Big Miracle (28 page)

Colonel Carroll spent years carefully constructing sturdy walls of dispassion. Now, a woman five thousand miles away, a woman he had never even met before, was the force that unleashed pent-up emotion. She was the only one he could turn to for comfort.

Bonnie and Tom talked constantly throughout Operation Breakout. In the first few days after the president's call, neither had yet mustered the courage to explore the other's marital status, but the game went on. The two grew remarkably close. After the disastrous Wednesday, the colonel and Bonnie spoke half a dozen times. The day's final call lasted four hours. He didn't know why, but Carroll felt safe talking to Bonnie. Maybe it was because she was a National Guardsman herself, or because she worked for the president he so adored. Maybe she just evoked something that he suppressed far too long.

As much as Carroll was drawn to her, Bonnie was pulled even more toward him. But she had one critical advantage. For days, the colonel could only wonder what the woman he was quickly falling for looked like. Bonnie didn't have that problem. Every time she turned on a television, there he was. She saw an attractive, confident leader of men. Wednesday night, Tom Carroll dropped his guard. He confessed that things weren't going well. He and his men just spent hours devising a last-ditch plan to get the barge on its way. While she needed to know the operation's progress so she could report to the president, she found herself interested for Tom's sake. She desperately wanted the new plan to succeed, not so much for the whales, but for the colonel she knew only via the telephone.

Ever since they first tried freeing the barge, the National Guard rescue command used each of the helicopters to take turns pulling it across the ice-covered harbor. Carroll wondered what would happen if both helicopters pulled the barge at once. Would the effect of a double pull be twice as powerful? Would it be enough to get the barge out of its doldrums and on the way to Barrow? Working with slide rules and pocket calculators, Carroll and his pilots stayed up until the early hours of Thursday, October 20, working through formulas and equations to determine whether the double pull was even a theoretical possibility. They put their mathematical skills to the test for hours until they finally got some answers. The helicopters would have to pull from a much lower altitude and with less than full power. The eight-hundred-foot tow lines had to be doubled in length. Too much pressure applied to either of the thick steel cables could send both helicopters spiraling to the ground in stereophonic explosions. If the colonel decided to try it, he would be the first. No one had ever attempted a double pull before. Regardless of the effect on the whales, Carroll figured the exercise would provide valuable lessons for more important missions in the future.

Carroll was worried about the media. He knew they had to be invited to cover the attempt, but he didn't want to make too much of the event because of the risk. If they sensed a hint of danger, they would be all over him, shaking the confidence of his men, increasing the chance of fulfilling their own nay saying prophecies. The kid gloves used to cover Ron Morris were thrown off in the media's treatment of Colonel Carroll. With Ron Morris off-limits, Carroll was the only game the media could train their sights on. At first light the next morning, the colonel and his men, putting up an optimistic front, walked out onto the Prudhoe Bay ice for one last try. The helicopters were gassed up and ready to go. The lengthened tow cables coupled their underbellies with the stagnant barge. Succeed or fail, military transport history was about to be made. The press pool circled overhead in a National Guard helicopter flown in from Barrow. Carroll double-checked that he could reach the pilots by radio. Before they took off, he gave them their final instructions.

“You're the pilots,” he assured them. “It's your call. Any time you feel it's too dangerous, drop the cable and come on down.” His pilots knew the risks. They performed the calculations together the night before and reached the same conclusion. It was dangerous, but it just might work. The press hounded the colonel to do something. But if he wouldn't jeopardize the lives of his men for the sake of three stranded whales, he certainly wasn't about to do it for a press corps that had all but offered to make him their lynching party's guest of honor.

The choppers lifted off the ground at the same time and hovered a few hundred feet apart in front of the lopsided barge. The pilots went through their checklists and waited for the barge captain to signal that he was ready. When both helicopters and the barge were set, the Skycranes gradually eased forward in unison until the taut tow cables stopped them.

The helicopters increased power until, straining against the cables, the barge crept out of its last hole and started slowly sliding across the jumbled ice. The colonel and his men felt a brief flicker of hope. Maybe this would work. Their raised expectations were quickly dashed. No sooner had the barge started on its hopeful journey before it crashed back through the ice. It was the same old story, smooth sailing for five hundred yards followed by another setback.

