Big Miracle (15 page)

The hearing was a big event. Controversy was all but assured. All the Anchorage media—the newspapers and the television and radio stations—were on hand to cover it. Earlier in the week, the Interior Department in Washington sensed trouble. They instructed the moderator to find whatever excuse he could not to open the Greenpeace bids. The tension was palpable. The moderator knew he wouldn't get away with it, but orders were orders.

Again, Cindy was ahead of the game. She had locked horns with the oil companies and used histrionics too many times before to know the hearing would not go as its sponsors wanted.

She knew it was she, not they who were in charge. They were afraid of her. She was not afraid of them. She couldn't lose—if she caused trouble and was expelled, she would claim to be the victim of a rigged process; that her free-speech rights were trampled. If she was permitted to stand her ground inside and lost, she could still make the same basic charge: the process was rigged.

Cindy made sure she was flanked by friends who would protect her. Fellow activists and fishermen trying to defend their livelihoods sat next to Cindy on both sides. When the moderator announced that all bids would remain sealed, Cindy seamlessly transformed herself from well-behaved participant to activist loudmouth—literally. She slipped the high-powered megaphone she smuggled past security out of her briefcase.

“What about the bids? Why aren't you going to read the bids?” she demanded. The megaphone was louder than the auditorium's public address system. “Why don't you open the bids like the law requires?” The law, of course, required no such thing. But amid the hubub no one had the presence of mind to point that out. Hundreds of heads turned in her direction. Applause and cheers overtook the smattering of boos from Alaskans who favored development as strongly as Cindy opposed it.

The security guards sprang to life. From all corners of the hall, they ran toward Cindy's direction to stop her disruption and to restore order. They fought and struggled with the phalanx of burly fishermen who rose with broad chests to shield her. Did they know she opposed them, too? After a heated exchange, the guards overwhelmed their opposition and yanked Cindy out of her seat. The crowd jeered as the guards dragged her screaming from the hall. Camera crews captured it all for the evening news. Practice made perfect. It was a masterful performance.

Outside, the media lined up to interview the hearing's well-rehearsed animal-rights diva. The episode became that night's lead story on all three Anchorage newscasts. After answering all the media's questions, Cindy walked to her Volvo where her boyfriend, Kevin Bruce, was waiting. Kevin always tried to be on hand whenever Cindy planned any of her stunts in case he was needed to post bail. Knowing she was too upset to drive, he gave her a warm hug, took her keys, and drove her home.

Make no mistake. Cindy Lowry didn't oppose enjoying all the fruits developed and produced by the industries she made a living trying to close. On the way home, they stopped for drive-through Chinese takeout to eat while watching Todd Pottinger's 11:00
P.M.
newscast from the comfort of their modern Anchorage condo, outfitted with all the latest accoutrements. They had expected Cindy's expulsion to be the top story. The surprise came when they heard Pottinger report it as a major victory. The uproar she contrived had forced the MMS to cancel the hearing. The sealed bids went right back to the same vault where they had moldered for the last three years. Cindy and Greenpeace had won. For the moment at least, Cindy Lowry had helped keep Bristol Bay “safe.” She also helped keep safe, if not strengthen, the stranglehold that foreign regimes had on U.S. energy needs.

While still a bit shaken by her ejection, Cindy's face lit up. She basked in victory not for herself, but for her good friends the otters, seals, and whales of Bristol Bay. How sweet.

Opponents sometimes accused Cindy Lowry of many terrible things, but none of her critics ever suggested that she generated publicity for her own purposes. Cindy Lowry was, heart and soul, an activist. She was a true believer and hard not to respect. Environmentalism was her life's passion, often to Kevin's chagrin. While her tactics were sometimes questioned, no one could question the sincerity of her motivation. She thought Alaska's wilderness to be in grave danger. It wasn't a passion she acquired. Cindy Lowry was born with it.

By the time she was five, little Cindy was already cutting loose the fish her family caught on pleasure trips. The adults soon learned that if they ever wanted to eat any of their catch, Cindy was better left at home. By her tenth birthday, she displayed a dangerous willingness to use deadly force to protect animals. Patrolling to protect her Kansas farm against coyote poachers, little Cindy marched with her grandfather's heavy shotgun slung over her tiny shoulder. Shoving her loaded gun's double barrels into the marauding hunters' stunned faces, she forced them to think twice before trespassing. Word of “that crazy Lowry kid” spread fast. Her militancy worked. The poachers never returned.

