16

Saving Whales the Old-fashioned Way

Colonel Tom Carroll was frazzled. He tapped the sharpened tip of his pencil on the Formica conference table provided for him by ARCO, his Prudhoe Bay hosts. His glazed eyes peered aimlessly through the frosted glass window and out to sea. In front of him lay a field of dirty Styrofoam coffee cups that had accumulated since his National Guard unit hastily set up shop there five days earlier. All his mind could focus on was the prostrate, abandoned barge which lay listless on the ice.

The operation to save the three whales proved to be the strangest mission of his life. Called from his Anchorage home on a Saturday afternoon, Colonel Carroll was initially put in charge of a logistical aspect of a burgeoning whale rescue. His commanding officer, General John Schaeffer, assigned him a single straightforward task. General Schaeffer ordered him to move a 185-ton hoverbarge from its frozen dry dock at Prudhoe Bay to Barrow, 270 miles across the ice-covered surface of the Arctic Ocean.

Just seventy-two hours after arriving in the Arctic netherworld, Tom Carroll was briefing the president of the United States. If that wasn’t enough, he was also falling in love with one of the president’s assistants whom he had never seen. But just as the colonel’s star began to rise, it fell back to earth with the force of a falling meteor. The colonel was back on the ground facing the bitter reality of Arctic logistics. His fifteen minutes of fame were drawing to a close, at least for now.

By the night of Thursday, October 20, day five of Operation Breakout and day thirteen for the stranded whales, Colonel Tom Carroll found little comfort in the thought that his mission seemed a failure. He told his men they performed their duties with honor and distinction. They were assigned a difficult task with no more than an even chance of success. Despite mounting press recriminations, the colonel told his men they could hold their heads high.

Just as the colonel’s emotional cycle entered the acceptance stage and his natural healing process began, General Schaeffer called and asked him what he was planning to do for an encore. Carroll thought Schaeffer was poking fun at him. After all, he thought, any more performances like the one he just directed and the entire Alaska National Guard might be the next endangered species.

General Schaeffer told Colonel Carroll if it were not for the National Guard, the whales would have long since perished. Carroll had much to be proud of. The general insisted that the Guard’s participation and the colonel’s command would continue as long as the rescue did. The Guard had invested too much time and money to back out now. If they did, the general said, the press would interpret it as a sign of weakness, a blow from which the Guard might not quickly recover.

It would also send the wrong signal to the rescue itself. If the Guard, with all its resources, gave up on the three whales, how would that play with the chain-saw-wielding Eskimos? Schaeffer ordered Carroll to devise alternate plans to assist in the whale rescue. If no further logistics were available in Prudhoe, he wanted Colonel Carroll to redeploy most of his men and equipment to Barrow. That was where the action was. There was plenty the Guard could do there. Randy Crosby and his Barrow Search and Rescue helicopters were overworked. The Guard could help SAR run helicopter press tours of the whale site, and if necessary, they could coordinate press access to the rescue. Tom Carroll was back in business, though on a smaller scale. But as far as the press knew, he had never missed a beat.

Just a few hours earlier, the whales recorded their first hint of progress since the rescue began. At last they started to explore the new holes the Eskimos had cut for them on Wednesday. The Minnesota deicers couldn’t possibly have arrived at a more dramatic moment. They saved the whales when they were literally on their last breaths. Wednesday night’s brittle cold completely sealed nearly every hole except the two kept open by the deicers.

The colonel thought quietly for a moment about ways to help. His brief experience with the barge taught him many valuable lessons. Chief among them was the difficulty of performing even the Arctic’s simplest jobs. Unlocking the barge from its four-year frozen berth was a feat in itself. Herculean efforts were required just to move it, some of which had never been tried before. While creative ingenuity was the only option available to many Arctic expeditions, the colonel’s detailed post mortem determined that an operation so fraught with unconquered obstacles could not depend entirely upon improvised solutions.

Carroll decided that Arctic innovations were better left to the innovators. If the National Guard was going to play a role of any significance in the whale rescue, the colonel resolved, it could only be done through tested, proven means.

Carroll called Ben Odom, the head of ARCO Alaska, and the rescue’s chief financier. The two men had been in daily contact ever since the colonel and his unit arrived at Odom’s expansive North Slope facility five days earlier. The barge failure didn’t change Odom’s mind. He wanted those whales freed and his checkbook would stay open until they were.

