Big Miracle (6 page)

When Oran, Billy, and the technicians arrived at NARL at 8:30
A.M.
Wednesday morning, they found the biologists looking worried. Craig and Geoff thought that time was running out for the whales. The National Weather Service said temperatures could fall to forty degrees below zero out on the ice. With such cold, the whales' only hope was for wind to keep the sea from freezing, but the forecast predicted no wind. Without wind, the holes would freeze and the whales would drown before the day was out.

The ride out to the whales took longer than Oran expected. When the six of them brought their ski machines to a halt ten yards from the snow-covered beach, Geoff and Craig were amazed at how much new ice had formed overnight. The whales were right where the biologists left them. They continued their grim dance. The baby seemed steadier, taking more regular breaths. Billy Adams crept out to see how much farther he could walk. He was able to get much further beyond his earlier footprints. Remarkably, his tracks from yesterday looked as if they were just made—proof of the Arctic's low humidity and quiet winds. At this rate, the whales did not have long to survive.

Too excited to lament their fate, Caudle was spellbound just by the sight of the whales and almost dropped his camera. Craig told him to calm down. “Just relax, these whales aren't going anywhere,” he assured him. “Take your time. Do what you have to do to get ready. The whales don't have much choice; they have to wait for you.”

This was new. Here were three animals in their natural habitat that could be treated as though they were props back in his production studio. Normally in the wild, photographers are lucky to get any pictures. Oran calmed himself down and set up his camera. Equipment failure was still his main worry. At forty degrees below, any failure was not only possible, it was likely. Still, even if his gear worked, Oran wasn't sure how long he could keep it working. It was more than cold; it was dangerous, both for him and his gear. When he breathed the bitter air too deeply, it singed his lungs. In weather this cold, bones become brittle and easily break.

When Oran looked into the viewfinder, he saw only fog. He knew not to rip the camera apart to get at the droplets of water causing the condensation. There was only one thing to do. He put the camera on the tripod and waited for the inside of his camera to get as cold as the outside so that the condensation would vanish. Geoff and Craig noticed the whales were still not comfortable with all the commotion on the top of ice. The animals most likely feared the men's footsteps were those of a prowling polar bear. Breathing holes are favorite stalking grounds for polar bears. Like fish in a barrel.

The trapped whales were extremely vulnerable and they knew it. Every time they rose to the surface, they were dangerously exposed. A polar bear could kill a giant whale with one devastating swipe of its paw. The whales tried to stay underwater as long as they could. But sooner or later they had to face whatever was stomping around above them. They had to breathe.

While Oran fiddled with the expensive equipment, Geoff and Craig tallied the effects of the whales' predicament. They tried to think of ways to nudge the whales toward open water. The ultimate question was whether they could influence gray whales even if they could come up with a plan to do so. Oran asked Craig to sit down so he could take his first pictures of the whales surfacing in the background. He lifted his heavy twenty-five-pound video camera onto his shoulder, focused the zoom lens, and squeezed his thumb against the soft rubber record button. Caudle lumbered about trying to record every aspect of the whales. He put the camera on a tripod and filmed Billy Adams testing the ice in the foreground with the whales bobbing their gigantic heads against the stark white background.

Since the water was rapidly freezing, Caudle wanted to know how far the solid ice now extended. Would it be safe to walk right out to the edge of the breathing holes by the next morning? Billy Adams thought it might. In a guttural Eskimo accent, he said, “If the holes aren't froze over, we could probably get close enough to pet 'em.”

Oran had an idea. “Let's do some interviews,” he suggested. “We can edit them to go with the pictures of the whales for local TV. Which one of you guys wants to be interviewed?” Caudle inquired of his captive audience. Since the film would be shown on the local channel, Oran had to get some local flavor. That meant Billy or his assistant Marie.

Of the six people now on the ice, Marie seemed best suited to conduct the interviews. She was director of public information for the North Slope Borough. She was also Geoff Carroll's wife. In spite of her title, she didn't agree at first; Oran had to coax her. Geoff and Craig pretended to be completely absorbed in their various tasks. They were collecting lots of new data they would need to analyze, but they were also camera shy.

