by Tom Rose
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 bab
y polar bears sure do make good mascots for environmentalists on parade.
Sliding open the huge hangar bays, Randy Crosby hooked the tow tractor to the front end of the new Bell Long Ranger 214 whirlybird. According to Crosby’s own regulations, one helicopter always had to be ready for an emergency. Since it was just over an hour before the first scheduled media flight out to the whales, they had less than that time in the air to spot a bear. He lifted off the Search and Rescue helipad dimly outlined by faint yellow lines obscured by the windswept snow. He swung the aircraft to the southeast and out to sea five miles due west of Barrow. The pressure ridge that Morris and the Eskimos were looking to cleave was the natural home to one of the world’s most ferocious land animals.
As Crosby flew overhead hoping to find bears, Arnold Brower and his Eskimo scouts were down below armed with high-powered rifles to protect them from the deadly and unpredictable animal. In the most dangerous areas, people knew to walk back to back. They did this on the ice. They walked with guns drawn and elbows locked as they scouted the towering ice walls of the pressure ridge looking for a place to cut a path for the whales. They hoped to avoid a confrontation with one of the huge and remarkably agile giants, but if they could not, they were ready to win it.
Crosby flew northeasterly toward the whale site from the open water side of the pressure ridge. He kept the helicopter less than 100 feet from the surface of the gray-black depths of the ice cold water. He told Chittick and his cameraman to keep their eyes intently focused out the right side of the aircraft. Polar bears liked to hunt along the edge of the ice pack where they could easily slip in and out of the food-rich sea. Just as Crosby was about to lift his Long Ranger to a higher altitude to head for another spot where he had seen polar bears, a mass of white fur leapt out from behind a slab of ice and bounded angrily toward the helicopter. Crosby swept the aircraft sharply around at a hard angle and dropped to just ten feet off the water to let the ABC cameraman get the best possible shot of the bear.
Exposing its teeth and swiping its deadly claws, the massive bear started to rise on its hind legs. Chittick was baffled. Did this bear really think it could attack a swirling helicopter flying ten feet off the ground? But as his mind was framing an image of perplexity, Chittick’s puzzled face fell expressionless. The bear stood fully erect. Chittick thought his eyes had finally betrayed him. He felt them tilting up to stare the bear in the eye. He was flying in an airborne helicopter and looking up to see the head of a land animal standing on its hind legs. Just how tall was the damned thing? The bear’s angry growl was easily audible over the din of the chopper’s spinning blades.
Unbelievably, the bear flailed its paws in an attempt to swat down a hovering helicopter. Unbelievable. The ABC cameraman captured the entire dramatic sequence on video. It was not only the most remarkable sight in Harry Chittick’s career, it was also some of the best video to come out of the rescue. Because “pure” Eskimos were the only people allowed to kill a polar bear under state and federal law, they were the only armed scouts the networks could hire. (Whether the scouts assented to have their blood tested to verify their “Eskimo purity” no one rightly bothered to ask.) Reporters covering the whales were told never to go more than a few hundred yards away from the whale site without an escort, except on the now heavily traveled ice paths.
On the way back from our first day covering the whales, Masu Kawamura and I parked our balky truck on the side of the road and strolled onto the ice pack. We just couldn’t get over that we could drive, walk, and play on top of the Arctic Ocean. Our otherwise fearless cameraman, Steve Mongeau decided to stay in truck. Mongeau had reported from the Arctic before and knew plenty about polar bears. There was no way he was walking “out there” without a gun.
Masu and I marveled at the fact we could probably walk clear across the top of the world and way down the other, all the way to Norway, across a frozen ocean. Suddenly we got hit with a bout of whiteout—a blinding condition caused when swirling snow wipes out visibility. We both dropped to the ground to regain our balance and escape the biting wind. When I looked around for Masu I could see nothing. I knew he couldn’t be more than five or six feet from me. We knew we weren’t far from the whales because we easily heard the helicopters and the saws. But neither of us could see anything.
As the wind howled, I first wondered what I was looking at below me. Were they Masu’s footprints? They couldn’t be more than a few seconds old. But they appeared much bigger, if they were footprints at all. I couldn’t be sure. Maybe, perhaps probably it was just my imagination. But as the wind died and the whiteout faded, I convinced myself I could see the outline of a massive polar bear that seemed to be staring right at us.
