Big Miracle (33 page)

Comfortably wrapped in a tattered Army-issue green wool blanket, Chittick calmly waited for his phone to ring. Intermittently wiping drops of milk from his gray-flecked beard, he savored the solitude of the still, pre-morning Arctic. When his phone did ring, it would signal the beginning of yet another frantic, brutal day on the ice. At first his superiors in New York tried talking him out of going to Barrow. It would look bad, they argued, for him to run off to the top of the world in an obvious attempt to play catch up with NBC, which broke the story. They soon changed their minds. Even though it took ABC seventy-two hours to transmit its first self-shot story from Barrow, they felt fortunate that Chittick was there to cover what had mushroomed into one of the biggest media events of the decade.

The indefatigable Chittick told his superiors that he ran into an exhausted but elated Cindy Lowry just a few hours earlier.

“The deicers worked, the whales moved into the next hole!” she exclaimed.

During his five days in Barrow, he had never seen Cindy so ebullient. He had watched her growing despair as she stood by helplessly as the whales' conditions rapidly deteriorated. He had seen no hint of the euphoric emotion she now displayed. Unable to imagine the agony of a single hour on the bone chilling ice, still less an entire day, ABC News executives could not understand why Chittick and his crew missed the whales' first big move.

Chittick tried to explain that, except for a lone light stationed to ward off curious polar bears, the whale site was pitch-black. Besides, he could hardly order his videographers to drop their $100,000 cameras under water to film the whales swimming to the new hole. For that moment to be perfectly timed, the whales would have had to stick their heads out into the cold air long enough and speak English well enough to announce their impending move.

The misconceptions Chittick had to overcome were mild compared with the tales of other pressmen. British photographer Charles Laurence, shooting for London's
Daily Telegraph,
was so hastily dispatched to Barrow he didn't have time to obtain American money. The first in a series of costly misjudgments the Briton made concerned his assumption that since Barrow was in the United States, its few commercial establishments would accept credit cards. When he wasn't dangling perilously from the back of a speeding dogsled hired by a more fortunate crew nice enough to let him hang on, he was screaming at his editors back in London to wire him the money he needed so he could properly cover the story.

His predicament grew worse when he discovered that no way existed to wire any kind of money to the tiny Eskimo hamlet. The nearest modern bank was in Fairbanks, seven hundred miles away. After enduring the humiliation of begging for cash, he eventually persuaded his office to authorize a paltry $500 wire transfer to Fairbanks. Even if Laurence could figure out how to get his hands on the money, five hundred dollars would barely last him two days in Barrow. He was livid, but desperate. Laurence spent most of his first few days in Barrow frantically trying to get the money tantalizing him from Fairbanks. Dozens of calls later, he found a courier willing to deliver the small sum to Barrow. After he paid the courier, the cash was half gone.

Moreover, the frustrated photographer had to put up with the incessant stream of absurd instructions he received from his desk in London. With no money, woefully inadequate clothing, and nearly frostbitten appendages, Laurence was lambasted whenever one of his well-financed competitors managed to get a picture he didn't.

“Whatever you do,” came the order from his superiors in London, “make sure you get great pictures of the whales as they escape.” Up to now, his English refinement had kept him in check. But no more.

“Ah, bloody hell. You've got to be joking,” he shouted incredulously. “Do you think the whales are actually going to flap their flukes and wave good-bye as they swim away?” he mockingly asked.

Laurence was so enraged at the request he stopped people passing by the wall phone at the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory. “Excuse me,” he implored of a perfect stranger. Loud enough for London to hear, Laurence asked of the passerby, “Can you believe this? These idiots want me to get pictures of the whales as they escape. I'm too upset to tell them. Can you please try and explain to them that we are talking about whales, not a trio of happy campers who wave good-bye at the end of their summer holidays?”

His editors got the message and backed off. Their man resented being overworked, underpaid, and totally unappreciated. What he didn't get from London he more than got from those he entertained with his uproarious tales. In analyzing our coverage, none of the estimated one hundred and fifty reporters who flocked to the top of the world would have argued with one universal observation: No war, revolution, or political campaign that any of us had ever observed proved any more physically demanding as the Barrow whale rescue. To some, like Charles Laurence, it was a sign from heaven telling them to explore other lines of work. To others, like Harry Chittick and yours truly, it was the story of a lifetime, and of television journalism at its apex. There was no room for the usual hangers-on to interfere with coverage. We enjoyed unlimited access to all the key players in the drama without the retinue of press aides that attended most government operations.