Oran assured Marie she looked great. Besides, if she didn't, who would ever know? After more playful prodding, she agreed to question her husband and then Craig. Oran thrust the microphone into her hand and pushed the Record button. “Go ahead,” he said with one eye squinted shut and the other buried in the viewfinder. “Ask him what he is doing out here and what he thinks of the whales.”

Marie was quick to pose coherent questions. She asked Geoff how the whales were discovered and what he thought their chances that they would either be able to escape or be harvested. Geoff said he didn't know for sure on either count; all he knew was what he could see in front of him. The whales were not in great shape.

She then interviewed Craig, who sounded professional, factual, and concise, if a little stiff. His stark face matched the terrain. With the whales active in the background, Oran knew he was finally recording some good stuff. (If he only knew how good!) Craig told Marie that the Wildlife Management office had a rare chance to study a natural phenomenon he was not sure anyone had been able to see before. “Unfortunately, there just isn't enough data yet to comment with any authority as to how these whales got stuck or what their chances might be to swim free,” said Craig. Little did he know what good practice these quick sound-bites would be for the gathering storm looming on their personal horizons.

Oran wanted Billy in front of the camera to lend authority to the story's locality. Billy was an Inupiat whom everyone in town knew and who would make the setting more authentic, the story more compelling. And it would get critics off Oran's back. As much better paid advance men for major party presidential candidates were proving at the same time down in the Lower 48, visual backgrounds were rapidly moving into the foreground of what critics now deemed to be “good” television.

As Billy and Marie began speaking into the microphone, one of the two larger whales rose to breathe and burst brilliantly into frame. Oran stumbled in the slush as he backed up for a wider shot. He couldn't imagine a more powerful image. He couldn't describe what he naturally intuited. These creatures had a remarkable pull over the imaginations of everyone who saw them. Here the whales were fighting for each breath in front of people who went to great lengths and not insignificant personal risk just to see them. Oran's reaction didn't seem much different than anyone else's. It was more emotional than journalistic. It had to be—other than new data collected, there was nothing inherently journalistic about three whales either stranding themselves or being stranded at the very tip of North America.

What would become clear soon enough was that this story's real drama was unfolding not under the ice but on top of it: people gathering to watch captive whales becoming themselves captive to their fate.

As Billy spoke, he motioned behind him to note the stressed condition of the baby whale. At that moment, the baby rose timidly through the ice and stole the show. Bloodied and tired, the desperate animal lay motionless. The pathetic creature seemed to appeal to the camera for help, as if it somehow knew its message would soon be transmitted to creatures of an alien but caring species. The audio came across the bleak landscape perfectly, but Oran wasn't paying attention to the sound. He was spellbound by the immense power of the pictures he was shooting. Billy and Marie called and shouted his name several times before they got a response. They were trying to tell him they were finished.

“What do you mean you're done?” Oran bristled. “Just keep talking, I don't care what y'all say,” he bellowed. “Just keep talking. Nobody will listen to what you say; it's the pictures they want to see and the pictures need some audio. This is just too incredible.” Everyone was astonished. They never saw Oran so insistent. How could he possibly be so interested in hearing what they already said three times? Oran beseeched them to keep up the charade. Marie asked Billy the same questions over and over.

Watching these whales was like being on a drug so good it had to be illegal. As much video as Oran got, he had to have more. He had long since forgotten about the cold. Was it cold out here? When he finally ran out of tape, the others convinced him it was a good time to head back to town. By the way, yes, it was cold. In the four hours they spent out on the ice, the shelf of what appeared to be solid ice had grown an amazing twenty-five feet or so out toward the whale hole. If the cold kept up, they would be able to walk all the way out to the whales by tomorrow. But that begged the central question: just how long could the breathing holes stay open? In any case, it was time for these shivering humans to get back to town.

The return trip on the back of the snowmobiles was even colder than the ride out. But after all the excitement, enough adrenaline was circulating to keep their blood warm enough to manage the ride back without too much discomfort. After a chance to warm up and grab a bite to eat, Craig used Geoff's office to notify the Coast Guard about the trapped whales and to see if they wanted to send someone out to see if they could think of any way to help them. The closest permanently manned Coast Guard office was 1,200 miles to the south in Anchorage. He and Geoff thought the whales could easily be freed if there were a ship in the area to break a path through the soft slushy ice. Maybe the Anchorage office could authorize one of its North Slope vessels to cut a quick channel from open water into the whales, which at that point was still less than a mile. They didn't need a big ship; certainly nothing like an icebreaker. The ice was still slushy enough for any medium-size ship to do the job.