“It's no use,” radioed pilot Gary Quarles. “I'm begging off this one. It's just not going to work.”

The colonel was disappointed but not surprised. In fact, he felt a certain relief. The heavy burden placed on his shoulders five days earlier was finally lifted. His men and the crews from VECO had done everything they could to move the barge. Nothing would work. The task was too daunting. General Schaeffer couldn't ask any more. No one could. He took risks, but limited them so that none of his men or equipment would be exposed to any unnecessary danger. Sure the media would point their fingers his way. But as the commanding officer, he was prepared to take the heat. It was his job. He had no problem taking all the credit a few days earlier. Now the tables had turned.

When Ron Morris got word that the barge was a lost cause, he ordered Arnold Brower Jr. and his Inuit crews to cut as many of their new holes as they could. It was too late to call off the rescue now. The whole world was watching. The whales had to be saved.

Cindy Lowry couldn't hold back her tears when she heard the double pull had failed. She watched Bone grow weaker with each passing breath. The new holes were wide enough and long enough for the three whales, but for a reason no one understood, they would not use them.

By noon on Wednesday, October 19, day four of Operation Breakout, the Eskimos had cut a chain of fifteen holes stretching a quarter mile toward the open water lead five miles away. The thirty-foot-high pressure ridge separating the whales from the open water that meant freedom still loomed on the horizon. But for now, the rescuers concentrated on getting the whales moving in the right direction. They would worry about the pressure ridge when and if the whales ever got there. The difference between the high-tech means used to move the barge and the low-tech means the Eskimos used to cut through the ice wasn't lost on Colonel Carroll. The barge was a failure while the chain-sawed holes seemed promising though still untested.

Cindy called Campbell Plowden at the Greenpeace office in Washington to discuss alternatives to the hoverbarge. Plowden was one of the foremost whale advocates in the world; surely he would have a suggestion or two. At the beginning of the conversation Plowden apologized for the difficulty she had reaching him. Greenpeace had to hire eight temporary employees at the height of the Barrow rescue just to answer telephone calls from thousands of people around the world.

Plowden suggested Cindy get in touch with a person who had been calling the Greenpeace office for days with an unusual offer of help. He was a man named Jim Nollman and he called himself an “interspecies communicator.” Nollman said he could coax the whales out of the original holes by playing back recordings of other whales with special underwater sound equipment. Cindy had heard plenty about Jim Nollman and not much of it was good, but she figured she didn't have a choice. As far as she knew, Nollman was the only person in North America who had sound equipment capable of functioning in the Arctic. She accepted his offer of help and asked him to come to Barrow, promising to pay his expenses.

Thin-blooded to begin with, Cindy couldn't stay out on the ice for more than a few minutes before she started shivering uncontrollably. It took weeks for her teeth to stop aching from all the chattering. Her poor footwear held up so poorly she spent half her time lifting a leg off the bone-chilling ice and shaking it to circulate the blood in her numbed feet. Had she not refused to wear animal fur, most of Cindy's physical suffering could have been avoided. She could freeze to death with a clean conscience.

She and Craig walked back to the meager warmth of a small portable hunting shack constructed at the tip of the sandbar to give the Barrow whale rescuers a respite from the inescapable cold of the windswept ice. The tiny hut stood like a beacon at the edge of North America, a hundred feet from where the continent slipped beneath the frozen Arctic Ocean.

When they pushed open the hut's flimsy door, Cindy and Craig were welcomed by several friendly Eskimos taking a break in the cramped but relatively warm quarters. They offered the two visitors Styrofoam cups of piping hot coffee which they both gladly accepted. Cindy noticed the uncut chunks of muktuk that the resting crew chewed on as high-energy snacks. She wanted to ask them how they could eat whale meat at the same time they were working so hard to save the three whales stranded just a few hundred feet away.

For the Eskimos, the answer was simple. The creatures they were working so hard to save were not whales they depended on. The Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow ate bowhead, not gray whales. It was their very dependence on the whale that led Malik, Arnold Jr., and now dozens of other Inuit volunteers to come out and help the troubled grays. Inuit tradition revered whales.