Ben Odom’s enthusiasm for the project was shared by nearly everyone at Atlantic Richfield. From the executive dining room to the canteens, the rescue was a big topic of conversation throughout the ARCO Alaska tower. It united the company’s 25,000 employees like no other event Ben Odom could remember.

No oil company in Alaska ever got more favorable press coverage than ARCO did during Operation Breakout. Normally the whipping boy of oil dependent environmentalists, ARCO now worked side by side with Cindy Lowry and Greenpeace. ARCO swallowed any hint of criticism by pouring resources into a rescue destined to save three animals endangered by nature, not man. Of course, the green’s later sniffed that ARCO’s work freeing the whales did nothing to clean up the 11,000 acres of North Slope Arctic tundra they claimed were “ruined” by oil drilling.

Standard Oil Company was one of ARCO’s global competitors as well as a partner in the gigantic consortium of oil companies working the North Slope fields. Standard Oil donated three chain saws to the rescue. No good deed, no matter how small ever goes unpunished, particularly when committed by an oil company. When Standard confirmed their donation, the media immediately howled that the company spent more money announcing their contribution than their contribution was even worth.

Odom couldn’t have been more encouraging to the colonel and his National Guard guests. The barge setback notwithstanding, the longer the rescue went on, the more ARCO could benefit from the goodwill generated by their efforts. Besides, Ben Odom wanted the whales freed for the same reasons everyone else did. They were innocent victims whose plight couldn’t help but stir human compassion. He told Carroll that he and ARCO were at his service. Whatever the colonel wanted or needed, Odom would do his best to provide. Carroll contacted Ron Morris in Barrow to find out what options, if any, the NOAA coordinator was considering. The colonel informed him the Guard had the mandate to help in whatever manner Morris saw appropriate. Morris told Carroll that he and Cindy had called upon experts at NOAA and Greenpeace to draw up a comprehensive list describing every plausible technique for breaking the ice or moving the whales.

Cindy Lowry was amazed by the extensive research her colleague, Campbell Plowden, had conducted from the besieged Greenpeace headquarters in Washington. Between asking and being asked questions of and by nearly everyone professing to be an ice or whale expert, Plowden had been on the phone for four days straight. He sent nightly faxes to Cindy in Barrow outlining what he had learned that day. She reviewed and edited the reports before passing them on to Morris.

The most promising alternative to the abandoned barge seemed to be “portable” water jet pumps. Originally designed to dislodge minerals imbedded in granite, they proved more than capable of blasting through thick Arctic ice deposits. The powerful pumps shot water pressurized at 35,000 pounds per square inch. Manufacturers assured Plowden they could blast through an eight foot wall of solid ice. But there were no pumps to be found in Alaska. Private contractors only brought them up to the North Slope on a per job basis. Like the Boeing Vertol helicopters Bill Allen wanted to use to tow the barge, the independent water jet operators fled the slim pickings of the North Slope in search of more promising pastures.

Every other option had too many drawbacks. Phosphorus burning powders were ruled out because of the potential destruction to other marine life, including free-swimming whales, that were in the area. The steel and glass cutting particle steam erosion laser was too heavy to transport from the Lower 48, and the mini icebreaker owned by the Amoco oil company was busy protecting a drill ship in the Arctic Ocean two hundred miles north of Prudhoe.

Earlier in the week when the barge was still expected, Cindy heard a rumor there was an icebreaker docked in Prudhoe Bay. The owners of the ship, the Arctic Challenger, turned down Plowden’s request for help. It would be suicide, they argued, for their small ship to fight the Arctic ice so late in the year. The last time they tried to sail from Prudhoe to Barrow the voyage took three weeks, the ship was severely damaged, and that was in September. Luckily, no lives were lost, but this year the ice was even thicker and the owners were not about to risk their ship again for the sake of three whales. Plowden couldn’t blame them.

About the only idea that seemed even remotely feasible, if comparatively lame, came from the suddenly resurrected Tom Carroll. After hearing about the Eskimos cutting manual ice holes, Carroll asked Marvin King, VECO’s top man in Prudhoe, if he knew of any readily available device that might cut holes even faster.

“Well, there’s that ARCO ice bullet,” he said in a tone lacking confidence.

“The what bullet?” asked Carroll.

