Big Miracle (7 page)

One of Oran's biggest frustrations running Barrow's TV studio and production facility was that whenever he thought he had a big story, he had to go begging for his downstate contacts to consider it. The Anchorage and Fairbank TV stations only seemed interested in bad news from the North Slope—making them, in fact, no different at all from TV stations anywhere else. The bad-news stories from the Arctic usually fell in one of a few predictable categories: corruption, crime, alcoholism, bear attacks, or the weather. But for North Slope weather to make news in Alaska? Well, it had to be worse than bad. It had to be awful. And those were not the kind of stories that Oran could push anyway as the seventy-five-degrees-below story was not one local tourism folks were keen to publicize.

Sure enough, when Oran returned the call, Todd wanted to know if anyone had anything new to report on the stranded whales. Whale news was always good news. Pottinger wanted to find out more and hoped Oran could help. Not only did Caudle know all about the whales, he told Pottinger, he had just spent several hours filming them.

“You mean you've got video of them?” Todd Pottinger excitedly asked.

“You betcha,” Oran proudly answered, employing the ubiquitous Alaskan idiom.

“Can you wait just one second?” Pottinger asked, conveying his own excitement as he put Caudle on hold. Todd's hunch paid off. Before Oran could collect his thoughts, Pottinger came back on the line asking how soon Oran could arrange a satellite transmission of some of that footage down to Anchorage. He knew Barrow was home to one of Alaska's biggest white elephants, a highly sophisticated satellite-transmission facility that stood just south of the town's runway—the only year-round transportation link in an ambitious billion-dollar state project to use some of the proceeds from the oil-rich 1970s to connect Alaska's rural villages and settlements with the outside world. But like many other ill-conceived projects of that free-spending era, the transmission facility was rarely used. Although the giant satellite dishes constantly received transmissions, they rarely sent much.

Oran told Todd he wasn't sure the “send” mode of the expensive system even worked. Caudle couldn't recall ever having used it. To him it seemed like a fixture misplaced from a different decade in the frozen tundra. Todd urged him to get an answer back to him as quickly as possible. In the meantime, Pottinger adjusted KTUU's satellite dish in Anchorage so it could receive a transmission from Barrow, should one be sent. Todd didn't have time to wait for Oran to call back. If he wanted to try to get some footage for that night's newscast with time to edit it, Pottinger needed to book thirty minutes on the satellite immediately. He called Alascom, the telecommunications company that owned the $100-million Aurora I satellite launched in October 1982. Aurora I orbited 22,500 miles above the Earth connecting the once isolated forty-ninth state with the rest of the world by telephone, radio, and television.

Pottinger scheduled the feed for Thursday, October 13, 1988, at 1:30
P.M.
, Alaska Standard Time. On behalf of his Anchorage station, KTUU, Pottinger agreed to the $500 satellite time fee whether or not Caudle could figure out how to transmit by then. Meanwhile, Oran Caudle sent his only technician back to the transmission shed to see if he could tune in the video test pattern Oran sent him from his studio to the transmission complex outside the NSB building complex. On the very first try—without any tweaking—the test pattern came in perfectly. Oran called Pottinger to tell him that things seemed all set.

“Oh, by the way,” Todd mentioned matter-of-factly before hanging up, “KING-TV in Seattle wants to downlink the feed for their news.” The Aurora I satellite was parked in geosynchronous Earth orbit 22,500 miles above the north Pacific—making Seattle the only city in the Lower 48 that was able to “see” the Aurora I. This meant that whenever someone in Alaska wanted to transmit or receive a signal from beyond the Pacific Northwest “gateway,” the signal had to be transferred—almost always in Seattle—to a different satellite. This was called “looping.” Even though looping added 45,000 miles to a picture's journey, traveling at just below the 186,000 miles per second speed of light, this detour took less than half a second.

By the time all the arrangements were made, it was 11
A.M.
, leaving Oran Caudle only two hours to reduce the hours of whale footage shot yesterday down to a twenty-minute satellite-ready package. For a network news producer who did this kind of thing every day this would have been no big deal. But Oran Caudle was not a network news producer. He did not do this every day. To him it was a very big deal indeed.

