hansen, the answer was obvious enough: rent a car. He thumbed through the seven-page Barrow telephone directory several times before he finally realized that there were no rental cars. The hotel manager suggested Hansen call the folks over at the North Slope Borough, the local government. The NSB owned most of the town's vehicles. If anybody had extras, it would be the NSB.

When word spread through the new all glass NSB building that NBC News was in town, everyone just assumed they were in town to cover the North Slope Mayor's Conference, then taking place in Barrow. But that seemed odd. Who cared about that? Locals were even more taken aback when Hansen told them that, in fact, he and his crew were in town to cover the stranding of the three whales.

“The whales?” one astonished Eskimo asked, “What whales? What is so newsworthy about whales?” “I don't know,” Hansen answered. “People just love them.” The man at the NSB gave Hansen a list of names of people who might have cars to rent. Not many people in Barrow may have heard the word “chutzpah” before, but they sure seemed to have it.

The first local he talked to wanted a thousand dollars a day for a 1975 Chevy Suburban. Hansen burst out laughing … but the last laugh was on him. The best deal he could find was with a hooded character who wore sunglasses at the NSB, who agreed to rent him three old pickups for just six hundred dollars a day each. The ruddy-faced owner said he couldn't remember when he came to Barrow or exactly why, but after meeting the likes of Jerry Hansen who was willing to pay six hundred dollars a day in cash for a broken-down heap, he didn't regret his decision.

No one anywhere else would have paid half that amount to buy them. In between his grimy exhalations of cigarette smoke, the man gave Hansen the keys and told him never to drive on the ocean—as if that occurred to Hansen—and never ever to turn the car off.

“Never turn the car off?” asked Hansen. “When is this dream going to end,” he inquired in a failed attempt at shock himself back to reality. That's when the white-haired Hansen remembered the surreal sight of a line of empty parked pickup trucks, all with their motors running as he walked out of the airport terminal.

The NBC Burbank desk asked Russ Weston to stay an extra day to produce the Friday story for
NBC Nightly News
. Weston jumped at the chance. Producing a story for the network news was an opportunity he wasn't about to pass up. But to get the story, Weston had to see the whales. He saw everyone in town transporting themselves on the back of whining ski machines. Surely this was the best way there. But when he tried to rent one, he ran into the same problem Hansen had. The first man Weston found willing to rent a ski machine asked the same thousand dollars that Hansen was quoted for a car just hours earlier—except the thousand dollars wouldn't give him access to the ski machine for the day; it would buy him one round-trip out to the whales.

Weston turned to Oran in disbelief. Could Caudle find him a ride to the whales? Oran suggested getting in touch with the North Slope Borough's Search and Rescue (SAR) department that operated a fleet of helicopters and small fixed-wing aircraft. Perhaps they could arrange to take him up in one of their helicopters for some aerial shots.

Russ's face lit up. He begged Oran to help him get one of those helicopters. He didn't care what it cost; NBC told him to spare no expense. Oran was as anxious to see Russ succeed as Russ was himself. Oran was filled with excitement. Of course he would help. He dialed his friend Randy Crosby, the director and chief pilot of the department, and asked if they could get a lift out to the whales. Crosby said that barring any rescue emergencies, he would meet Caudle and Weston at the SAR airport hangar the next morning and fly them out for free.

After waiting in the large hangar for first light, Geoff, Craig, Russ, Oran, and Randy took off in a Bell 214 helicopter around 9
A.M.
, for a comfortable, heated twelve-minute ride to the languishing whales. For the first time, biologists Geoff and Craig would be able to survey the whales' condition from above. Neither mentioned the possibility that the whales might have died since the last time anyone saw them. The dark orange light of this early Arctic morning revealed the magnificence of a rare cloudless day. From the climate-controlled cabin of the helicopter, the rising sun looked deceptively warm. But it was above the horizon for such a short time and, at such a low angle, its feeble rays were powerless to lessen the bitter cold.

The helicopter flew due west from its pad at the airport and headed straight out to the ice covered Chukchi Sea and flew parallel to the long Point Barrow sandbar. The chopper followed the sandbar north until the two holes in the ice came faintly into view. Their aerial reconnaissance gave Geoff and Craig an idea of what a ship might encounter in the unlikely event the Coast Guard dispatched one to break the ice. They could see that more than a mile of solid new ice stood between the whales and open water. An icebreaker seemed the perfect solution to freeing the three whales.

But Geoff and Craig knew the present circumstances made the use of such a ship impossible. The state of America's icebreaking capacity was a hot issue in Alaska at that very moment. In fact, the Coast Guard's complaints against President Ronald Reagan's administration for its refusal to authorize the construction of more icebreakers was on the same
Anchorage Daily News
front page as the first story about the Barrow whales.

