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From the Edge of the World to the Center of the Media Universe

On Saturday morning, October 8, the day after Roy Ahmaogak found the three whales, he and Malik drove their ski machines along the Point Barrow sandbar to the spot where Roy had seen them. As they got closer, Malik’s windswept face lit up. He had an intimate kinship with whales that environmentalist do-gooders had a hard time understanding. From miles away, Malik knew enough about whales and their environment to see that the three whale spouts were hanging unusually close to each other.

Malik grew excited as they approached. Roy grew relieved to see the whales had made it through the night. The two Eskimos parked their five-hundred-pound ski machines on the snow-covered sand at the edge of the spit. The ocean ice was too weak to hold the machines. In fact, the area around the whales wasn’t really ice at all. It was still just a thick slush, but hardening by the minute.

The closer Malik got to the whales, the more he wondered why they didn’t just swim away. Were they too afraid to swim out to open waters? Maybe they were afraid to leave the breathing hole to explore the unfamiliar water farther out toward the open channel? In the Arctic, the autumn’s weather was always the most unpredictable. Did the whales know that, too? It was impossible for man to predict ice conditions for more than a few hours. Perhaps the whales’ internal weathermen were no better?

Malik feared that if the whales did not make a move soon, the ice would harden enough around to really strand them. To complicate matters, he also knew what the whales knew: that if they left this hole, they might not find another. What would happen if they ran out of air before they got back? What if they became disoriented under the ice? The answer to these questions was obvious: They would drown. The gray whales were unlike their cousins, the bowhead whales, who would have had no problem breaking their snouts through the thick slush to breathe. Malik lost count of the number of bowheads he missed over the years as they dove under large ice patches to dodge his harpoons. He was surprised to see how different these gray whales seemed.

Malik and Roy stood on the beach (or maybe on sea ice near the beach—they couldn’t be sure), waiting for the whales to surface. Sure enough, each one surfaced in its turn every few minutes to breathe. It was their constant surfacing in the same place that kept the ten-by-twenty-foot hole from freezing over. In all his years whaling, Malik never saw anything like this.

He would have loved to get closer, but this was as far as they could get. The ice was too thick for his boat to get through but not strong enough to support a man’s weight. Unable to do more than watch, the two Eskimos climbed on their ski machines and headed back to Barrow.

Inuit whalers from the tiny inland village of Nuiqsut, eighty miles southwest of Barrow, learned about the three whales from radio reports broadcast across the region. Several of them gathered at the hamlet’s single telephone (remember, there were no cell phones yet) to call their colleagues up in Barrow. Malik was nonplussed to learn how quickly folks down in Nuiqsut were to harvest the stranded whales. Why shouldn’t they be? The whales were there for the taking. And since the whales were fated to die, why was the ocean bottom more entitled to reap their bounty than the Inuits of Nuiqsut? The “old school” that valued whales not for glory or profit but only for survival was in fact, no school at all. It was myth: the pseudocosmopolitan product of modern environmentalism that aimed to delegitimize the modern by glorifying the past—even if it meant falsifying it.

When the twentieth century finally got to Barrow, the century was already half over. But the Barrowans quickly made up for lost time. Everything changed … and fast. Most of the change was welcomed, but not all of it. Subsistence whaling was formalized at the very moment whales ceased being a subsistence source. Whales would never again mean the difference between life and death, but instead took on the same meaning the modern world had placed on them since the eighteenth century: commerce. The whales, so central for so long, became a luxury almost overnight. Many Eskimos were apprehensive about how modernization would affect them, but not enough to turn back the clock. The uncertainty of present-day times sure beat the certainty of death by starvation every winter.

Modernity meant it was now possible to put the soon-to-die whales to good use. Rather than letting them drown, harvesting the whales would inject tens of thousands of dollars into the local economy by providing several hundred people with work for a day or two.

As Malik and Roy watched the whales gasping for each breath, they knew these whales weren’t trapped where they were found by accident. The very geography that threatened to entomb the whales allowed them to be discovered and, in the end, rescued. The whales were caught among the sand shoals at the very tip of a narrow five-mile-long sandbar marking the northernmost tip of Alaska stretching north–northeast until it slipped into the sea. At its widest point, the Barrow sandspit was a hundred feet across. The far end lay nine miles north of modern Barrow. The fragile earth barrier was all that separated the calmer waters of the Beaufort Sea from the raging tempests of the Chukchi Sea.

