Big Miracle

by Tom Rose

  Thursday night, Morris gave what he promised would be his final press conference. While not absolutely sure, Geoff, Craig, and the other biologists were reasonably certain that shortly after dark, the whales would slip through the last vestiges of the channel and enter the unfettered waters of the open lead. Their Barrow misadventure behind them, the whales were almost surely free. At first light, Friday morning, Randy Crosby flew the final mission. Flying twenty miles up and down the lead, he saw not a trace. The whales were gone.

  Fittingly, Malik was the last American to see the two whales before darkness. Petting Siku good-bye, he wished the two creatures the luck he knew they would need to survive on their long voyage. Ordinary gray whales would be hard pressed to make it through the multiple dangers that lay ahead. Treacherous ice floes extended for several hundred miles along Alaska’s northern and western rims. Next, there were pods of killer whales waiting for weak and wounded prey. And finally, if they made it that far, the whales would have to dance through minefields of great white sharks lurking off the coast of the Pacific Northwest in search of weakened prey.

  But these whales had proven themselves anything but ordinary. These whales touched hundreds of millions of hearts and captivated the fickle attention of a self-obsessed world. They brought together people, industries, and nations in a way man himself never could. If only for a fortnight, the three whales were at the center of the world. They were history’s most fortunate creatures.

  Lucky whales.

  24

  Consequences

  Success or not, the media dubbed Friday, October 28, Operation Breakout’s final day. If, at first light, the whales still hadn’t left the ice pack, we defiantly resolved that we would. We phoned our loved ones, told them the story was over, and booked flights home.

  Everyone agreed. There was nothing more to be done. Now that the pressure ridge no longer barred the whales from entering the open channel of water, the whales remained the only obstacle to their own freedom. We desperately tried to convince our assignment editors that the rescue’s human aspect had concluded. From every indication, the American people were tiring of the story. They, too, had seen enough. If ever Operation Breakout gave the media and the world a chance to cut and run, this seemed the moment.

  But when Malik discovered the lead whale Siku nearly frozen in the icebreaker’s paths on Thursday morning, Barrow was overwhelmed by feelings of frustration. On Wednesday night, October 26, the whales seemed free. But the next morning, they once again demonstrated their penchant for getting stuck. The same faulty genes that trapped them the first time did it again. The whales could not find their way out of the icebreaker channel before it froze solid overnight. Instead of finally beginning their migration, they became stranded in yet another tiny hole. It seemed like the whole mess was starting all over again. Fortunately for the whales and the weary media, the Russians remained one final night. The whales at last slipped through the channels to open water sometime early Friday morning when the icebreakers returned to clear new pathways through the ice.

  After almost two weeks at twenty degrees below zero, there was just no more left to give. From its outset, Operation Breakout was nothing more than an artificial enterprise, created not for the whales or their species, but for the media. Like any other news story, Operation Breakout needed a beginning, a middle, and, most important, an end. If it appeared that the rescue would continue indefinitely, that most critical criterion would be violated. But of course, the very notion of the rescue operating in a vacuum was absurd. The media was the rescue.

  The contrast to Operation Breakout’s final hours could not have been more striking. Barrow was the Arctic equivalent to Saigon right before the fall. People were desperate to get out.

  It wasn’t the NVA we feared, but Barrow itself. Don Oliver, a veteran of that frantic Indochina exodus, worked just as busily to get out of Barrow. He was helping his video editor, Steve Shim, pack all of NBC’s equipment when the phone rang. It was NBC’s Los Angeles bureau. Immediately, Oliver knew he wasn’t going to like what he was about to hear. Oliver rejoiced in his industry nickname, El Diablo. Remarkably, Barrow and its endless privations had yet to ignite the temper for which he was legendary.

  “We want you to stay on a couple of days,” came the unsteady voice from Los Angeles. “You know, just in case the whales come back.” It was so cold in Oliver’s Top of the World Hotel room, you could almost see steam pour out of his ears. The thought of still another day in Barrow made Oliver long for Saigon, April 1975. Watching his colleagues head for warmer climes pushed Oliver over the edge. El Diablo was about to erupt.