A sudden fear seized Caudle. Could he do it? The footage he shot for local Barrow television was going not only to Anchorage, but also down to Seattle. He always wanted to work with real news professionals. Now he was getting a chance. Oran locked himself in the edit suite where he frantically fast-forwarded through two-and-a-half hours of videotape, screening it for the best shots.

The phone rang. It was Todd. He had called back to reassure Oran. When they last spoke, he had sensed Oran to be a bit on the nervous side. Todd told him to relax. No need to make every edit perfect, he said. That was a job for KTUU's editors.

The task, when completed at 12:15
P.M.
, did not in hindsight appear so daunting. Now, Caudle needed step-by-step instructions on what to do next. He called Todd, who told him to put the edited cassette into the tape machine. Caudle waited for a pattern of color bars to appear on his screen accompanied by the familiar sound of the test tone. When it came through, he was looking at the picture coming back to him in Barrow from the Aurora I. Everything seemed to be working.

Todd Pottinger's report that he saw the same thing at the same time on his monitor down in Anchorage confirmed that all systems were go. Patiently, Pottinger talked Oran through his first live television transmission. “Whenever you're ready,” Todd said, “just hit the Play button and we're in business.” Todd couldn't believe how good the video was. The instant he saw the first shots of the whales, he knew this would be a big television story. He just had no idea how big.

Minutes later, KING-TV in Seattle called to tell Oran that NBC News was rushing to arrange an immediate transmission of Oran's footage to New York. Something about Tom Brokaw wanting to run it on the
NBC Nightly News
. At their boss' suggestion, Brokaw's producers were always looking for a unique, visually appealing story to end the show. When the three trapped whales came up during Thursday morning's conference call, NBC News bureau chiefs readily agreed with the Los Angeles bureau that if the video was any good, the whales might make a good “kicker,” TV slang for the story that ends each newscast.

Oran could hardly believe what he was hearing: His story on
NBC Nightly News
? He was just glad Todd didn't pass on that bit of news before they finished transmitting. He was already a nervous wreck. Now he was a speechless nervous wreck. It wasn't so long ago that Caudle was covering local beauty pageants back in Commerce, Texas.

Thursday, October 16, 1988, at 12:30
P.M.
Alaska Standard Time, the three frightened whales still concerned only a handful of people in a small Eskimo town straddling the top of the world. Hours later, 15 million Americans saw them for the first time. (Back in 1988, people actually watched the
NBC Nightly News
.) They watched as the whales gasped for air. It was a sudden and unexpected diversion from the day's big news: the closing weeks of the 1988 presidential campaign between Republican Vice President George H. W. Bush and Democrat Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.

The moment the first image of a stranded whale appeared on a television screen at KING-TV in Seattle, no one could have imagined that days later, America would turn its attention away from its great quadrennial event and direct it instead toward the nonevent of three California gray whales trapped in frozen waters off the continent's northernmost point.

But for those assigned to cover the story, it was even harder to prepare for the world they would soon enter, the world of Barrow, Alaska—a world like no other.

3

The Eskimos: 25,000 Years Below Zero Degrees

In 1826, an Arctic explorer named Thomas Elson took one of history's great adventures. One day, while exploring Alaska's northern coast, Elson took a step 25,000 years back in time. He stumbled upon a string of prehistoric Eskimo hunting settlements along the edge of the world's northernmost periphery. What Elson did not know at the time was that he had discovered evidence of a people whose very existence defied human logic. These people not only managed to survive longer than any other known civilization, but they did so in the world's harshest known environment, one where life itself seemed a miracle.

Although the natives called their home Utqiagviq, Elson named it Barrow, after a British patron of Arctic expeditions. For 25,000 years, these nomadic tribes scattered throughout both Alaska's coast and interior evolved in complete isolation. Their Inupiat language and their unique culture seemed based upon a single primary influence: the whale. The whale provided not only food, but heat, shelter and spiritual moorings. The whale was more than a food source to these ancient people. It was more than a creature. It was to them a spirit, its capture a gift. What other visible source could provide the Eskimo with everything they needed to survive?