After the whales made their first tentative move toward freedom, the rescue took on a new urgency. The whales had given new hope to an anxious world. An instinctive death wish was no longer a valid explanation for their poorly understood behavior. They had demonstrated the will to live and proved that they could and would work with their rescuers. Now that the whales were cooperating, there really was no turning back.

17

Polar Bears Threaten to Steal the Show

The rescue's command looked inward to the one group who had kept the whales alive since they were first discovered: the Eskimos. By Wednesday night, October 19, Arnold Brower's holes finally started to pay off. At the Thursday morning meeting with Ron Morris and Cindy, Brower offered to try to cut breathing holes clear out to the pressure ridge five or six miles away.

In the meantime, village elders thoroughly versed in the ways of their native habitat would search for a way through it. At Brower's suggestion, Morris tersely ordered Dan Fauske, Barrow's budget director, to authorize Eskimo search teams to target by land and air weak spots in the massive ice wall. Fauske was not accustomed to being treated like a supplicant. Morris's request sparked his ire.
Who did this guy think he was?
Fauske wondered. Only after Arnold Brower interceded, saying it was his idea, did Fauske relent. Eskimo hunters directed their helicopter pilots to promising routes through the ice ridge where they marked potential pathways by dropping plastic bags filled with red Kool Aid crystals. The red markings stood out clearly against the universal white backdrop.

The ways of the Inupiat Eskimos were new to Morris. Not surprisingly, his relationship with Brower and the Eskimos was quick to unravel. Not without reason, he felt the Eskimos and their supporters were anxious to show him up. In an effort to shore up support for his leadership, Morris hired two of his own ice experts to help him out. As a coordinator from NOAA, he was in a position to tap resources like few others. NOAA ran the National Weather Service, which employed many of the world's leading hydrometeorologists, specialists on ocean ice. He called Gary Hufford, perhaps the foremost ice expert in the world. Morris ordered him and his associate, Bob Lewellen, to come immediately to Barrow. But much to Morris's chagrin, Hufford was the first to admit that, despite all his professional training and international reputation, Arnold Brower Jr. knew far more about the local native ice conditions than he did.

Brower's promise to cut holes all the way to the pressure ridge pitted the intrepid Eskimos against the one force that even they could not master: the encroaching darkness. Resting near the top of the planet, Barrow experienced the most dramatic variances of daylight of any permanent human settlement on the globe. Between August 2 and November 17, Barrow goes from eighty-four days of total daylight to sixty-seven days of total darkness. The four months in between are a headlong race toward endless night. In this four month period, Barrow loses up to twenty minutes of light every day. In the first five days of Operation Breakout alone, rescuers lost more than an hour of useable daylight.

The increased darkness brought not only Arctic depression, but rapidly plummeting temperatures. Thanks to the Minnesota deicers, the Eskimos didn't have to worry about keeping the existing holes from freezing. Instead, they could concentrate on cutting new ones. The small pumps the press started calling “Arctic Jacuzzis” did that job for them.

By 9
A.M.
Wednesday, Greg Ferrian and Rick Skluzacek were back on the ice. They were too busy to notice that every television and still camera north of the Arctic Circle was pointed right at them.

At that stage, they were still only heroes in the making. Because New York time is four hours ahead of Alaska, news of the late-night miracle on ice came too late for the network morning shows. But word of the Minnesotans' triumph dominated Thursday afternoon's satellite transmissions. By night time, their lionization was complete. Rick Skluzacek and Greg Ferrian were instant, if short-lived, American heroes. Remarkably, the same Peter Jennings broadcast that propelled Skluzacek and Ferrian to Barrow caught the attention of another Samaritan businessman. This one manufactured chain-saw components in Portland, Oregon. Dudley Hollis of Omark Industries saw the Eskimos struggling to cut holes in the ice, and knew he had a product that could help. Less impetuous than the in-laws from Minneapolis, Dudley Hollis, a former logger from Australia, carefully assessed whether his product could actually help the Eskimos. His company made and sold chain for power saws to manufacturers around the world. At first, Hollis wanted to send a hundred-foot reel of extra chain. Hollis thought the Eskimos might need it to replace their chains when they snapped under the immense strain of sawing thick ice.