In the shortest instant, it had to have been frightened by the helicopter hovering overhead. Or maybe it wasn’t anything at all. Neither of us was prepared to swear we saw anything—certainly to members of our own fraternity who would only laugh at us. That night, our host Rod Benson did exactly that. There was no way, he howled, we were that close to a bear, and besides no one else saw him and if he were that close to shore he would have wandered onto shore where he would have been soon. Masu and I were told that a favorite strategy of the Nanook is to wait for its victims to be blinded by whiteout. It was a good fantasy to engage in: (a) Had there actually been a bear and (b) had it decided to come for us, we wouldn’t have had much of a chance and he wouldn’t have had much of a meal—so we were even.
Arnold Brower and his scouts came back from their pressure ridge expedition with bad news. They told Morris that while there were certain weak spots, none were shallow enough to be tackled by chain saws. They could not be sure, but it seemed as though most of the ridge was grounded. That meant the huge ice towers reaching thirty feet in the air also reached more than thirty feet below the surface, firmly anchoring the ice to the ocean floor.
By Friday morning, October 21, Operation Breakout needed a breakout of its own. Although the whales had started to use the holes cut for them by the Eskimos, there still seemed no way through the pressure ridge. What could break the ridge? The question asked since day one had only one answer: an icebreaker. The rescue was right back to where it started a week earlier with Cindy Lowry back on the phone making calls to faraway places. Many of them went to Campbell Plowden, her colleague in Washington. Before the first Outside reporter arrived in Barrow to cover the fledgling whale rescue, Plowden was already working behind the scenes to find a ship that could save the whales. Friday morning, October 14, the day after the first news of the stranded whales appeared on NBC Nightly News, Plowden called his contacts in the U.S. Coast Guard, which operated two world-class icebreakers.
The flagship icebreaker, the Polar Sea, was herself making news. She was mired in the ice-bound Northwest Passage on the way back from a ship rescue. A Canadian vessel was stuck near the western end of the Passage just a few hundred miles east of Barrow. The Polar Sea was trying to guide it to safety. Under normal conditions, Plowden was told, the ship would have sailed right past Barrow. But because of the unusually bad weather in the Arctic, the ice at the Northwest Passage’s western end was frozen too thick, even for the Polar Sea. Instead, both the icebreaker and the ship she came to save had to sail the other way, 1,500 miles across the top of the world and out into north Atlantic waters just a few hundred miles from Iceland. From there it was 12,000 miles back to Barrow through the Panama Canal. Plowden didn’t need to ask any more questions. The Polar Sea was not an option.
“What about the other icebreaker?” he asked, knowing that the Coast Guard operated a second such vessel. The newer and sleeker Polar Star was in drydock at Seattle, undergoing extensive repairs. Neither American icebreaker could help in the cause that was uniting the world. How could the United States military have only two icebreakers? Plowden asked himself? Maybe because it was people like him who always found reasons to oppose any defense spending, let alone $300 million for an icebreaker designed to facilitate the transit of “contaminated” comme
rcial ships through “pristine” waters.
Except for Alaska, which consistently argued for more, the Navy had little use for icebreakers; the Coast Guard even less. In the passion of the rescue, few people paused to reflect that, thankfully, until then we simply didn’t need them. Unlike the Soviet Union, not a single U.S. seaport was ever closed for winter, even those in Alaska. In fact, some believed we didn’t even need the two we had. Most of the time they assisted Canadian vessels in the Northwest Passage: Canadian waters; and Canada had its fleet of ice breakers—newer, faster, and more reliable than America’s.
In his conversations about the U.S. icebreakers Plowden heard reports that there was a private 200-foot icebreaker in Juneau. His calls revealed she would be no use. At less than half the size of the Polar Sea, she was much too small to do the job. Designed to break the relatively thin ice in southeast Alaska, she would have enough trouble just getting to Barrow, let alone contending with the huge ice blocks of the pressure ridge. Plowden got the name of a marine services company in Seattle that reportedly worked closely with all the world’s big icebreakers. The man at Crowley Maritime Corporation asked Plowden if he had spoken with anyone from the Soviet Merchant Marine office in New York. The Soviet Union operated the world’s largest and most powerful fleet of icebreakers. With few warm water ports, they desperately needed them to assure passage of Soviet merchant and military vessels.
Right after he spoke with Crowley Maritime, the same anonymous woman who called Cindy Lowry in Anchorage earlier that morning with word of the VECO hoverbarge phoned Campbell Plowden in Washington.
“Have you thought about the Soviets?” asked Jane Whale. Jane told Plowden she just spoke to Armand Hammer’s Los Angeles office. Hammer was the nonagenarian industrialist who made his first fortune acting as international trading agent for the then embryonic Soviet Union. He later parlayed his business interests into a controlling stake in the giant Occidental Petroleum Company, which he ran until his death in 1990. Hammer commented correctly that he was perhaps the only man alive who was close friends with both Vladimir Lenin and Ronald Reagan.