Whale meat was the perfect food source. It was so rich with vitamins and minerals that those who consumed it seemed immune to nutritional diseases that ravaged others. It provided a high concentration of vitamin D, a vital nutrient most people got from the sun, a source never strong enough to deliver amounts necessary for survival in the high Arctic. The meat from the bowhead whale had the highest fat concentration of any known natural food source, yet heart disease seemed to be unknown. The pre-Modern Inupiat Eskimos ate no fruits, vegetables, or grains, yet their diet contained as much fiber as any other.

They lived in the world's most unforgiving climate where even the most prepared often die when exposed to it. Before their introduction to non-Eskimo peoples, ways, and pathogens, local records seemed to indicate that Inupiat lived long and healthy lives. Time would prove the Eskimos to be most fragile. So long removed from contact with other peoples, the Inupiat Eskimo was defenseless against diseases carried by those now entering the Eskimo world. Like most other native peoples in North America, the Eskimos had no way to prepare for or to protect themselves against the arrival of the nineteenth century.

Thomas Elson's first visit lasted but a few days, but it would forever change the Inupiat people. Romantics, undoubtedly white and who lived far away, would mourn visits like Elson's as being unmitigated disasters—that each new outside influence would accelerate decline and leave one of the world's oldest civilizations vulnerable to the future's risks but also anxious to partake of its opportunities.

At first, visits from the outside were few and far between, but like change everywhere else, when it landed on the shores of Utqiagviq, it could not be stopped. It could, however, be managed. And it was: sometimes it was managed well, other times not so well. Local Inuit civilization didn't start its visible “decline” until several decades after Elson's first visit, but since no one from the outside really had a good sense what life was really like before the explorer's arrival, the benchmarks for measuring decline could only start from the early nineteenth century.

Whaling was America's first great global industry. The explosion of commercial whaling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was no cheap trick, changing and shaping the development of the young United States like no other single industry. Whaling ships were state of the art, and played a central role in America's war of independence. Whalers provided products that profoundly improved the lives of everyday Americans, generating the huge capital required to fuel America's burgeoning Industrial Revolution.

The environmental narrative, increasingly accepted as the only narrative, accepts almost as a given that all our modern ailments derive from the changes spawned by the Industrial Revolution, namely the move from water to coal as the economy's primary source of fuel. But like most stories, this one has two sides, and in this story, equating the bad with the good is being generous to the bad. The benefits of industrialization far outweighed its costs and not just to humans but also to the environment. The Industrial Revolution's success was in no case more vivid than the story of the whale itself.

The Industrial Revolution saw both the expansion of commercial whaling and also the end of commercial whaling. In nearly destroying the species, the Industrial Revolution paved the way for whales not just to recover but to flourish as never before. When the Industrial Revolution started in the late eighteenth century whales were to humans what they had always been: an animal hunted for its food, its fuel, and the countless other products developed over the centuries. The whale's oil came from the blubber that sheathed its body, with the oil of each whale species varying in both quality and use.

The most prized of all whale oils was that found in the nose of the sperm whale used to make what experts even today contend were the finest candles and perfumes ever made. Whale parts were used to make everything from fertilizers to fishing rods and umbrellas to piano keys. But by the closing days of the Industrial Revolution, the first third of the twentieth century, the great mammals had become something entirely new to humanity—a magnificent and endangered creature to be protected and enjoyed.

While whaling was a major industry in the nineteenth century, and the United States was the preeminent whaling nation, the industry was so competitive it was never particularly profitable for those actually in it. Even as prices for whale products rose, profit margins seemed always to fall. By the middle of the 1800s, one out of ten whaling ships failed each year. But no matter how much trouble the industry had eking out its own share, they never lacked demand for their products. That demand reached such extraordinary heights that the richest New England whaling companies plowed millions of dollars into new ships that could spend years at sea looking for whales in waters stretching to the farthest corners of the globe.