  “In case they come back?” he shrieked incredulously, his face crimson. “We’re booked on the 12:30 flight and we’re not going to miss it. The whales are gone, gone, gone. They aren’t coming back, and if they do, that will be their problem, not mine! You got that?”

  The hotel’s entire first floor fell silent. This was an impressive display of rage, even for the master himself. Maybe he was out for a personal best, his producer Jerry Hansen joked. We could all sympathize. Oliver, like the rest of us, had served his time. Why was his sentence extended when all other prisoners at Barrow Correctional were being paroled?

  Harry Chittick, the ABC producer, walked toward us from the far end of the hall seemingly unfazed by Don Oliver’s deafening outburst. Like the rest of us, he had a plane to catch. As he passed Oliver’s open door, none of us spoke. We wondered how Chittick would handle the delicate situation. Would he slip quietly past, pretending to ignore the erupting red-caped devil, or would he peak in to catch the master of rage in action.

  Getting to the door, Chittick stopped, turned to Oliver and waved good-bye. Pausing in midtirade, Oliver turned to Chittick, flashed him a brief but warm smile, winked, stretched out his hand in a gesture of farewell, and picked up his tantrum right where he left off. Chittick laughed, hoping Oliver’s latest explosion would produce the desired results. Oliver flashed Chittick a jubilant thumbs-up sign.

  For Oran Caudle, it was like waking from a dream. Just hours before, he had worked frantically to keep the North Slope Borough television studio from collapsing under the strain of twenty-six demanding broadcasters barking orders in half a dozen languages. Suddenly, life hurtled back to pre-Breakout normality. There were no more network feeds, no more pushing, no more shoving and, thank God, no more shouting. For the first time in more than two weeks, Caudle turned off the North Slope Borough television transmitter. As the light on the console faded, Caudle knew another decade might pass before it was ever used again.

  But Oran’s work remained incomplete. He had only a few hours to convert his global communications center into a stage ready fit to host a hundred Eskimo students from Ipalook Elementary dressed as goblins and ghosts for “Fright Night 1989.” The local Halloween pageant was a major annual event on Channel 20. For Barrow’s youngest residents, the whales swam free in the nick of time. The whale rescue helped fulfill the electronic media’s technological promise of a global village. The world had been bound together in a common, seemingly noble aim. But the minute that aim was achieved, the world went home. For all the time the media spent in Barrow, few of us stayed to reflect on our impact on that remarkable hamlet we so briefly called home.

  Like life itself, Operation Breakout was born, matured and, finally, died. Its death came swiftly. The story that led newscasts from Minneapolis to Moscow and Boston to Bombay one night was not so much as mentioned the next. It was time for the world to move on. With a few hours left to kill before our flight back to the world we so desperately missed, Masu Kawamura, the Japanese correspondent, cameraman Steve Mongeau and I all drove out to Point Barrow for one last look at the site where the world had focused its attention for the last two weeks. I wondered what the endless expanse of icy terrain really looked like. Now that everyone else had left, maybe we could find out.

  The only Arctic we knew was lined with cables, cords and wires. The sheet of ice we stood on fo
r so many long hours had reverberated with the sounds of man: the buzzing of helicopters, the whine of chain saws, the hum of idle engines, the chatter of human voices.

  Even the throaty “FFWWWSSSSHH” of a whale exhaling depended on man. Without him, the whales would long since have died. Except for the howl of the Arctic wind, the ice would have remained utterly still, a seemingly lifeless, frozen desert.

  We crossed over the sandy hump that separated North America’s most extreme tip from the stark white horizon of frozen sea for perhaps the 50th time. Yet in a remarkable way, it seemed like the first. The dense early-morning fog burned off to reveal a distant Arctic sun that shone brighter and stronger than on any of our previous trips. It cast a deceptive light of warmth where none existed.