King gently rubbed his tired face, sat down and let out a sigh. Their efforts to free the barge could have killed him and his men. It was one of the most difficult tasks any of them had ever performed. Remembering all the frostbite, singed lungs, painful coughs, and frozen eyelids, the last thing King wanted was to get out there and start all over again with another one of the gung-ho colonel’s crazy ideas. Known by several other names, the “bullet” had one simple function. “Smasher,” “ice crusher,” “ice bomb,” each described a late-twentieth-century Arctic technology at its simplest. The five-ton concrete spike emblazoned with the light blue ARCO corporate logo looked like a giant toy spin-top. The bullet dangled on a steel cable beneath a helicopter. It was winched a hundred feet up in the air and, in a reaffirmation of the laws of gravity, dropped to smash through the ice below. Sophisticated? No. Effective? Always.

The colonel wanted to know more about the bullet, but there wasn’t much more King could tell him other than ARCO owned it and lent it regularly to VECO. Based on his incomplete understanding of ice conditions in Barrow, it didn’t take much for Carroll to determine that the force of a five-ton shaft of concrete dropped from one hundred feet would obliterate whatever lay beneath it. Colonel Carroll wanted to test it. Late Thursday evening, he called Bill Allen at his Anchorage home to see if he could smooth the way to getting ARCO’s permission to use the bullet.

Ever since he touched the whales with his bare hands five days earlier, Bill Allen seemed a changed man. His employees at VECO noticed it the morning after his trip to Barrow. He was more at ease, more attentive. Before his encounter with the giant whales, Allen could not fathom an animal as large and as graceful as the one he gently petted at the top of the world. Unlike ARCO, his colleague Ben Odom’s company, VECO had almost no contact with the general public. It sold its products within the oil industry. Except during a 1984 political scandal that rocked the state legislature, hardly anyone outside the “industry” had ever even heard of VECO. Its role in saving the whales could only detract from VECO’s bottom line. Bill Allen contributed his company’s time, energy and money for one reason. He wanted to save the whales.

Allen’s secretary, Pearl Crouse, flung open the door to her boss’s office, on Wednesday, October 19, sporting a bright grandmotherly smile. As she ushered in a bundle-laden postman, Crouse nearly burst with pride in the boss she adored. The mailman was carrying a canvas mailbag stuffed full of handwritten letters for the VECO chairman.

Children from schools across the United States and Canada drafted letters to Bill Allen with salutations such as “Dear Mr. Oilman,” and “Dear Whalesaver.” Many of the letters had no address, just “Whale Rescuers, Alaska.” Within seventy-two hours of Operation Breakout’s birth, the letters had found their way to VECO’s Anchorage headquarters on Fairbanks Street.

Reading the heartwarmingly scribbled notes, Allen’s mood improved. Carroll could not have picked a better time to ask him for his help in getting the bullet. In his ebullience, Allen would likely have agreed to almost any suggestion. The entire operation started when he authorized the use of the hoverbarge. But in the time it took for the barge to be rendered impotent, Operation Breakout had taken on a full-fledged life of its own, no longer dependent on any one man. Allen knew there was no stopping the rescue’s momentum. Realizing it would proceed with or without him, he was determined to see it through, helping in any way he could.

The colonel had one more solo act to perform. If the bullet passed its test in Prudhoe, the National Guard would start punching its own path of holes out to the open lead, picking up where the Eskimos left off. Carroll briefed his Skycrane pilots about the new plan. They were to test the concrete block to see if it worked. Waiting near the silent Skycranes for the test to begin, Chief Warrant Officer Gary Quarles and his crew stared across the burnt orange horizon, mouths agape as they watched what looked like an extraterrestrial vehicle with six-foot-wide treads slowly crunching its way across the barren landscape.

Arctic men called the odd truck carrying the heavy concrete bullet a “Rolligon.” The oil industry spent millions of dollars to design a machine that could carry heavy loads in the Arctic without damaging the sensitive environment. Since the wide treads dispersed the truck’s massive weight over a broader surface area, it could cross fragile tundra and ocean ice without breaking through.

The bullet was attached to a recoilable high-tension cable and hung from the middle of the Skycrane’s slender fuselage. Unlike the strain of towing the barge, this test was virtually risk-free. The high powered helicopter would have no trouble lifting the block and dropping it into the ice below. For once during their North Slope assignment, the pilots had it easy. No late-night mathematical computations, no two-way radios, no pep talks. Either the block would break the ice or it wouldn’t. Sitting next to his copilot, Gary Quarles powered up the Skycrane, locked in the bullet and prepared to head out to an open area of ice in the middle of Prudhoe Bay. At the last second, Colonel Carroll hopped on board for the ride. The pilots lowered the aircraft to just one hundred feet above the surface of the ice. When it was properly positioned, Quarles firmly gripped the joystick, anticipating the sudden upward thrust when the bullet was released. With a nod from Quarles, the copilot released the winch holding the bullet in the chopper’s cargo bay.

