Big Miracle (29 page)

Harry Chittick thought the fact that Pepe's could charge twenty dollars for their greasy version of a hamburger and get away with it was as newsworthy as anything happening out on the ice. He was right. The ABC News producer wanted to get a sound-bite from one of the out-of-town media while he was paying his oversized bill. Chittick's cameraman readied himself right by the cashier. When CBS cameraman Pete Dunnegan paid his bill at the cash register, Chittick's videographer recorded Dunnegan turning to the camera, sticking a toothpick in his mouth, and shrugging. “Twenty-one bucks for a cup of coffee, hmphhh,” he said, scratching his head. “Must have been the extra sugar.” That humorous sound-bite closed that night's ABC's
World News Tonight
broadcast.

It was also the perfect close to Pepe's culinary career for Pete Dunnegan. Fran Tate was livid when she saw his quip on her TV. At dinnertime, she cut Dunnegan off at the door. In front of his colleagues, she told him never to set foot in her restaurant again. Dunnegan happily obliged. He was the envy of the press corps. The rest of us had no choice but to suffer Pepe's gastrointestinal consequences. The more Barrow and the three whales made news in the United States, the more interest foreign broadcasters showed in reporting the story themselves. In the two days following the president's call to Colonel Carroll, British, Australian, and Canadian television crews arrived in Barrow, adding further bait to the fever-pitched frenzy at the top of the world.

But most intrigued by the whale story were the Japanese. By the time the rescue reached its crescendo, three of the four national networks had crews in Barrow. They marveled at America's latest bizarre obsession. They were less interested in Bone and its skinless nose than they were in people like Cindy Lowry, who cared so much about the tasty creatures. They wanted to explore what it was about three whales that could so completely unite almost everyone in a nation as huge and diverse as the United States.

Takao Sumii, the president of the Japanese NTV network phoned me the evening following President Reagan's call. It was Wednesday, October 19, day twelve for the stuck whales, and day five for Operation Breakout. He tried to explain what it was about the American media his network was seeking to cover. I may have been a journalist, but I was also a TV viewer. I could see the emotional pull of the story although I couldn't figure out the dynamics of its rise in prominence or urgency. To me, it seemed like the story from Barrow started out about whales but evolved into one about the media. Only after I arrived in Barrow did I begin to understand how true that was.

On the MarkAir flight from Anchorage to Barrow, Masu Kawamura, the NTV correspondent, told me my job was to report on the media's coverage of the event, to give the Japanese viewer a sense of the episode's absurdity. Like other Americans, I guess I wanted the whales saved but didn't lose too much sleep about it. Not knowing any of the background or complexities that led up to the rescue, I was no more or less interested than the next person. It was that widespread attachment and fondness for the endangered animal that created the story in the first place. I watched anxiously as the whales slipped closer toward what looked to be an inevitable, pathetic death. Knowing nothing about the Arctic and its conditions, I cursed that damned colonel who the networks said was the one who couldn't get the barge to Barrow. I was exactly what the Japanese assigned me to analyze.

In Japan, whale meat was an age-old delicacy. The Japanese wondered what it was about the tasty mammals that seemed to so strongly touch the hearts of Westerners. They resented the international pressure that forced them to pretend to have ceased commercial whaling. Far from stopping their slaughter of the great creatures, the Japanese just put a new, benign name on it and went right on whaling.

The 1986 International Whaling Commission convention banned what was left of commercial whaling for five years. As signatories, the Japanese faced economic sanctions if they didn't comply. The Japanese proposed a compromise. Norway, Iceland, Japan, and the Soviet Union would agree to give up commercial whaling if they could continue to hunt whales for “scientific purposes.” Fearing no accord at all, other IWC agreed.

Before the ink had even dried, the demand for whales within the Japanese “scientific community” skyrocketed. Japanese “scientists” discovered they needed 1,100 “samples.” But no one knew what it was these “scientists” wanted to “study.” Roughly the same number of whales could now be killed for scientific purposes after the moratorium as were killed for culinary purposes before the moratorium. Call it “culinary science,” perhaps?