  For the first time since our arrival, the three of us felt alone. Not only was man gone, so was his every trace. His hand-cut holes were solidly refrozen. The windswept snow and thick blue ice were virtually all that colored the lifeless landscape. The only evidence of one of the most colossal events the Arctic had ever seen harkened back to the rescue’s earliest days: a few rectangular blocks of ice pulled out of the water by the Eskimos before they learned to shove them under the ice shelf. There the blocks would remain until the brief Arctic summer would thaw them some months later.

  As I surveyed the endless expanse of frozen void, I couldn’t imagine this was the same place hundreds of people stood just hours before. It was a completely different world, a world whose reality was emphasized by the scathing bitterness and eerie howl of its biting wind. This was the world that existed before the Whales of October. This was the world that would endure.

  Encumbered by thick, heavy gear, I gazed across the Arctic emptiness realizing this was as close as I would probably ever get to fulfilling my childhood dream of walking on the moon. I patiently waited for Masu and Steve to finish taking their last pictures. When they started back toward the truck, I urged them to keep going. Telling them I would be but a minute only piqued their curiosity.

  At that moment, I got my reward. Once confident no one would ever see or know, I crunched the wide bottom of my boot against the dry snow and lumbered about on the Arctic Ocean’s flat, frozen surface pretending I was Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.

  In an odd, almost indefinable way, it seemed as though everyone involved in the rescue was bequeathed a uniquely meaningful reward. Odder still, these rewards seemed commensurate with the recipient’s contribution to helping the whales. Take me, for example. I did nothing to directly help the whales. All I did was report the efforts others made to help them.

  By Friday morning, October 28, 1988, one hundred and fifty journalists from four continents, the American and Soviet governments, ARCO, VECO and Greenpeace, together with two brothers-in-law from Minnesota, had spent more than $5,795,000 to see to it that two whales stranded at the top of the world could swim safely into the Arctic Ocean’s last swath of ice-free water. Their efforts dwarfed not only most human rescues, but all sense of proportion.

  Most biologists agreed there were likely more gray whales in October 1988 than ever before; around 22,000.

  Yet all the heroics and expense served only to return two whales back to sea. If marine biologists, who guessed these particular whales may have been genetically flawed, were right, the whale rescue might have done more harm than good. There must be a reason nature wanted to be rid of these whales, they argued. Allowing them to pass their defects on to future generations might weaken the species, perhaps leading to still more whale strandings and maybe even more Operation Breakouts. The Eskimos could only hope.

  In fifteen days, the three major American television network newscasts ran more than forty stories about those amazing whales, devoting nearly 10 percent of their programs’ air time to coverage of the world’s greatest nonevent. Even more incredibly, coverage of the rescue supplanted coverage of the climax of the 1988 presidential campaign.

  The revolution in television technology allowed hundreds of millions of people to watch the rescue—more than watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. In the all-important television ratings book, more people than watched the single greatest achievement in the history of man watched the rescue of three trapped whales.

  Even Arab terrorists were affected by the world’s whale obsession. Sheik Sayyed Hussein Fadlallah, the founder of the Shiite Lebanese terror group Hezbollah complained that the West was losing its interest in ransoming his Western hostages. He was right, but, unfortunately not for long. At least Fadlallah knew he could get back on the front page whenever he wanted. All he had to do was order his Jihadi henchman to snatch or murder another innocent American, emboldened by the fact that he could carry out his latest outrage with impunity. Fadlallah knew that his latest victim’s government would respond the same way it had with every other terrorist act. Call it an outrage, promise retribution, and in the end, do nothing at all.