The biologists hoped their request would not be considered a big deal. Wednesday afternoon, they left a message with the Coast Guard duty officer who promised to pass it on. Later that night, a reporter named Susan Gallagher called the Coast Guard to see if anything newsworthy was going on. Gallagher was an Alaska night-beat reporter for the Associated Press. It was part of her job to phone the Coast Guard every night to find out if there were any late-breaking stories. The Coast Guard was constantly mounting search-and-rescue efforts to find lost or stranded hunters, whalers, adventurers, and who knows who else—especially late in the fall. But, a rescue effort for whales? That was a first. And within hours, the biggest rescue by humans of nonhumans in Alaska history—who knew, maybe even in all history—would be underway.

Gallagher dutifully took down the details as they were relayed to her by the Coast Guard duty officer and turned it into a nondescript, quick wire-service story. She couldn't spend that much time on it as there were other, seemingly more important news—involving people—that had to get turned into copy before deadline. When the night editor of the
Anchorage Daily News
saw Gallagher's story come across the wire, he decided to run it as a small item below the fold on the front page of Thursday morning's edition. Six days after the whales were first discovered, a small story about them made page one—and with no pictures!

Lucky whales.

Gallagher wrote: “A trio of whales trapped by ice in the Arctic Ocean used two openings for life-saving air Wednesday as biologists sought help to free the animals. The three California gray whales apparently were swimming from the Beaufort Sea to their winter grounds off Mexico when they got caught in the ice east of Point Barrow a week ago, said Geoff Carroll, a biologist from the North Slope Borough. He said the whales' movement kept open two holes in the ice, but those openings shrank as temperatures plunged and new ice formed. By Wednesday, when Barrow's minus thirteen degrees set a record low for the date, the holes were 450 feet offshore.”

The chain reaction had begun. The next link in that chain was a television reporter at KTUU-TV, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage, named Todd Pottinger. Pottinger saw the front-page story in Thursday morning's
Anchorage Daily News
as he got ready for work. Each day, work started with a morning assignment meeting that would determine which stories everyone was to cover in anticipation of that evening's newscast. At the age of twenty-six, Pottinger had already been in the television news business long enough to know that whales always meant news. The minute he saw the story, he was sold. People loved whales. Whether they were beached, mating, or just swimming by, whales were always worth a segment—sometimes more—on the Anchorage evening news. The news director needed no convincing. Whales were sure, safe. It was Pottinger's story to run with.

Pottinger flipped through his Rolodex for Oran Caudle's phone number. Alaska was much too big for one local news agency to cover alone. Newspapers, wire services, and television stations relied on freelance stringers across the state to report on the areas they couldn't cover themselves. For TV stations looking for footage of any kind from Alaska's North Slope, Oran Caudle was that man. He operated that region's only modern television facility.

When Oran got to work that Thursday morning, a hand-scribbled message stating that Todd Pottinger from Anchorage had called was prominently placed on top of his desk. Oran was confused. He knew the whales would connect, but could Pottinger be calling about them already? How would he know about them? Oran himself had only just seen them the day before. No matter. Whenever anyone from Anchorage called, it was good news for Oran Caudle. It meant he had a chance to interact with someone in the state's media capital, not to mention the opportunity to connect the North Slope Borough with the rest of the state. He watched Todd read the Anchorage news every night on TV up in Barrow and was proud to know him. The two were friendly and had worked together in the past. Part of Oran's job was to assist outside television stations covering Barrow. While he was supposed to make sure that whatever coverage he helped outsiders collect would be favorable to the NSB, there was no real way to do that. Journalists were journalists; they report what they want. This wasn't just a theory for Oran; he had been burned enough to know this to be the bitter truth. Barrow was too far for same-day delivery of the
Anchorage Daily News,
meaning he didn't know yet that his whales were page-one news in the state's most important city. Still, the instant he saw the message, he knew Pottinger had to have heard about the whales somehow.