Just when they were about to send the reel of chain to Barrow, Hollis remembered the eleven Husqvarna chain saws in Omark's test laboratory. He called Dan Fauske at the North Slope Borough to see if he wanted them. “How much is this going to cost?” asked Fauske warily. His ears pricked up and his eyes opened wide when Hollis told him Omark would donate them. “Well, then,” said Fauske jovially, “get your ass on up here.”

Hollis's first day on the ice was almost his last. He fitted the adaptable saw with extra long blades enabling the operator to more easily cut through the ice. He explained the safety procedures as clearly as he could. But just in case, he snapped on a pair of thick steel mesh safety trousers. Sure enough, the first Eskimo to fire up a Husqvarna carelessly spun around without looking, whacking Hollis's leg with the saw. If it weren't for the safety trousers, the chain, spinning at fifty miles an hour, would have sawed his leg right off, leaving him to bleed to death on the ice. For the rest of the day, even in this godforsaken place, Hollis couldn't believe how happy two legs could make a person.

That same morning, Harry Chittick convinced Randy Crosby of North Slope Search and Rescue to take an ABC camera crew on a polar bear hunt. After all, Chittick thought, when you covered any kind of a story from the Arctic, you had to show polar bears. All Crosby had done for the past five days was fly press missions to and from the whale site. As long as he wasn't needed for medical evacuations, he didn't object. In fact, he loved it. It was the most exciting thing he had ever done. Crosby relished the opportunity to take Chittick, a fellow pilot, on an aerial tour of his adopted Arctic home. Crosby knew where to look for the bears he and his Eskimo neighbors called Nanooks. He told Chittick that at twelve feet tall, they would be almost impossible to miss. Several Eskimos on hunting expeditions near the whale site saw bears as close as a thousand yards from all the human activity.

Polar bears are fearless. They hadn't yet bothered the whales or their rescuers only because they didn't want to. If they weren't frightened by Barrow, where they regularly roam the streets, they would not be too worried about a few buzzing chain saws and ski machines far out on the ice, the bears' home turf. Chittick was surprised to learn that the polar bear was not a land animal. Since it lived primarily on ice and ate from the sea, the polar bear was classified a marine mammal, just like the trapped whales. The bears only ventured onto land when migrating caribou were visible from the ice pack or when no food could be found in their normal habitat.

Polar bears were protected by the federal government although they weren't formally put on an endangered species list until 2008, when there were 25 percent more polar bears roaming the Arctic. While non-natives faced strict penalties including long jail sentences for killing a polar bear, Eskimos were allowed a limited hunt under Alaskan subsistence laws. The five or six times each year when an Eskimo was lucky enough to shoot a polar bear occasioned a local feast. Just as when a whale was killed, the news was broadcast on KBRW, Barrow's radio station.

The announcement on the radio made clear that only native Inupiat Eskimos were invited to take part. Non-Inuits—even non-Eskimo spouses, children, and parents—were not permitted to participate. The absurd “race and blood” provisions of federal and state law adopted to protect Inupiat culture only served to divide by race everyone else living in native communities. Not to mention, with an intermarriage rate exceeding 80 percent, who was an Eskimo anyway? In their quest to do good, federal rule makers weren't as thorough as their German predecessors at Nuremberg in precisely clarifying what “percent” of non-Inuit “blood” would be enough to expel a wife, a daughter, or a brother from the family dinner table.

Besides, at the rate the polar bear population was expanding, there were probably more polar bears roaming Barrow than there were “racially pure” Inuits to hunt them. Polar bears are difficult species to count because they constantly roam and live in hard to access places. But a 2005 study by the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated the global population at 25,000. If true, it means there are likely more polar bears alive today than ever before; a quarter more than there were thirty years before. But baby polar bears sure do make good mascots for environmentalists on parade.