Big Miracle (27 page)

He grabbed a lightweight ski parka in the mistaken belief that it would keep him warm during his short stay just 1,700 miles south of the North Pole. After all, he thought, how cold could it be? It was the second week of October. The temperature was in the mid-eighties in Los Angeles, and back home the mild winter was stepping aside for another glorious Aussie spring. The three-man crew from Network Ten boarded their flight at LAX with the infectious smiles and pleasant demeanors native to mates from Down Under. When they stepped off the plane in Fairbanks, their jovial good humor was swept away in the subarctic wind. It was already minus ten degrees there—the coldest temperature any of them had ever experienced. Burslem didn't know whether to panic or buy himself a case of beer.

They checked into their hotel on the banks of the Chena River in downtown Fairbanks and called Melbourne to check for any new details. The news desk told him they were scheduled to do a “live cross” back to Australia in just over an hour. Burslem wished he'd opted for the case of beer. Instead, he panicked.

“I'm glad I called,” Burslem said. “Would have been a pretty boring live cross without me, huh?” He laughed.

They gave him the number for KTVF-TV, the local television station in Fairbanks. They were arranging live interviews between the anchors of Network Ten News in Melbourne and Sydney and the exhausted but still witty Burslem, who called KTVF and asked for the person in charge of live crosses.

“Live what?” came the unsure response.

“Aw, hell,” Burslem chided himself. He couldn't count how many times he had made that mistake. The rattled Aussie hardly needed reminding that Americans used the term “live shot” when referring to live satellite television interviews. How long had he been in America? he asked himself out loud.

“I'm so sorry, mate,” he said to the confused man in the newsroom. “I mean the ‘live shot' to Australia—do you know anything about it?” His eardrum nearly burst when the receiver at the other end of the line clattered to the floor.

“It's the Australian,” screamed the excited KTVF employee. He asked Burslem where he was. When Burslem gave the man the name of his downtown motel, he was told that someone from the station would meet him in the lobby in five minutes. Burslem and his crew of three arrived at the KTVF studio dressed for a cool night at a Queensland “beach barbee.” The folks at the station couldn't help but cackle. One of the men pulled Burslem aside and apologized for the laughter. Suppressing his own giggles, he told Burslem that if he went to Barrow dressed like that, he would die. Burslem stopped laughing himself when the man's friendly warning finally registered.

Burslem resolved to worry about the problem once the live interview was out of the way. Unlike American television, Australian television had few of the pretensions and none of the exaggerated self-importance so often associated with the American networks. Mistakes weren't ignored, they were often played up. Australian television reporters were allowed to show much more human emotion, particularly the light kind, than their American colleagues. For Ken Burslem, it would prove a good thing.

His instructions from Sydney were to stand outside in the frigid Alaska night so Australia's summer viewers could get a sense of how cold it really was. “Act cold,” came the last word from Sydney. If there was one thing Burslem didn't need it was someone telling him to shiver while standing outside in temperatures of minus ten degrees. What he didn't know, his flimsy red ski jacket would soon teach him. The folks at KTVF were delighted to help this cheerful Aussie make television history. If it worked, it would be the most remote “live cross” ever broadcast in Australia, and the underdressed crew had not even reached Barrow. The Australians did not realize that Fairbanks, Alaska's second city, was a cosmopolitan mecca compared with the tiny Eskimo village. One of the studio cameras was rolled out the big back doors and onto the snow-covered parking lot to prepare for the outside shot. Burslem stood between the camera and a large drift of plowed snow dwarfing him in the background. When someone from KTVF asked if that snowdrift was all right, Burslem howled loudly.

“Hell, we're Aussies,” he said to the overattentive staff. “Most of those lucky bastards we'll be talking to don't even know what this stuff is. They sure as hell are not going to know one heap of it from the next,” he said, reassuring his nervous helpers. If everything went off properly, the shot would work just like Oran Caudle's from Barrow. But instead of playing back prerecorded tape, Burslem stood in front of a camera responding to live questions coming in over a phone line from Australia. The picture ran from the camera to a satellite dish in KTVF's parking lot. The dish would beam the video signal to the same satellite Oran used from Barrow, Aurora I, the geostationary orbiter parked 22,500 miles in space above Alaska. In Seattle, three thousand miles to the south, the signal would be “looped” or relayed onto another satellite.