When it came to her own life, Cindy was no martyr. After working long weeks on the Bristol Bay lease sale, she intended to take the rest of the week off. Nothing could spoil the hard-earned and long-planned weekend with Kevin she had already postponed several times. Thursday morning, October 13, Cindy Lowry slept in. Figuring she wouldn't miss the paper she referred to as
“The Anchorage Daily Snooze,”
Kevin took that morning's edition with him to his office. While he casually glanced at the front page, one headline caught his eye. It read “Ice Traps Three Gray Whales.” He decided against calling Cindy who he hoped was still sleeping after her busy week. Stage-managing raucous publicity stunts was exhausting work.

A local Anchorage reporter named Jeff Berliner wasn't so thoughtful. He woke Cindy up at home to ask what she knew about the three whales. To the Alaska press corps, Cindy's phone was referred to as “enviro quote.” Whenever reporters needed a source to quote on an environmental issue, Cindy would always oblige them, whether or not she knew any more than they did.

Jeff's call was the first instance she heard about the stranded whales. If Cindy didn't know, Berliner told himself, maybe it wasn't a story. Cindy thanked Jeff for the call and promised to get back to him as soon as she found out anything. The instant she hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was Geoff Carroll calling from Barrow. The biologist figured that if anyone could help him help the whales, it was Alaska's most famous whale hunter. Cindy Lowry was his man.

All Geoff knew for sure about the whales was that they were California grays. He didn't know their sex or ages although one was a baby and the other two seemed to be adolescents. Geoff told Cindy that unless a path through the ice could be cut to the open water, the whales would die. Any ship with a strong, steel reinforced bow could probably do the job, he told her. The night before, the two biologists spent hours on the phone asking Coast Guard personnel around the country for help.

At the time, the United States Coast Guard only had two icebreakers on active duty, a fact Alaskans knew well. Many had long argued unsuccessfully for more. Neither of the ships were available to help the biologists. One ship, the
Polar Star,
was limping its way through the seventeen-foot-high ice floes to clear a commercial path through the Northwest Passage, while the other, the
Polar Sea,
was undergoing extensive repairs in its Seattle drydock.

Whale strandings were common in Alaska. When whales were imperiled near Anchorage, Cindy always tried to help. So did lots of folks. In fact, the last time whales became stranded nearby, Cindy and her dog, Denali, were almost killed trying to save them. That August, a group of Beluga whales beached themselves just south of Anchorage. They were exposed and helpless on the mudflats of Turnagain Arm, the body of water to the south of Anchorage. The Arm was known for its immense tidal surges called bore tides. Unlike regular tides that gradually ebb and flow, bore tides formed high-crested walls of water that moved at up to thirty miles an hour.

The group of whales Cindy was trying to help had become stranded by a bore tide, finding themselves trapped on the Arm's mudflats. Cindy knew that if they were not helped immediately, the whales would die before the next tide could bring the sea back in to save them. Before launching her own private rescue, Cindy reported the stranded whales to the Anchorage office of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). NMFS was the federal agency responsible for enforcing the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, passed by the U.S. Congress primarily to help endangered whales like those stranded on the Turnagain mudflats and, later, the three trapped whales in Barrow. Even though NMFS didn't help her as much as she would have liked, Cindy obeyed the law requiring citizens to report stranded animals.

NMFS employees took emergencies reported by Cindy Lowry with a grain of Greenpeace salt. “It's her again,” they seemed to lament. “It's that crazy but lovable environmentalist again.” She constantly cried “stranding.” If NMFS responded every time, they would exhaust their annual rescue budget in the first quarter of the year. They told her there was nothing they could do for the beluga whales stranded on Turnagain Arm. If they were going to be saved, Cindy Lowry would have to do it herself.

Stranded out on the flats, dry skin was the biggest danger the whales faced. To a person, dry skin meant minor irritation easily alleviated by applying moisturizing cream. To a whale, it meant death. Without water to cool their warm-blooded bodies, the whales would overheat and die. Cindy called her surprised boyfriend at work and told him she needed him to help her scoop water from tidal pools over the stranded whales.