Japanese “scientists” bought whale carcasses from domestic sources as well as Norwegian and Icelandic whalers. When the scientists completed their “research,” they sold the carcasses back to the whalers who then resold them to Japanese food wholesalers. To the Japanese and other clear thinkers, this whale rescue made little sense. How were these three stuck whales different than three stuck Texas shorthorns? Why not just sell the whales to Japan and make some money rather than spending money to save livestock that were meant to be harvested in the first place?

When we arrived and were met by Rod Benson, he tossed our bags into the snow-filled bed of his natural gas-powered Chevy pickup, and drove us straight out to the whales. We were several hundred yards out to sea before I even realized we were driving on the ocean. That's right. Driving a Chevy on the Arctic Ocean.

After traveling from New York, Toronto and Tokyo, the first thing any of us saw at the top of the world was a strange smiling man sitting in a canvas director's chair at the edge of an ice hole in the middle of the frozen Arctic Ocean. He was singing a strange chant he said was destined for the whales that were nowhere to be seen, deep underwater. Trying to escape his rhapsody, I started thinking maybe Masu Kawamura, our Tokyo correspondent, was right. Was Lewis Carroll's rabbit hole really that far-fetched?

We were then introduced to Geoff and Craig, who were busy calming Cindy after an unexplained altercation with Jim Nollman, the interspecies communicator. What I didn't know at the time was that Cindy was arguing with Nollman about his insistence on playing South African guitar music instead of the whale sounds he promised her from Seattle.

Then, standing on the edge of the ice hole, I was struck with an unexplained, stinging pain, first in my left eye, and then, seconds later, in my right. It felt like a sharp object was cutting through my closed eyes. I knew it must have had something to do with my contact lenses but I couldn't get at them. My eyelids were frozen. In the instant it took to blink, the tiny droplets of condensation at the edge of my lashes froze my eyelids together, closing my eyes. My contact lenses had frozen to my eyes and my eyelids were stuck together. I hadn't even been out on the ice for five minutes. Sensing my disorientation, an Eskimo walked over and helped me to his idling car. My eyes quickly defrosted. I thanked him profusely and wore my glasses for the rest of the trip. Acts of extraordinary kindness were the rule, not the exception, in Barrow.

Rod Benson dropped us off at the Top of the World Hotel so we could check in with our NBC associates. They were NTV's American network partner. I introduced myself to NBC producer Jerry Hansen. With a smile, he assured me our trip to Barrow would be a memorable one. Delighted to get it off his hands, he playfully tossed me the keys to a battered old Chevy Suburban NBC rented earlier in the week. “It's all yours,” he said with obvious relief. No matter how bad it might have been, I said to myself, it certainly seemed more inviting than spending several hours a day hanging onto the back of a speeding dogsled in windchill temperatures dipping to minus one hundred fifty degrees.

Jerry gave me the standard instructions. “Never turn it off, and fill it up every night.” There was only one gas station within 100,000 square miles. That, combined, with the Suburban's poor gas mileage made it a good bet I would remember where it was. What Jerry neglected to tell me was never to put the automatic transmission into “park.” On only our third day in Barrow, the truck's frozen transmission died halfway between town and the whales. Only after we collectively cursed the damned garage that charged us two hundred dollars a day for a truck that didn't work did we realize that the Chevy broke down because no one taught us how to operate it.

Left in park, transmission fluid doesn't warm up with the rest of the car. Throwing the truck into gear with all the lubricants frozen destroyed our vehicle in less than fifty miles. With a watchful eye out for polar bears, we removed our gear from the truck and lamely hitchhiked back to town. I reported the truck abandoned and passed by it for the next ten days on the way to and from the whales, wondering whether it would ever be claimed or just join other abandoned vehicles and garbage that clutter the sides of Barrow's few roads and alleyways.

By Thursday, October 20—day thirteen—Oran Caudle's studio was on the verge of a meltdown. The night before, despite the chaos that threatened to engulf him, Oran managed to pull off a live broadcast of the ABC News late-night program,
Nightline
. Never before had
Nightline
broadcast from a more remote location. In New York, Ted Koppel wondered whether it was worth the risk to go live to Barrow. Only after Harry Chittick, the ABC producer on the scene, assured New York that they could pull it off did Koppel and his staff agree to give it a try.