The whales gravitated to the sandspit, which served as a natural windbreak, allowing them to feed more comfortably in its shelter. But when the calm Beaufort Sea water started to freeze, the whales did not realize that the waters just across the spit—which were much rougher—were still ice-free. If the whales had been any farther from shore they would never have been discovered because they wouldn’t have been stranded.

That night, over beers, some of Malik’s whaling friends asked him what he thought about harvesting the three gray whales. Malik shrugged with disinterest. He didn’t see the point of killing them so long as there was a chance they could swim free. If they couldn’t escape, then all bets were off. He took no pleasure in seeing animals suffer, but then again, he took even less pleasure seeing his fellow human beings suffer. Why should Barrowans be deprived of benefiting from the whales if there really was no way to help them?

Malik thought there must be some way to help the whales overcome their fear enough to get them to start swimming. Because they were young, they had probably never seen slush before and simply assumed it was ice. While the whales acted like they were trapped, as of Saturday afternoon, October 8, they were not. Later that night, reports of the stranded whales started to trickle through town. The newer, younger whaling crews clamored for permission to harvest the whales.

However, they weren’t allowed to do anything until Craig George and Geoff Carroll had the chance to study them, but the two biologists were hunting caribou in the tundra, and weren’t scheduled to return until Monday. Craig and Geoff helped start the local government’s Department of Wildlife Management in the early 1970s. The job offered these two adventurers a chance to study whales in a way other biologists could only dream of. Their management responsibilities were not just to protect local wildlife, but also to help locals hunt and kill it. In particular, the most important part of their job was to help the Eskimos hunt and kill bowhead whales.

The two conducted an annual census of the bowhead whale population for the North Slope Borough (NSB), Alaska’s equivalent of a county. What they found would be the basis for negotiating next year’s quota with the International Whaling Commission. Geoff and Craig exemplified a remarkable fact of modern Eskimo life. The Inupiat Eskimo lived primitive lives by conventional American standards, but they were smart enough to hire the best modern expertise their money and influence could buy. The Eskimos had no shortage of help to manage their stormy entrance with the modern world—which is what made so much of it so stormy.

Herein lay another hard to break media myth about native peoples in the United States, Alaska in particular—that their hard-bitten plight was the consequence of government disregard. In fact, on a per capita basis no other group of Americans received even close to the level of federal and state assistance annually disbursed to native peoples. By the 1980s, federal and state aid to these peoples was massive enough to transform entire communities into little more than state wards. The government micromanaged the land they lived on and the houses they lived in. The government not only paid for, but directly delivered, their health care, which goes a long toward explaining why it was the worst in the country. Dozens of federal departments and agencies had their own designated “native American” programs, nearly all of which were available to Alaskans. And that’s just the feds. By 1988, the state of Alaska had its own fully developed but largely redundant assistance bureaucracy.

The consequences for native peoples in places like Barrow were somewhat incongruous. What but government could produce poverty in people with relatively high per capita incomes? What entity but government could shorten the life spans, deepen the chronic health problems, and increase the rates of social and family dislocations as they increased involvement? Naturally, the worse government assistance made things, the more activists would clamor for more government assistance. By 1988, the federal trusteeship imposed upon native-Americans as supposed to compensation for federal crimes committed against them was proving more calamitous than the crimes themselves.2

The greedy talk of slaughtering the gray whales appalled Malik. He knew it would reflect badly on his people. The young whalers sounded like the prospectors who were looking to stake another claim. It pained him to imagine all the careless whaling crews in a mad dash to kill three useless whales. At best, they would be used for dog food.

Before leaving on their weekend hunting trip, Geoff and Craig reported Roy’s discovery back to their boss, Dr. Tom Albert, 1,200 miles to the south in Anchorage. Albert wanted them to check on the whales before they left, and to report back to him on whether they believed the animals would survive the weekend. In his brief dispatch back to Albert, Geoff offered his prediction that the whales would be gone by Monday—not dead, but en route on their 7,000-mile journey to winter breeding grounds.

Geoff and Craig were required to investigate each reported stranding of any animal on the government’s endangered species list. Protected from the rusty harpoons of commercial whaling fleets since 1947, while still on the endangered list, gray whales were flourishing. By 1988, biologists estimated there were 22,000 gray whales, an all-time species high. As the old joke goes, the nearest thing to eternal life on this earth for people is work at a government bureau—and for animals, placement on the endangered species list.

