Big Miracle (22 page)

Carroll stared wondrously at the remarkable site below him. He shook his head in amazement as the plane touched down at the Wiley Post–Will Rogers Memorial Airport. From the ergonomic seat of his plush plane, the bitter, lifeless elements outside his window looked deceivingly like a fairytale wonderland as the plane taxied toward Randy Crosby's Search and Rescue hangar at the opposite end of the 7,000-foot runway. Before the pilot could cut the engines, Carroll and Haller watched in bewilderment as the SAR hangar bays slid open, letting loose a stream of television cameramen and entangled technicians racing each other in a mad dash for position at the bottom of the airplane's steps. No longer did it seem like such a wonderland.

“This happens wherever I go,” Carroll deadpanned.

Like a seasoned political campaigner, Carroll smiled broadly and briskly waved as he stepped off the plane. Nonplussed by the cluster of microphones stuck in front of his chest, he warmly shook hands with Ron Morris who was clearly freezing cold. The much larger Carroll put his arm around the man's shoulder. As they walked across the tarmac, the cameras captured Colonel Carroll as he listened to Morris. They walked together into the “secured” part of the hangar, leaving Mike Haller to deal with the media.

Once inside, Colonel Carroll asked to meet the man in charge. He figured it was the big smiling man standing in a blue flight suit in the back of the room. His confident aura matched with his Grizzly Adams look gave Carroll the sense that this man was the boss. He was right. It was Randy Crosby, director and chief pilot of the North Slope Search and Rescue command. When Carroll watched the burly rescue pilot pour him a generous mug of hot North Slope coffee, he knew they were destined to get along just fine.

Carroll boarded Randy's second chopper and flew out to the site. Carroll caught his first glimpse of the whales when the red, white, and yellow helicopter prepared to touch down on the frozen surface of the Chukchi Sea. By mid-morning Sunday, Randy had already flown enough people out to the ice to know how excited they became the first time they saw the whales. Carroll was no exception. When he stepped out of the chopper, Randy motioned to the colonel to duck his head until he was clear of the swirling blade. Although the ice seemed like it was rock solid, Crosby could not take any chances. He kept the chopper on half power. If the ice started to buckle beneath him, Crosby had just seconds to raise the helicopter into the safety of the air. Those on the ice would have to fend for themselves.

Carroll walked toward the whales while trying to listen to Arnold Brower Jr. describe the ice conditions over the loud commotion of the television crews following them. He asked Brower how far it was to the ridge and if anyone had been out there yet. Brower said the closest paths through the ice were four to five miles away, twice as far as they were when the whales were first discovered nine days earlier.

Each day the whales were stuck beneath the ice, the farther they were from the safety of the lead's open water. But even that safety was rapidly vanishing. The open water lead that separated the growing formation of new ice from the encroaching polar ice pack was shrinking almost a mile a day. When Carroll and Crosby saw it Sunday morning, October 16, they figured it was less than fifteen miles wide. If they couldn't free the whales before the two ice formations met and closed off the lead, the whales would die. Brower walked with the colonel to the edge of the crowded hole. Not seeing any whales, Carroll tentatively leaned his tall frame to peer straight down into the bubbling dark gray sea. Just as his head broke the water's parallel plain, one of the whales burst out of the sea spraying water all over the startled colonel. That night's newscasts and the next morning's papers carried comical pictures of the decorated war veteran struggling to wipe crystallized whale breath off his face.

When they met him, Geoff and Craig had one message for the colonel: Get that hoverbarge to Barrow. They told him that the whales he was fondly admiring didn't have much time. Although the chain saws could be counted on to help keep the hole open, the biologists didn't think it would be long before the whales started showing signs of fatigue. Carroll promised to do his best. Holding his hat so it wouldn't blow off, he offered the two biologists a customary salute and ran back to Randy Crosby's waiting whirlybird.

Crosby, Carroll, and Brower flew west to inspect conditions at the ice's outermost edge. When Crosby lowered the 214 Lone Ranger into position for landing, the newest and most forbidding obstacle came towering into view. Powerful ocean currents had heaved up huge walls of ice. In some places, the pressure ridge rose as high as thirty feet above the ocean's surface. In the midst of all the shards, Crosby looked intently for a safe place to touch down.