Like bomber pilots on a sortie, they pressed their helmets against the side windows for a better view. They peered down to see the effect of their nonexplosive concrete bomb. They looked for the identifying buoy which was supposed to float in the newly opened water. When they spotted the bright orange buoy, it was bobbing up and down among the shattered shards of ice. The bullet worked. It broke clean through the two-foot-thick harbor ice. If the bullet could penetrate through that, it could easily smash the ice half as thick off the tip of Point Barrow. Jabbing vigorously into the air, Colonel Carroll landed an animated smack of congratulations onto Gary Quarles’s flight helmet. The copilot pushed the recoil button to raise the bullet back to its resting place under the fuselage. Maybe he wasn’t dead weight after all, thought Carroll. Maybe his latest idea would help the Barrow rescue in its quest to free the whales. When they returned to base, Carroll called Morris and Bill Allen to tell them the bullet was on the way.

On Friday morning, October 21, the Skycranes were outfitted for the 270-mile flight to Barrow. The National Guard asked Randy Crosby and his Search and Rescue team to help them look for a local place to set up shop. There was only one place that could accommodate the National Guard and Randy Crosby’s hangar was it. Not having much choice, Crosby reluctantly offered to house the Guardsmen and their workaholic colonel in his own facility. He sent one of his workers to restock the hangar with plenty of coffee. Carroll and his men arrived in Barrow exactly two weeks after the whales were first discovered and six days after making his first exploratory trip. Somehow, the whales had survived. Despite unimaginable stress, the whales managed to outmaneuver their own seemingly sealed fate for a fortnight.

With the exception of the still weak baby whale Bone, the mammals seemed as fit as at any time during their 350-hour ordeal. The middle-sized whale had been given the name Poutu, an Inupiat word roughly describing the icy hole it was trapped in. Poutu was breathing normally once again, its pneumonia overcome. The whale biologists Ron Morris summoned from the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle arrived to pronounce the animals in remarkably good condition.

Several of the reporters, including me, asked why the whales weren’t being fed during their confinement. The biologists told us that they wouldn’t have eaten anyway. Like all other California grays, these three came to Alaska to take advantage of the rich deposits of amphipods that line hundreds of thousands of square miles of the Arctic Ocean’s shallow seabed. They just finished spending the last five months fattening themselves up. Each put on several tons of extra blubber during the summer. Once they left on their 4,500-mile journey from the frozen Arctic to balmy Mexico, the whales wouldn’t eat again until they returned in the spring.

Craig and Geoff were convinced that a marine miracle kept the whales alive in their tiny hole for two long weeks. The whales managed to balance their survival against a formidable assortment of obstacles. Each of the five thousand breaths each whale had taken required a tricky maneuver against strong ocean currents through a small opening in the ice while fighting exhaustion and mental fatigue. Malik didn’t think it was a miracle. He knew it was the whales’ inner strength that compelled them to survive. If the bowhead whale could sustain his people for so many years, Malik knew the three grays could surely find a way to save themselves, if one was available. Cindy didn’t know what it was that pushed the whales onward in the face of certain death, but she thanked God for it.

During the two weeks of Operation Breakout, the Top of the World lobby was transformed from a modest hotel lounge into an international marketplace whose item of commerce was information about the whales and the effort to rescue them. The hotel was more than just the broadcast and print nucleus for media trying to cover the story. It also became Barrow’s social hub. Self-proclaimed experts on just about everything from the Arctic to the whales purveyed their various theories to hordes of anxious newsmen clambering for any unreported angle. Here, rescuer and reporter commingled and cohabitated.

The smell of scotch cut through the smoke-filled lobby. Reporters and technicians clutched their overused and underwashed glasses. When glasses broke, the more determined connoisseurs had to make do with Styrofoam cups, a tradition NBC producer Jerry Hansen started that was soon mimicked by others. Climbing the sharp-edged iron steps of the world’s northernmost hotel was an ascent into a rarefied atmosphere in American journalism. Nowhere else could the coordinator of a United States government rescue constantly be seen drinking liquor in front of a passive, mesmerized press corps.

