Big Miracle Page 9

  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.

  If the other networks wanted in on the game, they needed to get moving. Time was wasting. If they worried about money, they could never play. By whatever means they could muster, ABC and CBS, not to mention CNN, had to figure out how to get their own video of the whales on the air to close their own Friday night newscasts. They tracked down Oran through a graphic NBC News superimposed on the footage it used the night before. It read, “Courtesy of the North Slope Borough.”

  At first, nobody at the networks knew what the “North Slope Borough” meant, let alone wha
t it was, but finding out was the very thing reporters were trained to do. They called Alaska directory assistance and got the number for the North Slope Borough. When they asked for the person responsible for the video that appeared on NBC News the night earlier, the switchboard operator transferred them to Oran. The first calls Oran returned were from the networks. After talking to CBS, ABC, and CNN, he found his freelance camera services at the center of a two-way bidding war. CBS and ABC crews were on the way to Barrow. But until they got there, they needed Oran Caudle to help them get the footage they had to have for their Friday night broadcasts.

  Until the other networks put their own footage on the air, this story was an NBC exclusive. People interested in finding out more about the trapped whales would tune in Brokaw and tune out Peter Jennings (ABC) and Dan Rather (CBS). NBC had the obvious advantage—Don, Jerry, and Steve were already on the ground and transmitting.

  CBS and ABC wanted in on the game. They asked Oran to go back for “fresh” video of the whales. Each time they spoke to him they raised their cash offers by hundreds of dollars. As he could not serve two masters simultaneously, Caudle sold his exclusive services a day at a time. In the end, CBS won the Day Two Oran Caudle sweepstakes by agreeing to pay him two thousand dollars to arrange one trip out to the whales. That was the going rate for exclusivity.

  “Wowee, I can’t believe it,” Oran exulted in his north Texas drawl. He would make in one morning more than he would in a week and a half with his job at the borough.

  Oran knew CNN could never compete with the cash offers made by the networks. These were the halcyon days of network news; immortalized just the year prior by the Hollywood hit movie Broadcast News, which starred William Hurt and Holly Hunter. But Caudle personified the subtle change seeping over American TV viewers. He preferred CNN; not because it was CNN necessarily, but because it was a full-time news network. At six o’clock every morning, it ran the Barrow temperature. Oran felt that any network that acknowledged Barrow deserved to be acknowledged itself. He would give CNN free use of the footage he shot for himself the day before as long as it gave the borough credit on the air. The twenty-four-hour news network was only too glad to accept.

  Oran barreled into Russ Weston as he ran out the door in his hurry to get back to the whales before dark. In his exuberance, Oran told Russ that the other networks were sending up their own crews. “Isn’t that great?” he asked. Needless to say, Russ did not quite share in Caudle’s enthusiasm. Russ’s exclusive would soon enough be no such thing. From now on, he would have to compete with his competitors for the story that up to that point was his alone.

  The transmission facility was destined to start heating up with activity. Since only one signal could be transmitted at a time, Oran knew the task of handing out the time slots would fall in his lap. Had Oran been at the Anchorage International Airport that Friday afternoon, he might have gotten a glimpse of what would soon be descending on his quiet studio over the next two weeks. The normally quiet MarkAir ticket counter hummed with unexpected activity for the afternoon flight to Barrow.

  MarkAir was more than the only commercial and freight airlines serving Barrow. In a village with no land or sea routes, it was Barrow’s lifeline, its only physical connection to the outside world. Without it, the town would find itself stranded. Outside of government, it was Barrow’s biggest business, the source of everything from food and gasoline to transportation to all away games for the Barrow High School basketball team. The three daily flights carried much more than people. They carried the town’s future, supplying virtually everything modern Barrow needed to survive its brutal environment.

  MarkAir’s new fleet of Boeing 737 jets had movable bulkheads. Usually, the front two-thirds of the cabin on Barrow-bound flights held cargo. Even at $337 for the cheapest one-way seat, MarkAir couldn’t afford to give up the cargo space unless the plane was full.

  But after this afternoon, the agents faced a rare problem. There were more people trying to get to Barrow than there were seats on the plane, including more than a dozen people from CBS and the other Anchorage television stations. Behind them calmly stood the local representatives of the national wire services. To them, Alaska was home. But even they could not fathom what Barrow would bring.