  Before the whales, television’s immediacy was more likely to be associated with Lebanon’s venomous snake pit than with Alaska’s North Slope. A cheaply shot video of another hapless American hostage pleading his kidnappers’ demands or, in the grizzly case of executed American hostage Colonel Rich Higgins, dangling from the end of a rope, seemed to be the American dinner hour’s constant companion. That America would commit such tremendous resources to save three whales while doing precious little to protect its own citizens in enemy captivity could only delight Sheik Fadlallah. It certainly empowered him and the group he founded. As of this 2011 writing, Hezbollah is the defacto ruling party of Lebanon and one of the most potent terror forces in the world.

  America’s once legendary resolve had been reduced to saving three whales. But we couldn’t even do that without asking our number one enemy to finish the job for us, a fact the United States Coast Guard used to lobby Congress to fund the construction of a third American icebreaker.

  The same phenomenon that catapulted little Jessica McClure into the national spotlight two years earlier when she tumbled into a well in Midland, Texas, propelled the whales into the national spotlight. The story was simple: either Jessica and the whales would be saved or they wouldn’t. The then relevant MacNeil-Lehrer PBS Newshour didn’t have to cross-examine a panel of experts to dissect the issue. At least not at first. Operation Breakout started because it was easy. A wind of simplicity blowing across a world made dizzy by its own complexity.

  In the beginning, nothing seemed to interfere with the story, neither the facts nor the relevance. Television producers knew everybody loved whales. Greenpeace spent the past fifteen years teaching us that whales had to be saved, wherever and however they were threatened. Combine that with its slick Madison Avenue sales job, and there were the makings of a media “made-to-order-event.”

  Desperate Americans who clung to the premise that “whales are people too” made the rescue possible, only to learn they were much, much more. Up-close pictures of them struggling for survival transmitted instantly anywhere on earth, was dream television. Nothing sold like whales. The larger and longer the rescue became, the more millions of viewers glued themselves to their sets, sending ratings into the stratosphere.

  News coverage of the whales earned the networks cheap, easy money without the inconvenience of soul-searching. Nobody liked constant bombardments of bad news. Give the people what they want. “Don’t worry,” went the year’s Number One hit song, “be happy.” It seemed too good to be true, and in the end it was.

  By the time the Russians did show up, Operation Breakout had transformed itself into exactly what it was supposed not to be. America sought out the whales to escape its own reality, when in fact the whales forced America to confront it. The country’s mindless lovefest turned into a healthy self-examination. We got the opposite of what we bargained for and exactly what we needed.

  Washington Post columnist William Raspberry summed up the mood of the positivists when he called the three dramatic weeks a time when “the world was able to rise above its divisions of
culture, competition, political ideology, and even the pursuit of money to join in a common, noble cause.” Raspberry was right (maybe for the last time). But so was Sayyed Fadlallah.

  Anticipating the crush of reporters anxious to get home, MarkAir scheduled a last-minute third flight out of Barrow for Friday, October 28. Euphoric Outsiders rejoicing in their Arctic liberation packed all three planes. The Eskimos’ fortnight on the cusp of national recognition was sealed behind the pressurized door of that day’s last flight. When the maroon and white airliner’s wheels lifted off Wiley Post’s snow-covered runway, Barrow was once again alone at the top of the world. The only difference to this hardy Eskimo village was that its few weeks in the limelight had put a couple of million dollars in its pocket.

  The whale rescue gave the Eskimos of Barrow the chance of a lifetime, the opportunity to introduce themselves and their way of life to people around the world. For two weeks in October 1988, Barrow became the center of a world that all but ignored it. For these two weeks, the tiny Eskimo hamlet seemed transplanted to some other more accessible latitude, its eternal isolation somehow suspended, its bitter elements miraculously mitigated. This illusory transformation ended with the abruptness of an Arctic wind. Barrow picked up its timeless pace just where it left off.

  Winter was fast on its way. While the October rescue turned out to be the coldest experience most Outsiders would ever live through, to the Eskimos it was nothing but a late autumn nip. To them, their winter didn’t officially start until November 17, the day the sun slipped below the horizon, not to rise again for two and a half months. November 17 was the first of a sixty-seven daylong night.