Before heading back to the ice, they asked Cindy if she wanted something to eat. In addition to whale meat, the shack was stocked with walrus, seal, even some polar bear meat. When she said she didn't eat meat, they offered her raw fish instead. After having stood out in the freezing cold all morning, she was so hungry that it sounded tempting. As long as it wasn't meat, Cindy would gladly eat it.

“Here, dip it in some Eskimo butter,” said the Inupiat worker who handed her a piece of frozen fish on a toothpick. She quickly plunked the fish into the yellow odorless liquid and popped it into her mouth. The instant her taste buds registered the unusually pungent flavor, she gagged and wretched uncontrollably. Cindy's unprepared palate was in violent revolt. When she regained control, she lamely looked up at the concerned workers and asked exactly what it was that stopped just short of making her vomit.

“Probably the butter,” came one guess.

“What's wrong with butter?” Cindy asked to a chorus of laughs.

“You see,” said one Eskimo, “it's not your kind of butter.”

“Well, then, what kind is it?” Cindy asked impatiently.

“It's from seals,” the man answered quietly. “It is seal oil. We call it Eskimo butter.”

That was all the explanation Cindy needed. She shuddered in disgust and walked back out into the cold.

In the twelve days since the three gray whales were first discovered, the scene on the ice changed dramatically. It was almost unrecognizable from the time Craig, Geoff, and Billy Adams, their Inuit guide, first went to verify the reports that three whales were stranded off the end of the Point Barrow sandspit. That cold October Tuesday, the three men saw three whales struggling aimlessly against the uncaring force of Arctic nature. The landscape was bleak and gray. There wasn't a soul within ten miles of the six creatures. The three men never dreamed they could save the whales. The most they hoped to accomplish was to study them until they died. Maybe they could publish a study in a marine biology journal.

Now, the most distant edge of North America had become the center of the media world. Heavy traffic traveled on the glassy smooth ice of the frozen lagoon whose western boundary was marked by the sandbar. A tiny corner of an endless, silent and motionless universe suddenly became an oasis of noise and activity. Speeding helicopters broke the hush by buzzing continuously over the increasingly crowded whale site. What started as three men visiting a like number of whales clinging to a lone hole, became hundreds of people surrounding dozens, and soon hundreds of freshly cut holes that would eventually stretch seven miles toward the western horizon.

Until the
Exxon Valdez
spill six months later, the October whale rescue was the single biggest media event in the history of the state. The hundred and fifty journalists assigned to Barrow formed the largest press contingent ever to invade any part of Alaska for any reason. But of all the places in the Last Frontier, reporters chose to gather themselves and their expensive technology around a few tiny man-made ice holes at the top of the world, the most remote edge of America's most remote state. At the rescue's height, there was one reporter for every seventeen residents of Barrow.

14

Barrow: Frostbite for the Big Time

Within a few days of the president's call to Colonel Tom Carroll, at least twenty-six broadcasting companies from four continents were transmitting their version of events from the overworked control room in Oran Caudle's studio. Less than a week earlier, the facility had never before been used to transmit. Its huge white satellite dishes stood as a powerful testament to money many Alaskans thought poorly spent.

Now Oran's facility transmitted footage of the whales almost twenty-four hours a day, to every corner of the globe. Suddenly, Barrow was the most glamorous byline in all the world. Vendors from across the state flew into Barrow to start hawking their wares. T-shirts of many different designs each proclaimed their own version of the same theme: I'
M SAVING THE WHALES.

Pepe's Mexican restaurant had to open earlier in the morning and close later at night to accommodate the several hundred Outsiders with no place else to eat. Fran Tate, the owner, was no stranger to national media exposure. She courted it at every opportunity. The mere fact that she owned a Mexican restaurant within striking distance of the North Pole landed her on the set of
The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson and on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
long before any reporters bothered to come to Barrow. Fran Tate insisted the increased hours were for the convenience of the press, but the skeptical media suspected that she would stay open as long as she could to charge her customers what they considered outrageous prices.