Randy lowered the helicopter onto what looked like the last firm patch of sand on the spit before it drifted below the frozen blanket of ocean. Once on the ground, he had to keep the helicopter at half power so it wouldn't sink into the shifting sand. Russ, Geoff, and Craig jumped out the flimsy door and hopped more than they ran across the sand onto the ice. The ice had grown strong enough to support the weight of three men and their gear and was rough hewn enough to pose no serious risk of slipping or falling down. Billy Adams's prediction of a few days earlier was right on the money.

The ice was now firm enough for them to walk right up to the edge of the hole itself. When they got there, the whales were waiting for them at the surface. The change in their behavior was obvious to Craig and Geoff. When they left them a day earlier, the whales did not yet seem reconciled to the visits of these strange new characters. It was a week since Roy Ahmaogak first discovered the whales swimming in slush on his way back from scouting for the Nuiqsut whalers. Now, they were genuinely trapped. The slush had turned to solid ice half a foot thick. The ice was so deceptively firm, it lulled the men into believing they were walking on terra firma.

Russ set his camera on the ice at the edge of the hole. He opted to shoot parallel to the sea's open and visible waters rather than mounting the camera on a tripod. Russ knew that would make for a more dramatic shot. By rising squarely into the middle of the picture, the whale's head would fill the center of the frame much faster. Russ focused on the churning water in the middle of the hole, turned on the camera and stepped back. Then he waited for the whales to surface. When the first whale came up for air, Russ exhaled a sigh of satisfied relief. His plan for the shot was right on the mark. The focus Russ captured was a spectacular moving image of the whale. It also managed to remarkably convey just how cold it was on the ice. When the whale exhaled, Russ watched through his viewfinder as the water vapor of the whale's breath froze in midair and landed as ice crystals on the lens of the camera. A video veteran of many Alaska whale strandings Russ was still awestruck.

Russ raced back to the helicopter as soon as the baby whale sank beneath the dark water, completing the sequence. He was scheduled to transmit his story to NBC via satellite in less than two hours. He needed to get back to the studio to start editing the footage. Snow whipped by the helicopter lashed Geoff and Craig, who remained behind as Randy lifted off for the trip back to Barrow.

Randy maneuvered his $1,250,000 single-blade helicopter to hover just two hundred feet above the whale's last remaining air hole. Since it was too loud inside the cabin to speak, Russ tapped Randy on the shoulder and motioned that he wanted to take some pictures with Oran's gyrozoom. The aerials would confirm once again NBC's dominance of the early stages of the stranded whale saga. They broke the story, got the first close-ups, and now the first pictures that showed how small the hole really was.

Until Jerry, Don, and Steve Shim—the NBC crew's video editor—had finished setting up shop, NBC's only option that day was to use Russ Weston's video. They weren't sure what to expect of the Anchorage videographer, but Jerry was delighted with what he saw when Russ showed him his footage. He called his assignment desk at NBC with the good news. They responded with good news of their own. The footage would run again tonight on
NBC Nightly News
, only this time for longer and earlier in the broadcast. Clutching a scotch on the rocks, Hansen warmly joked he didn't need his own crew as long as Weston was in town.

5

A Whale in Every Living Room

When Oran Caudle returned to his office following his sojourn with the whales, he found a shell-shocked look on his secretary's face. There were messages on his desk from CBS, ABC, CNN, all the other local stations in Anchorage, and at least a dozen television and radio stations across the country. The soft-spoken Texan laughed in disbelief. He did not know what to make of his instant prominence. In less than twelve hours, the story which he hoped to run on Barrow's local channel really had gone nationwide. The world's most remote television studio and the man who ran it were suddenly sought after by America's leading national broadcasters.

Oran was treated like a man of great importance when he reached the assignment desk by phone. They called him “Mr. Caudle” and even “Sir.”
Sir?
Oran thought. Sir was not a word often used in Barrow. In fact, about the only people who ever used that salutation when addressing him were divorce lawyers and collection agents. But he was their only link to a story suddenly ripe with importance. NBC ran it. Now the other networks had to cover it, or provide darn good reasons why not to. If that meant resorting to flattery, so be it.

NBC's exclusive footage of the trapped whales the night before was immediately recognized as an industry “mini-scoop.” Network news producers loved animal stories. They gave the network anchors a chance to display, in the spirit of the 1988 presidential campaign, and one of its candidate's emphasis on being “kinder and gentler,” how kind and gentle they could be. But for a reason as sublime as it was elusive, whale stories were the best of all, and a whale story like this, was the best of the best. Tom Brokaw had touched a warm spot with even his most cynical viewers at the end of Thursday's broadcast. The struggling whales couldn't help but touch the human heart, and Brokaw could not help using that appeal to stoke his own network's competitive advantage.