15

Minneapolis Comes to the Rescue

Just as hope was fading, help was on its way. After flying all night, Greg Ferrian and Rick Skluzacek, the Minnesotans bearing deicers, finally arrived in Barrow. Throughout the trip from Minneapolis, Greg never told the truth to his brother-in-law Rick or Jason Davis from Eyewitness News. He did not inform them that Ron Morris refused to authorize the use of their deicers. Greg told Rick that everything was set for their arrival at the top of the world.

When he first heard about it, KSTP’s Jason Davis thought the idea of following two local boys trying to save three whales up near the North Pole sounded like a great adventure. But the instant he deplaned, Davis’ enthusiasm evaporated. They were nearly blown over by a thirty-mile-an-hour wind that made January in Minnesota seem balmy. Rick’s first hint that things weren’t going quite as smoothly as predicted came when Greg admitted the two had nowhere to stay. A minor detail, Ferrian promised.

They called the Top of the World Hotel from the airport. “Booked” said the receptionist. It was the same story at the Airport Inn. Greg stood in line waiting to ask the Eskimo woman behind the MarkAir ticket counter if she knew of a place they could stay. He noticed a large cardboard sign written in Magic Marker and hung by a string at the head of the line.

“All raw whale, seal, walrus, and polar bear meat must be stored in leakproof packages for shipment on MarkAir.” When he turned around to point out the odd sign, Rick was already focusing his pocket camera to take his own shot. When Greg reached the head of the line, he asked the overworked agent if she knew of any accommodations. He tried to joke that the trip from Minneapolis was a bit too arduous for a commute. Nonplussed by his poor attempt at humor, the agent suggested he call the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL) north of town.

“North of town?” asked a befuddled Greg Ferrian. “I thought this was as far north as it gets?”

“NARL is as far north as it gets,” came the response. They loaded their six deicers into the back of an Isuzu I-Mark taxi and climbed aboard for the five mile ride out to the northern tip of the continent. When the driver told them the fare for the short ride was fifty dollars, they realized they had not only reached the edge of their continent but the edge of their means. They arrived at NARL just in time to claim two of the last guest rooms in the remarkably tidy facility. The sterile smell of a hospital hung heavily in the air. In case either of them was burned with chemicals or acids while conducting one of their Arctic experiments, there was a red emergency shower nozzle in the hallway outside their room.

From the television reports he had been watching before leaving Minneapolis, Greg immediately recognized the North Slope biologists Geoff Carroll and Craig George as they dragged their weary feet and aching bodies into their office across the hall. Ebulliently, he introduced himself to the exhausted duo, who had returned to their office to escape the whales, if only for a few minutes. Greg asked for just a moment of their time to explain the deicers they had brought all the way from Minnesota at their own expense.

“These machines can keep your ice holes open,” Greg assured Geoff. “That’s our business.” Geoff thought it was worth trying the machines but he dreaded the idea of yet another sleepless night on the bitterly cold ice worrying about polar bears mauling him. He knew though that the whales needed help. The remarkable string of luck that had brought the whales this far seemed at an end. The dropping temperatures only deepened the whales’ dire straits. Craig told Greg and Rick they had to find Ron Morris. The biologists promised help, but they had to get away from Morris first, if only for a few hours. The coordinator had turned the whole rescue into a media circus and he was its ringmaster. For their own sanity, they needed a break.

Geoff told the two Minnesotans that the best way to catch Morris would be to wait for him at the Search and Rescue hangar. Craig drove them to the hangar at the end of the runway and introduced them to Randy Crosby. They waited two and a half hours before Morris landed in one of Crosby’s helicopters. With a slight wave of his hand, Morris tried to brush off Greg’s insistent appeals. “All I’m asking is that you let us tell you about our machines.” Greg pleaded. “You have to at least give us that much. After all, we just spent thousands of our own dollars to try and help.”

“All right,” Morris relented, “I’ll give you a minute and a half to explain them.” He listened to Rick’s short but plaintive explanation while carefully examining his fingernails in a conspicuous attempt to show his disinterest. Standing up to walk out of Crosby’s office, Morris doubted the deicers would work. Even if they did, he added, he thought they would make too much noise. Rick pleaded with Morris to at least let them try the deicers. After all, the Coast Guard successfully used them to keep open a fifty-square-yard hole in the middle of a frozen Lake Superior. Unimpressed, Morris told them to go back to NARL to await his decision. He said he would call them with a definitive answer.

Rick and Greg returned to their tiny room now cluttered with ice melting machines, and waited for Morris to call. After more than two anxious hours, they could wait no longer. Rick had to know whether his trip was a total waste of time and money and exactly how to kill his brother-in-law who dragged him into it. Around 6:30 that evening, they called Morris at the Airport Inn. His wife told them he could not be disturbed. He was preparing for his Nightline appearance.

A minute later, there was a commotion in the hallway. When Rick peered out the door he saw Geoff and Craig hurriedly knocking on every closed door in the building. Craig spotted Rick and cried, “There you are. We’ve been looking all over for you.”

The biologists just returned from the ice. Conditions were deteriorating. The holes were freezing again. “The whales are losing it,” Geoff told them. “I don’t think they’re going to make it through the night.”