Affected by the cold and the lengthening darkness, the mood in the lobby of the Top of the World Hotel changed noticeably on the morning of Thursday, October 20. News of the deicers’ success spread. Reporters hustled to phone in the report to their bureaus. Hours earlier, before going to sleep, their final prognosis could not have been worse. The bitter weather and howling winds threatened to entomb the whales before daybreak. A few reports predicted that the last person to leave the whales would be the last one to see them alive. Ironically, there were no television cameras on the ice with Randy, Cindy, Craig, and the Minnesotan Rick Skluzacek to record the whales’ first move toward freedom. An unprecedented international obsession born out of the ability to capture the whales every move on film and video missed the first and only time when something specifically significant happened.

Not every reporter missed Wednesday night’s miracle on ice. There were two lucky ones. As they arrived in Barrow on the same flight as Greg and Rick, People magazine’s Maria Wilhelm and Taro Yamasaki knew they were far behind in their effort to cover the rescue. Most other reporters arrived in Barrow days earlier. Maria figured they already knew where everything and who everyone was. Boarding the plane in Anchorage, she realized she desperately needed an edge to get back in the race. That edge was sitting right across the aisle in the form of two collapsed Minnesotans.

Aside from Jason Davis’s Eyewitness News team that wouldn’t arrive in Barrow until a day later, Maria Wilhelm was the only reporter who could report Greg Ferrian and Rick Skluzacek’s story. Maria was ecstatic. Someone answered her prayers. Just hours after stepping off their MarkAir flight, Taro and Maria had the only pictures of the deicers thawing the hole and the whales moving into the new hole. As if to make up for the previous night’s blunder, reporters lined up early Thursday morning to get their first shots of the whales since they moved into the new hole. Each morning found ABC’s Harry Chittick to be the first network man able to pull himself out of an irresistible Arctic slumber—4:30 A.M. came early enough in the Lower 48, but after a day in the strength-sapping cold of the Arctic, it was more than most people could bear. Throughout their millennia, the Eskimos always thought of themselves as hibernators. The only respite from the endless frigid night of winter was long, deep sleep. In sleep, a body unprepared to function in the Arctic could slow its rapid-fire metabolism to a more normal rate.

Like the Eskimos themselves, reporters were overcome by the same indescribable exhaustion. No amount of sleep seemed enough. Traditionally light sleepers fell into unwakable comas. The lobby of the Top of the World Hotel was filled with people claiming they were sober when they fell asleep fully clothed, not to stir until ten hours later. After eight hours on the ice with the whales, it was all I could do to stay awake past 9 P.M. Not everyone responded in the same way. Our cameraman, Steve Mongeau, stayed up drinking and laughing until all hours with our host Rod Benson. After just a few hours of sleep, Mongeau was always the first to get up. Not only that, he worked harder and longer than anyone I saw in Barrow. I couldn’t get enough sleep and still was always exhausted.

But interestingly the mononucleosis, which limited me to no more than a few hours of daily activity back in New York, seemed to disappear. Maybe it froze to death. To the marvel of his colleagues, Harry Chittick managed to be not only awake but coherent for his 5:00 A.M. network conference call. The Vietnam vet and National Guard member claimed his secret came tumbling out of an eight-dollar box of cereal he bought at Barrow’s only supermarket. Only the clattering radiator and the rhythmic crunching of Chittick’s chewing broke the dark Arctic stillness. Pouring a measured portion from his seven-dollar gallon of milk, he gazed wondrously at the surreal jagged ice mounds of the Chukchi Sea. They reminded him of the unforgettable images transmitted from the surface of Mars during the mission of the Viking space probe, stunning photos zapped across the forty-million-mile void of space. He marveled at the sea’s curious and enduring luminance. There was no moon on those particular days to light up the blackest of nights, yet the sculpted surface of the sea was limited only by the bounds of Chittick’s imagination.

Comfortably wrapped in a tattered Army-issue green wool blanket, Chittick calmly waited for his phone to ring. Intermittently wiping drops of milk from his gray-flecked beard, he savored the solitude of the still, pre-morning Arctic. When his phone did ring, it would signal the beginning of yet another frantic, brutal day on the ice. At first his superiors in New York tried talking him out of going to Barrow. It would look bad, they argued, for him to run off to the top of the world in an obvious attempt to play catch up with NBC, which broke the story. They soon changed their minds. Even though it took ABC seventy-two hours to transmit its first self-shot story from Barrow, they felt fortunate that Chittick was there to cover what had mushroomed into one of the biggest media events of the decade.