Carroll and Ron Morris saw that the ice around the whales was not thick enough to challenge the hoverbarge's purported ice breaking ability. But the pressure ridge proved to be another story. There was no way the hoverbarge could break through it. Hoping to find weaknesses, the rescuers flew along the ridge to look for breaks in the ice wall where the barge might be able to sneak through.

The colonel could have canceled the National Guard plan to tow the hovercraft. If the barge couldn't break the pressure ridge, why bring it from Prudhoe? Instead of giving up, Morris, Brower, and Carroll agreed that the National Guard should proceed with the hovercraft operation. Brower was asked to help find Eskimos willing to scout the area for suitable routes the hovercraft could take through the pressure ridge. After flying back to his waiting aircraft at the Search and Rescue hangar, Carroll gathered his men, thanked Randy Crosby for his tour and told Ron Morris to keep those holes open.

“We'll see you in a couple of days,” he said confidently to the cameras as he leapt up his King Air's aluminum stairs. He would be back, but not as a hero. With Carroll gone, Morris had less than an hour to prepare for the arrival of the next contingent of VIP rescuers, the oilmen. The ARCO jet carrying Billy Bob Allen and Ben Odom followed Carroll's previous flight path. It made the same banking turn and was met at the hangar by the same chorus of reporters. For Randy Crosby, it was “déjà vu all over again.” Allen climbed aboard Crosby's helicopter, promising Odom and Leathard he would be a good sport. He went along to show Pete he supported his efforts and would earnestly help him pull the rescue off. The remarkable scenery of Barrow and the Arctic left Bill Allen unmoved. He had seen it hundreds of times in the past twenty years. This is where he made his fortune. He was sure he had seen all there was to see. But the impatient oilman and his patrician colleague were in for a sight that would change them forever.

Billy Bob stepped off the helicopter intent on concealing his lack of interest in the whales to the very end. He would tell the reporters how he hoped the three creatures could be freed. He would commend everybody who helped with the rescue, then return to the hangar, pour himself a cup of coffee into a Styrofoam cup, and fly off. When the helicopter set down, it blew away the snow covering the foot thick floor of glaring, bluish-gray Arctic ice.

Morris introduced Allen, Odom, and Leathard to Arnold Brower Jr., who had been busy at work with a crew of men trying to expand the whales' lone breathing hole. Allen and Brower conversed over the helicopter's loud roar. It was a few minutes before Billy Bob even realized he had not seen the whales. He did not know how long it would be before they appeared but he wasn't interested in hanging around in minus twenty-five degrees weather to wait for them.

The first whale rose just as it had thousands of times before in the nine days since it was first discovered. But for Bill Allen it was an indescribable revelation, an epiphany. A look of youthful wonder swept across his face. Pete Leathard had never seen him so animated. The middle-aged oilman abandoned all his inhibitions and for a brief moment became young Billy Bob again. He ran to the edge of the hole and quickly dropped down to one knee. Eagerly reaching out across the open water, Billy Bob stroked his hand across the side of the battered whale's face. The whale moved still closer to Allen and jutted its head over the edge of the hole. In an irresistible appeal for more attention from its new friend, the whale knocked Billy Bob down when he playfully butted its huge but battered snout into his chest.

The whales worked their magic yet again. For Allen, as for most non-Eskimos, the whale's magnificence was a relatively recent discovery. Well into the twentieth century, the only people ever to get so close to whales did so to kill them and at great personal risk. But man's transformation from whale killer to whale saver was so quick and so universal that by the end of that same century, hundreds of millions of people around the world would watch as great nations committed millions of dollars and hundreds of men to free three whales trapped at an isolated edge of the universe.

In the eyes of almost all seafaring cultures, the whale has always stood atop the pantheon of animal mythology. Throughout history the whale has played the part of legend, myth and allegory. From Jonah's punishment-cum-repentance in the mouth of the whale, to Ahab's battle of wills with Moby Dick, there has never been another creature quite like it. The leviathan has run the gamut of human emotion while never falling from consciousness. The whale has been everything but ignored.