“Screw Morris,” Craig barked when Rick muttered something about waiting for the coordinator’s call. “We’ve got to get those things on the ice.” They loaded two of the deicers into the ice and snow covered bed of Craig’s pick-up truck. They drove back to Search and Rescue to try and find a portable electric generator to power the deicers. Randy Crosby told them the heavy crosswinds made the already risky proposition of flying at night too dangerous. As they waited for conditions to improve, Rick and Greg passed out sales brochures to the dozen or so nightshift journalists waiting for any news to report. Among those handed a brochure was Geoff and Craig’s boss, Dr. Tom Albert, the director of the North Slope Borough’s Wildlife Management office.

After his appearance on Nightline, Ron Morris went back to the hangar. It was 10 P.M., Wednesday, October 19, and Tom Albert was waiting for him. He angrily shoved the brochure in Morris’s startled face. “Either we harvest those whales or you give these guys a chance.” Albert stormed off before Morris could answer. At around 11 P.M., Randy finally found a portable Honda generator in the back of his hangar. After he replaced the spark plugs and cleaned the carburetor, the small Japanese generator smoothly purred to life. It was loaded, along with the deicer, onto a SAR helicopter and flown off into the pitch-black Arctic night. Hovering above the black void, Randy searched for the lone light of the hunting shed erected on the edge of the sandspit. When he was directly over it, he switched on his landing lights to look for a safe place to set his chopper down.

Cindy and Arnold Jr. had just about given up hope. That night was the worst weather yet. They were thinking about heading back to town for some sleep. All that kept them alone with the whales on this minus forty degrees night was their unspoken fear that the next time they returned, the holes, like the whales that depended on them, would have vanished without a trace beneath firmly frozen ice and windblown snow. The arrival of the Minnesota brothers-in-law brought Cindy and Arnold back from the edge of despair. They expectantly gathered around the small silver and red generator while Randy tried to start it. But it was so cold, its components had frozen solid during the twelve-minute flight from the hangar.

Craig suggested they try again with his own portable generator. That would require another trip back to town. As they all flew back to the hangar, Cindy knew they were leaving the vulnerable whales to their fate, if only for an hour. She wondered if they would survive. She wanted to stay out on the ice with them, but Arnold Brower Jr. wouldn’t let her. There were polar bears everywhere. If she stayed alone, the whales would have a better chance of surviving than she would.

Greg was exhausted. He pushed his tired body as far as it would go. He had to get some sleep. It was after midnight and he hadn’t slept since before leaving Minneapolis thirty-six hours earlier. Since Rick was the expert on the deicers, Greg was free to fall comatose on his cot at NARL. Rick stood shivering aimlessly in the dark Arctic night as Craig rummaged through his cluttered tool shed for the generator. How could he have lost it, he asked himself. He used it just a week earlier on his hunting trip with Geoff. When he found the generator, it started on the first pull. Treating it just like his truck, he left its engine running for the ride back to the SAR hangar where Randy and Cindy were waiting.

Randy was not thrilled with the idea of flying his helicopter with a gas powered combustion motor running inside his cabin. Crosby prayed that the FAA never found out what he was about to do. Not only was flying a helicopter with a flammable engine running incredibly dangerous, it would also be incredibly cold. It was minus sixty degrees just a few hundred feet off the ground and the onboard heater barely worked with all the windows shut. But with a running engine emitting deadly carbon monoxide fumes, they would have to fly with the windows open.

The trip out was the worst experience anyone of them could ever remember. Randy’s arms were so numb from the cold, he could barely fly his aircraft. His left eye froze shut. Cindy broke down in tears that instantly froze to her stinging red cheeks. Rick wished he were dead, and Craig tried to take his mind off the excruciating cold by concentrating on a tune he was trying to hum. Finally, the chopper touched down. Randy lowered his head onto the frozen vinyl dashboard, relieved that his dangerous mission was over. Craig and Geoff cradled the still purring generator like a fragile infant as they walked it out to the slush covered first hole.

Like panting dogs, the panicked whales were surfacing every few seconds. Craig figured the whales had reached the end. At any minute, the mammals could drown. Rick frantically plugged the power cord into the end of one of the compact deicers and dropped it into the corner of the rapidly freezing hole. After bobbing up and down a few times, the buoyed device bounced into position. It was ready to be turned on. At the flick of a switch, it started to work. The slightly warmer water pulled up from a few feet below the waterline bubbled up at the surface. Instantly, the slush and ice around the buoy began to melt. The deicers worked.

In its first ten minutes, the deicer melted the slush and ice in half of the first hole. Almost as quickly, the whales started to calm down. Cindy, Randy, Craig, and Greg were exuberant. Finally, they found a way to help the whales. In his euphoria, Rick discovered a renewed source of energy that propelled him onward to the next hole. He set up his second deicer and dropped it in the hole. Within seconds, it too worked. Soon, the next hole was ice free. Drunk with delirium, four lone souls danced on the surface of a frozen sea in the bitter cold black of an Arctic night.

They knew not to trust everything they felt and saw. Their exhausted consciousnesses crossed into a new realm. They stammered in disbelief. The next sight their eyes beheld was more than their weary minds could compute. The whales were in the second hole. Just a few minutes after it cleared of ice, the whales gave the first sign that they were interested in being rescued. The whales had moved.

The next move was man’s.