The indefatigable Chittick told his superiors that he ran into an exhausted but elated Cindy Lowry just a few hours earlier.

“The deicers worked, the whales moved into the next hole!” she exclaimed.

During his five days in Barrow, he had never seen Cindy so ebullient. He had watched her growing despair as she stood by helplessly as the whales’ conditions rapidly deteriorated. He had seen no hint of the euphoric emotion she now displayed. Unable to imagine the agony of a single hour on the bone chilling ice, still less an entire day, ABC News executives could not understand why Chittick and his crew missed the whales’ first big move.

Chittick tried to explain that, except for a lone light stationed to ward off curious polar bears, the whale site was pitch-black. Besides, he could hardly order his videographers to drop their $100,000 cameras under water to film the whales swimming to the new hole. For that moment to be perfectly timed, the whales would have had to stick their heads out into the cold air long enough and speak English well enough to announce their impending move.

The misconceptions Chittick had to overcome were mild compared with the tales of other pressmen. British photographer Charles Laurence, shooting for London’s Daily Telegraph, was so hastily dispatched to Barrow he didn’t have time to obtain American money. The first in a series of costly misjudgments the Briton made concerned his assumption that since Barrow was in the United States, its few commercial establishments would accept credit cards. When he wasn’t dangling perilously from the back of a speeding dogsled hired by a more fortunate crew nice enough to let him hang on, he was screaming at his editors back in London to wire him the money he needed so he could properly cover the story.

His predicament grew worse when he discovered that no way existed to wire any kind of money to the tiny Eskimo hamlet. The nearest modern bank was in Fairbanks, seven hundred miles away. After enduring the humiliation of begging for cash, he eventually persuaded his office to authorize a paltry $500 wire transfer to Fairbanks. Even if Laurence could figure out how to get his hands on the money, five hundred dollars would barely last him two days in Barrow. He was livid, but desperate. Laurence spent most of his first few days in Barrow frantically trying to get the money tantalizing him from Fairbanks. Dozens of calls later, he found a courier willing to deliver the small sum to Barrow. After he paid the courier, the cash was half gone.

Moreover, the frustrated photographer had to put up with the incessant stream of absurd instructions he received from his desk in London. With no money, woefully inadequate clothing, and nearly frostbitten appendages, Laurence was lambasted whenever one of his well-financed competitors managed to get a picture he didn’t.

“Whatever you do,” came the order from his superiors in London, “make sure you get great pictures of the whales as they escape.” Up to now, his English refinement had kept him in check. But no more.

“Ah, bloody hell. You’ve got to be joking,” he shouted incredulously. “Do you think the whales are actually going to flap their flukes and wave good-bye as they swim away?” he mockingly asked.

Laurence was so enraged at the request he stopped people passing by the wall phone at the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory. “Excuse me,” he implored of a perfect stranger. Loud enough for London to hear, Laurence asked of the passerby, “Can you believe this? These idiots want me to get pictures of the whales as they escape. I’m too upset to tell them. Can you please try and explain to them that we are talking about whales, not a trio of happy campers who wave good-bye at the end of their summer holidays?”

His editors got the message and backed off. Their man resented being overworked, underpaid, and totally unappreciated. What he didn’t get from London he more than got from those he entertained with his uproarious tales. In analyzing our coverage, none of the estimated one hundred and fifty reporters who flocked to the top of the world would have argued with one universal observation: No war, revolution, or political campaign that any of us had ever observed proved any more physically demanding as the Barrow whale rescue. To some, like Charles Laurence, it was a sign from heaven telling them to explore other lines of work. To others, like Harry Chittick and yours truly, it was the story of a lifetime, and of television journalism at its apex. There was no room for the usual hangers-on to interfere with coverage. We enjoyed unlimited access to all the key players in the drama without the retinue of press aides that attended most government operations.

After the whales made their first tentative move toward freedom, the rescue took on a new urgency. The whales had given new hope to an anxious world. An instinctive death wish was no longer a valid explanation for their poorly understood behavior. They had demonstrated the will to live and proved that they could and would work with their rescuers. Now that the whales were cooperating, there really was no turning back.