For most of human history, one word has best categorized man's relationship with a creature it barely knew: fear. Whales are the biggest creatures ever to inhabit the earth. The hundred-foot blue whale is bigger than even the largest dinosaurs. Its gargantuan size convinced generations that the whale was evil. Ascribing evil powers that the whale did not possess, people avoided them at all costs. According to some legends, those who even saw them from a distance were marked for early death. For so long, man knew so little about the whale, he thought it was a fish. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the great beast was finally conquered. The once proud behemoth was no match for whaling fleets armed with harpoon guns. As man became more familiar with the animal he now relentlessly hunted, his conception of it began to change. The whale's long unknown attributes started to surface. Its remarkable intelligence, its grace, its unjustified trust of man confounded the age-old stereotypes. But, more than anything else, the whale had a certain undeniable charm, a charm of remarkable gentleness. Old myths died quiet deaths.

But only after slaughtering virtually every one of them did man first take note of the whale's greatness, a greatness he knew might vanish from the face of the earth. Perhaps out of guilt for having so long misunderstood and sought to undermine the creature, did man embrace the whale, now nicknamed the Gentle Giant, as a symbol of his own concern for a world he was destroying. Saving the whale was a first step toward saving ourselves.

After seeing the whales, Billy Bob Allen couldn't explain it in words any better than before. But he knew whales were special.

10

From Kickers to Leads

News, by definition, is unpredictable. If it is expected, it's not news. To people in Barrow, the stranding of the three California gray whales was not news. It was expected and predictable. But to those on the Outside, it was an unprecedented chance to think of themselves as part of an effort to help rescue one of man's favorite animals. Once Oran Caudle's first pictures of the trapped whales reached Todd Pottinger's editing machine at KTUU-TV in Anchorage, it unleashed an outpouring of interest and concern rarely experienced in the human species.

In many ways, this was the story television was created to cover. It offered an abundance of spectacular natural imagery with almost no need for analysis. A picture of the rising, spouting, and surging of desperate whales confined to a tiny hole in the middle of a frozen Arctic Ocean said infinitely more than the couched words of a television commentator. It captured the imagination of millions of people in a way network executives had rarely seen. Only the immediacy of television could convey the whales' almost hypnotic allure. Somewhat the same way that a cat stuck in a tree could mobilize an entire town, three gray whales stuck in Arctic ice mobilized an entire world.

Within hours of the first NBC broadcast on Thursday, October 13, six days after the whales were first discovered, the network's New York switchboard was jammed with hundreds of calls from ordinary citizens around the country. They wanted to know how they could help. Friday morning, Greenpeace's Washington office handled hundreds more from concerned members.

The people had spoken. What started out as an ideal story for NBC to use as a “kicker,” a lighthearted piece used to close a newscast, for a brief time became a national obsession. Suddenly, America clamored to see more of the whales. Through jammed telephone switchboards and higher ratings points, the networks got the message. They rushed crews to Barrow to try to meet the growing demand.

The whales didn't stay “kickers” for long. By Sunday night, October 16, they were news “leads.” Just three weeks before a presidential election, and three days after they were first reported, the stranded whales became the top story on each network newscast. Among the estimated thirty million people who watched the whales gasp for air on Sunday's evening newscasts was President Ronald Reagan. He penned a note reminding himself to ask about the whales the following morning at his daily 9:00
A.M.
briefing with senior White House staff members. Perhaps “helpless” was not the best word to describe the three whales. They clearly had done something that most other creatures could not do. Nine days after discovery, the whales compelled the most powerful man on earth to action.

Monday morning, October 17, the president told his chief of staff, Kenneth Duberstein, that he wanted regular reports on the rescue's progress. The daily written summary of the meeting circulated to every office in the West Wing, included a reference to the president's interest in the trapped whales. The memo quickly made its way to White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, the president's spokesman. Almost instantly, Fitzwater saw an opportunity. Mentioning the whales at the President's morning briefing would demonstrate that Ronald Reagan was just as concerned about the stranded creatures as millions of other Americans. Since no one wished the whales ill, the White House could not lose. After clearing the whales with the chief of staff's office, Fitzwater inserted a few words about them into the statement he was preparing to read to the White House press corps concerning the president's activities.