From there, the Network Ten crew in Los Angeles watched Burslem make his trademark funny faces on their test monitors. In Los Angeles, the signal was looped to its third satellite before being picked up simultaneously in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra. In less than a second, the image of a Ken Burslem sticking out his frozen tongue started at the top of the world and traveled more than 125,000 miles before it ended up near the bottom of the world. Moments before Burslem was scheduled to go live he pulled his favorite earpiece out of his pocket. It was the same one he took with him on all his stories. As he lifted it to his ear, the KTVF technician told him not to use it.

“Use one of ours,” he said confidently. They were rubber and wouldn't freeze to his ear. His helpful protestations went unheeded. Burslem thanked the man and told him not to worry. How, he wondered, could an earpiece freeze? The interview would last only two minutes. The stations in Australia communicated with Burslem over a regular telephone line. He plugged one end of the earpiece into a phone and stuck the other in his ear. He couldn't watch it, but he listened to the program broadcast live in Australia like any viewer back home. When he heard the anchor announce his name and location, Burslem knew it was time to stop making the funny faces. He was on the air.

But as he got his cue, he felt a sharp sting in his left ear and tried inconspicuously to lift the hand not holding the microphone to fiddle with the sharp, unexplained pain. When he did, he was horrified. It wouldn't move. The man was right, the damned thing had frozen to his ear. Here was Ken Burslem, the American-based correspondent, reporting live in an historical broadcast to his native Australia with a tiny earpiece frozen to the side of his head. He just wanted it to end and when it did, he thanked God. Wrapping things up, he realized he couldn't quite remember what he had said.

But the people who saw it will remember it for a long time. Burslem knew something about his voice seemed funny, but he was too new to Alaska to realize what it was. He tried to coil one of his crew's rubber cords only to find it stiff as uncooked pasta. When he reached his gloved hand to rub his itching chin, he could not feel a thing. The itch was nature's warning. His lower jaw was frozen. When he tried to speak his words came out slurred. Back home they thought he was drunk.

His producers thought so, too. They just assumed their man got caught with his pants down. They knew he had just an hour warning before the live interview, not enough time to burn off the fire in his blood. If the same had happened to an American correspondent, warning or not, he would have been fired immediately. Luckily, Ken Burslem was an Aussie. But in Barrow, Burslem's problem only got worse. As interest in the whales spread across Australia, Burslem was forced to stand outside Oran Caudle's frozen studio for longer and longer stretches in the middle of the bitter Arctic night. After just a few days in Barrow, Burslem actually found himself pining for balmy Fairbanks.

By popular demand, Oran Caudle broadcast all the television transmissions from Barrow over the local cable channel. If the Nielsen company had bothered to monitor the North Slope, Oran's ratings would have shot through the roof. Ken Burslem was an instant Arctic celebrity. Spontaneous crowds gathered around to watch their new hero do his nightly live broadcasts to Australia. As a joke, the Eskimos presented him a symbolic key to Barrow's new alcohol treatment center. Burslem loved it. He swore to his producers that he was stone sober, but they didn't believe him. His slur was too real. Only a drunk could sound like that, they were convinced. “For Christ's sake,” he exclaimed. “I wish there was liquor here to drink!”

It was impossible for Burslem's producers Down Under to realize just how cold it was. With the wind chill the temperature difference between Barrow and Brisbane amounted to one hundred forty degrees. When their own ratings started shooting through the roof, the Australian producers' dropped their concern. Their viewers couldn't get enough of Network Ten's man in Barrow. Soon, Ken Burslem was an Aussie legend. The whole nation tuned in each day to watch their heretofore-temperate U.S. correspondent report live from outside the North Slope Borough television studio in what looked to be a drunken stupor. Life played an ironic trick on Ken Burslem. He was one of the only reporters in Barrow who didn't drink.