  Crates of heavy television equipment began to pile up in front of the ticket counter. Luckily for MarkAir, Ed Rogers was in the Anchorage office and not out checking up on cargo operations at one of the airline’s remote sites deep in the Alaska bush. Rogers served as the director of cargo sales for MarkAir and instantly saw both the revenue potential and logistical problems of the unexpected passengers and their baggage. He wouldn’t think of turning away full-fare paying passengers along with the fees he would collect from their excess luggage; but with those fees would come costs. He ordered the preloaded cargo off-loaded to make room for seats in the front two-thirds of the Barrow-bound Boeing 737. The cargo taken off the passenger flight was flown up later in the day on a special plane. Rogers kept everyone happy and made MarkAir a handsome profit in the process.

  Instead of waiting impatiently for the aircraft to be reconfigured, several of the reporters wandered to the airport’s watering hole for an afternoon pick-me-up. They had no idea this would be their last chance to buy a drink legally. Under most circumstances, Barrow was dry and drinking was illegal. In the cabin, mock panic accompanied word that Barrow was dry. One of the stewardesses sought help from the cockpit. The captain’s sardonic announcement confirming the rumors only fueled the fake outrage. Stewardesses quickly took their serving carts to quiet the good-natured clamoring for last shots. With one trip down the aisle, every bottle of alcohol was gone. The more seasoned Alaska hands calmly sat through the hubbub, reassured by the bootleg caches of liquor stashed away in their luggage. Once the administered drugs took effect, the cabin calmed down.

  The pilot wakened his slightly inebriated passengers (it’s never too early for a drink if you are a reporter) on descent to Barrow with news that he had permission from Randy Crosby’s air traffic control station in Barrow to make a low-pass flyover above the stranded whales. The trapped whales were not just a national news item anymore. Now they were a tourist attraction.

  The influx gathered pace for the next ten days. The Top of the World Hotel started auctioning off beds, as opposed to rooms. People in town for the long-planned mayor’s conference and other business returned to the hotel after their day’s work to find themselves squeezed inside suddenly shared rooms they had booked and paid in advance as sole private rooms. Making matters worse was that their new roommates weren’t normal people; they were rude media types. Since the invading hordes gladly paid three hundred dollars a day for beds in shared rooms, the hotel was willing to take the heat from their displaced guests.

  Barrow had never seen anything like it. The current attention, although it had only just started, dwarfed the coverage of the only other event in Barrow to interest anybody on the Outside. On August 15, 1935, a plane crashed ten miles south of Barrow, killing both of its celebrity passengers: legendary humorist Will Rogers and famed aviation pioneer Wiley Post. The few daring journalists who actually reached the remote site back then aptly named the tragic site of the crash “Desolation Point.”

  The world had changed by 1988. There were satellites, regularly scheduled jet flights, and ski machines. Modern Barrow had running water and a choice among Innuit, American, Mexican, and Chinese cuisine. With all its imported social ills, Barrow had so far managed to avoid one of the most pervasive problems in the Lower 48: homelessness. When the affliction struck, its source was completely unexpected. Suddenly the town was overrun by an influx of reporters with nowhere to stay.

  Barrowans started clearing floor space in their homes to accommodate as many Outsiders as they could. The shivering and exhausted members of the fourth estate had little choice but to subject themselves to extortion if it meant escape from the elements. They paid a minimum of one hundred dollars each just for the privilege of s
leeping on a cold floor in a private home. If you wanted accoutrements like mattresses, sheets, blankets, even running water, you had to pay for them. Many of these suddenly entreprenurial hosts were flexible in the compensation they would accept. The reporters learned quickly that what cash couldn’t buy, whiskey would. Word spread back down the food chain that folks en route to Barrow should stock up on spirits to help grease their way toward a smooth and warm landing. A hundred-dollar bill wrapped around a bottle of J&B secured more than one vacant bed.

  The large loophole in Barrow’s prohibition was seized upon with alacrity. It was a top priority for many reporters. A not-so obscure provision allowed nonresidents to apply for temporary liquor import licenses. As everyone knew, the applications were available at the Barrow City Hall, which became the site of an almost endless line of those seeking an exemption from the harsh sentence of temperance. Locals roamed the line offering hundreds of dollars to those willing to use their permits to help them illegally resupply their own caches. Once Outsiders—in this case, reporters—got their permits, they made arrangements with their bureaus for shipments of Barrow’s preferred medium of exchange. Thousands of dollars worth of beer, wine, and hard liquor were shipped overnight express by the caseload. Ed Rogers’s joke was that the MarkAir cargo storage area was beginning to resemble a wholesale liquor warehouse.

  Some newsmen phoned in their complaints to their more comfortably assignment editors, decrying Barrow’s lack of amenities and begging for relief. Others thrived in the “hardship.” In fact, it wasn’t hardship as much as it was novelty. Each privation endured was a badge they could later point to as proof of their ability to report under varying levels of adversity.