Dressed in parkas and sweatshirts, Ron Morris and Arnold Brower Jr. sat in aluminum folding chairs in the sparse setting of Oran Caudle's studio. The backdrop was cluttered with empty equipment boxes. The picture captured by the studio's one camera looked like it was shot by a tenth grader at a wealthy suburban high school somewhere in the Lower 48. Brower and Morris answered Ted Koppel's questions about the whales that were piped in over a conventional phone line from New York. Like millions of others, Koppel wanted to find out what it was about these three whales that turned whale hunters like Arnold Brower Jr. into tireless whale savers. When Arnold's answers fell short of what Koppel was looking for, Morris jumped to the aid of his Inuit colleague.

“They responded like any other community would,” Morris said. “This is a humane effort. They were chagrined and felt sorry for these critters. It was the same kind of outpouring I see when other animals are trapped in Alaska.” Brower breathed a sigh of relief. ABC News correspondent, naturalist, and resident whale expert Roger Caras guaranteed Ted Koppel and his millions of viewers that the whales would never survive their ordeal.

“I hate to be a wet blanket…” Caras said from the comfort of the ABC Manhattan studio. “They are exhausted, they are stressed, and they've got a gamut to run. There will be polar bears on the lookout for any animal that's stressed or weak. Southeast Alaska, then British Columbia has many pods of killer whales, and the way these whales will be pumping with their flukes, will be very slow and will be detected as vibrations in the water by the killer whales who will close in. Then along the coast of Oregon, they'll pick up the white sharks. Then, if they have any energy left at all after running this gamut of teeth, they've got to move all the way down to central Mexico. All without eating.

“I don't think they will ever get to Mexico. They'll be lost from sight once they've cleared the ice and no one will ever know what happened to them. As much as I hate to say it, I don't think they are going to get there.”

The once underused facility was now a madhouse. More than twenty domestic and international networks and local television stations, jostled, argued, and threatened each other and a frazzled Oran Caudle for access to his studio and its transmission equipment. Oran didn't know where to turn. It got so bad that by midweek, reporters just barged into the studio and without pause abruptly threw Oran out of his own office. His adulation of the network “big boys” quickly turned to scorn. They were turning his fantasy into a nightmare. They were rude, drunk, and had egos too huge to measure.

One night, a technician from one of the other Japanese networks scheduled a feed to Tokyo but never bothered to tell Oran. When the technician's time was approaching, he waltzed into the control room and, ignoring the crew using the room, turned on all his switches. But when he reached to adjust the audio level, he cranked it up so high that he blew out the fuses on the soundboard. Fortunately, it was one of the last feeds of the day and the only one left to transmit was Ken Burslem, the cheerful Australian. Had the wayward technician fouled up an American network's transmission, they would have erected Barrow's first lamp post from which to hang him. Oran was up all night repairing the damage and getting ready for the next day's madness. The technician never apologized.

The producers from the three networks came to Oran and suggested he give them control of his studio until the story was over. They knew what they were doing, they assured him. Among them, the three producers had been in the business for more than seventy-five years. At what should have been the moment of his greatest professional triumph, Oran Caudle was being eased out of his own job.

Oran asked ABC's Harry Chittick why he and Jerry Hansen were so concerned about a meltdown. Chittick explained that like any major story from a remote or foreign location, their number one worry was access to the satellite. In the news business, Chittick said, competitors have two objectives. The first is dramatic footage and sound-bites. The second is to deny the same to their competitors.

As Oran knew, Aurora I was the only satellite that could “see” a signal from Barrow, and Oran's studio was the only facility that could access it in that remote part of the world. A single broadcaster could easily gain a monopoly on the story by buying all the available time segments on Aurora I, a technique known as “bird-jamming.” If one company could book all the time for itself, no one else could use the satellite. The bird jammer would face a pleasant dilemma. He could shut out all his competitors and keep the story for himself, making it an exclusive, or he could make a killing by selling segments of the time back to his competitors at enormous markup.