Big Miracle (47 page)

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 for 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.

The year 1988–89 brought more than the customary darkness and bitter cold. It also brought the coldest and longest winter ever recorded in North America.

I went back to Barrow in January 1989, along with my colleague Michael Richardson to take a second look at the place. As I stepped off the plane that dangerously cold January noon, I felt as if I had never been there before. Pitch-dark at high noon.

January in Barrow made me yearn for the halcyon days of October. An ambient temperature of minus fifty-eight degrees was Barrow's way of saying Welcome Back. Nostrils and eyelids froze on contact with the cold. So too did just about everything else. Spit froze in mid-air, clattering when it hit the ground. But Barrow was lucky. It was on the coast. Just a few miles inland, temperatures dropped to eighty degrees below zero. Dick Mackey, two-time Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race champion, logged the coldest temperature ever recorded in North America at his truck stop in Cold Foot, Alaska, 250 miles south of Prudhoe Bay on January 21, 1989: minus eighty-two degrees. It sure didn't feel like a record, Mackey said. It was just the first time the U.S. Weather Service gave his official station a thermometer that went below minus eighty degrees.

Isolation and depression hung over Barrow like the permanent bank of ice fog which blanketed that forlorn outpost nine months of the year. The days of Barrow's prominence seemed as remote as an ancient whaling epic. Did Barrow always seem hopeless and remote? I asked. “Nope,” Barrowans demurred, as if astonished anyone could reach my conclusion. “This is normal.”

The press's relentless coverage of the nonevent touched people all over the world. No matter where in the world I traveled in the next few months, almost every person I met was well versed in the plight of the whales. The whales had become celebrities.

Cindy Lowry's reward was obvious. The whales were free. Single-handedly, she catapulted the whales from Arctic isolation to global stardom. Because of her, the California grays turned into the luckiest whales that ever lived. History's most massive animal rescue was waged on their behalf.

Greenpeace turned whale-saving into a cash cow. Their dynamo Alaska field coordinator started not just a mammoth rescue, but the biggest source of new money and members in the organization's history. Operation Breakout was an unexpected cash cow. Memberships and contributions shot up 400 percent in the rescue's aftermath, the greatest single increase up to its time.

Biologists and naturalists far removed from the scene at first claimed there was no way the whales could be spared from a fate they deemed inextricable. As progress pushed the leviathans closer to that very possibility, the distant, dispassionate scientists discarded their mistaken theories. The scientists were wrong and the whole world knew it. In an attempt to salvage their credibility, they “refined” their views.

Even if the whales could get past the pressure ridge, naturalist Roger Caras tried convincing Ted Koppel on ABC's
Nightline
, they could never surmount the myriad obstacles that separated them from their breeding grounds off Mexico's Pacific coastline. Since the whales weren't tagged for monitoring, no one could ever prove Caras wrong.

And that was just what NOAA wanted. Shortly after the rescue, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration printed up colorful brochures and passed them out to whale boat tour operators on the Pacific Coast helping sightseers identify Siku and Poutu. No damage could come its way. If the whales were found, NOAA would be vindicated, if they weren't, there would still be no proof the animals weren't enjoying their anonymity in the wet beyond.