It was a vicious circle for Burslem that ended only when the whales were free. The drunker his frozen jaw made him sound, the more people Down Under wanted to hear him.

More stations across Australia tried to schedule their own live crosses with the jolly man at the top of the world. By the end of one of these long nights of chatter, Burslem could barely speak, almost unable to manage even the inebriated slur for which he had become so famous. Not to be outdone, Ken Burslem's Australian rival, Network Nine beat its own path to Barrow. With Burslem's celebrity, Nine's mission was to stay close. They did an admirable job in the Australian whale sweepstakes. Their big coup came on one of the last nights of the saga when they put the staggering mayor of Barrow on live television. George Ahmaogak didn't need a frozen jaw to sound drunk, he was already. The folks Down Under fell instantly in love with their Inuit soul mate.

13

The Arctic and the White House Joined by Love

The whales stranded 10,000 miles away became big news in Australia. While the American networks, caught up in their own self-importance, lost perspective of the relative insignificance of the story, the Australian reporters assigned to Barrow determined to let their viewers have fun. Measured against the scale of their own expectations, the Aussies came away clear winners. Ken Burslem would later win the Thorn Award, Australia's most prestigious television journalism award, for his distinguished reporting from the top of the world.

For those involved with the rescue, in the days immediately following the president's call there was little fun to be had. For National Guard colonel Tom Carroll, the euphoria of the president's call did not last long. He sobered up the instant he looked out his window. He clung to a plan whose problems grew more pronounced by the hour. Tuesday night, the second full day of the pull and the eleventh since the whales were first discovered, the barge that justified the rescue and was supposed to free the whales had become Operation Breakout's Achilles' heel. It was no closer to Barrow. Each time one problem seemed solved, another appeared.

The Skycrane helicopters Colonel Carroll designated to transport the recommissioned barge quickly showed their limits. The barge's massive tonnage combined with the brutal Arctic conditions proved more than the Skycranes could handle. After the helicopters finally ripped the barge free from its four-year frozen dry dock, its vast weight kept breaking through the newly formed shore ice. Each time the giant praying mantis machine pulled the barge out, it fell through the ice again after traveling only a few hundred yards. At this pace, it would have taken a week just to get out of the harbor.

By the night of Wednesday, October 19, Tom Carroll's operation found itself in deep trouble. The barge was barely five miles from where it started. The rotors of the expensive helicopters were cracking under the strain, threatening the safety of their crews. The press caught quick scent of the rescuers diminished faith in Colonel Carroll's faltering battle plan. Ron Morris's amusement at Tom Carroll's battering was a badly kept secret. The two didn't think much of each other.

People assumed he was jealous of the presidential call. Morris felt stifled by Carroll's refusal to return his phone calls. Morris wasn't alone in that criticism. By the middle of Operation Breakout's first week, some of the media thought Colonel Carroll was dodging them. Now that things started to falter, Carroll was accused of trying to shield himself from unpleasant questions. By that Wednesday night, October 19, Tom Carroll was at the end of his rope. The press started turning against him. ABC-TV producer Harry Chittick called him the “Keystone Colonel” for his inability to move the barge.

A growing contingent of Eskimos tirelessly cut hole after hole while the barge lay listless just an hour's walk from its original berth. Why, if this wasn't a race, did the media make the colonel feel that he was falling behind? He gathered his helicopter pilots to discuss plans for one last attempt to move the barge. If it didn't work, they would have to think of other options. If none were feasible, the colonel and his men would be forced to face the unfathomable prospect of returning to Anchorage in failure. The indignity of accepting his career's first operational defeat was bad enough. But being run out of his own state by a carpetbagging media was more than the hardened colonel could stand.

By Wednesday, October 19, the whales had been sloshing in the ice holes around Barrow for twelve days. The entire rescue mission, now five days old, was built around VECO's ability to use its hoverbarge. Tom Carroll faced a crisis of his own. His training told him to separate heart from mind. His job was to do, not to feel. But he couldn't help it. He felt plenty.