Kevin was mortified. Was he hearing this suicidal suggestion from the woman he loved? A woman he knew to lovably nuts, but thought possessed some sanity? Anyone foolish enough to ignore the huge red danger signs warning people to stay off the mudflats stood a good chance of miring themselves so deep they couldn't get out. The mudflats were more dangerous than quicksand. The more you resisted, the deeper and firmer the mud would clutch you. If the mud did not pull you all the way under, you could watch until the incoming tide consumed you in a wall of water.

With the elections coming up, this was Kevin's busy season. Kevin was—you'll never guess—a political consultant for liberal Democrats! But Kevin was more level-headed than Cindy, more practical. Then again, so were most people. He didn't want Cindy to become Greenpeace's latest martyr. After repeated but unsubstantiated assurances that she wouldn't take any unnecessary chances, Cindy still could not convince Kevin the whales were worth the risk. Only when she threatened to go alone did he relent.

Like ice strandings in the Arctic, tide strandings of the kind Cindy and Kevin were now witnessing were natural and common occurrences. But their routineness did nothing to quench Cindy's zeal. She loved animals. An animal in distress meant distress for Cindy. Before he could unfasten his seat belt, Kevin found himself screaming at Cindy out his open window. Seconds earlier, Cindy and her dog bolted out the open door and onto the deceptively solid floor of the arm. In his haste to urge them back to safety, Kevin banged his head on the window frame.

Just a few hundred feet out on the dry waterway, Cindy screamed for help. Like a stealthy predator, the oozing mud grabbed Cindy's left leg and pulled her deathward. Between her frantic cries for help, Cindy desperately tried to reassure her dog, Denali, who was fighting his own losing battle against the deadly flats.

Sinking against the encroaching and unmistakable sounds of the fast-approaching bore tide, Cindy and her dog didn't know what to do. Her final solace was knowing that her death would mean life for the beached whales.

The last thing Kevin Bruce wanted was to be eulogized as the “horn-rimmed hero.” Vaulting across the protective guard rail, he bounded onto the flats in a daring effort to save Cindy and her dog. Finally reaching them, Kevin wisely ignored Cindy's appeals to help her dog first. In just three minutes, the mud had already pulled Cindy waist deep. Cindy and her dog watched the wall of water threaten to consume them.

But Kevin turned his back, concentrating instead on pulling Cindy to safety. When she was free, she grabbed Denali by the scruff of his neck and pulled him out of the thick mud with one hard yank. They sprinted back to the shore. When they reached it, the water turned from demon to savior. They cheered as it rushed over the whales.

When she heard about the whale stranding in Barrow, Cindy immediately thought they must be beached like the belugas in Turnagain Arm. Until it was explained to her, she could not understand what Craig and Geoff meant when they talked about “shore ice,” “open leads,” and the need for icebreakers. The Arctic seemed as remote to Cindy in Anchorage as to anyone in the Lower 48.

By the close of business Thursday, October 13, Cindy did not know nearly enough to mount an effective campaign to save the Barrow whales. But by the time Kevin got home, something told him that his long-awaited weekend would go the way of all the others. That something was the look on Cindy's face. The seeds for still another mission of mercy had been firmly planted in her. This was just the sort of crisis Cindy lived for and just what Kevin feared. Cindy loved Kevin, but truth be told, she loved whales more. He knew it. She knew it. Everyone knew it. Every time he started to think otherwise, there was another stranding to remind him.

At 6
A.M.
Friday morning, Cindy's phone rang. It was Geoff Carroll in Barrow. After apologizing for waking her up, he told Cindy that the local television cameraman's footage appeared just hours before on the
NBC Nightly News
. The three stranded whales were a national story. Cindy Lowry was in business.

She jumped out of bed and into the shower. Before she could finish rinsing the shampoo out of her hair, the phone rang again. It was her boss, Campbell Plowden, from Greenpeace's Washington office. He coordinated all the organization's whale activities. While he did not see the NBC report himself, he heard about it and wanted to know if Cindy thought Greenpeace could play any kind of role. Plowden would leave the decision in Cindy's hands. If she could justify a realistic effort to help rescue the stranded whales, Greenpeace would pay the bill.