While whale strandings were common, the confluence of events regarding this whale stranding would be a cascading series of “firsts.” Geoff and Craig would be the first biologists to actually observe gray whales naturally trapped in ice. Gray whales may well have been familiar to nature lovers and whale watchers along the Pacific Coast of the Lower 48, but precious little was then known about them in their Arctic environment. The closer the two could get to the whales, the more they could learn about the animals’ behavior under extraordinary stress. Locals long knew whales died under the ice, but until now, scientists could only theorize as to how and why it happened. On Tuesday morning, October 11, 1988, four days after the whales were first discovered, Geoff and Craig would get to see them firsthand.

The bearded biologists loaded sleeping bags, flares, and emergency survival rations onto wooden dogsleds hitched to the backs of their ski machines and were ready to go. But they didn’t know where exactly they were supposed to go. They needed a guide to help them find the exact spot of the stranding on the featureless and endless horizon of frozen sea. Since Roy was not available, they asked Billy Adams, a skillful hunter who, having seen the whales on Sunday, knew where they were. Besides, Billy would be good company. He had his own ski machine and a great sense of humor. The three men encased themselves in a hybrid mixture of modern and traditional cold-weather gear needed to keep them, if not warm, then at least able to function in the mind-numbing temperatures that would consume them as they sped out across the frozen sea.

As the sun rose just above the southern horizon, the trio traveled along Barrow’s only road until it abruptly ended along with Alaska’s northernmost coast seven miles north of town. From there, it was still another five miles to the whales. When they got as far as they could on the ski machines, Billy led them on foot the rest of the way toward the very tip of the soft-surfaced sandbar. Craig stopped to marvel at the surroundings. He squinted to view the sandbar. Remarkably, the Arctic Ocean’s frozen glare can be blinding even under heavy overcast skies, which made this tiny sliver of what remained of North America hard to see.

As it tapered off into the sea, the total and uniform solitude overwhelmed him. Not a trace of life: no vegetation, no variation in scene, no visible image of anything. A void without end. Stark. Disconsolate. White. “Magnificent desolation” were the words first spoken by Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin Buzz Aldrin nineteen years before to describe the surface of the moon. It came to Geoff’s mind, but he knew the desolation that seemed so omnipresent on top of the ice was in fact a bountiful habitat teeming with an extraordinary cacophony of life on the underside of ice. Walrus, seals, polar bears, and of course whales thrived on a copious abundance of sea life almost impossible to quantify.

The three men stood on the frozen sandspit, gathered their bearings, and waited for spouts. They would know one way or another in a matter of minutes. If the whales were alive and still using these holes to breathe, it wouldn’t be long before they came up for air. If the men saw no sign of the whales within five or six minutes, that would have been the end of this story. The whales would either have made it to open seas or they would be dead by drowning. As much as Geoff and Craig hoped the whales were free, they still wanted to see them. They had already begun to construct the scientific line of inquiry they would try to compile if they could collect enough data.

As two minutes became three, Geoff and Craig had a sinking feeling. Three minutes became four. The banter trailed off, overtaken by silence. At four minutes, resignation crept into acceptance that the whales were gone. Then, at the moment Geoff started to collect his things for the return trip to Barrow, Billy heard a low rumble gain momentum and traction. Sure enough, the mammoth head of a barnacled and slightly bloodied gray whale poked through the ice. The whales (one at least) had made it through the weekend but were fading fast. Craig, George, and Billy cheered with joy. They punched their fists through the cold air, shaking hands in congratulations for the vicarious achievement they rejoiced in.

Like a locomotive letting off steam, the whale exhaled. Only a warm-blooded mammal could make that deep gargle. “FFWWWSSSSHHH,” the whale belched. As soon as it filled its giant lungs, the whale slipped its head back into the hole and disappeared into the black sea. The displaced water rippled through the weak ice surrounding the hole, freezing as it moved. Then, a second rumbling. Another huge head, this one bigger than the last, fit into the hole with barely any room to spare. Looking through binoculars, Geoff could distinguish one whale from another by the pattern of barnacles on its snout. This second whale swallowed its portion of air and vanished as quickly as the first.

From what Geoff and Craig could observe, the whales stayed under as long as they could. They seemed to be protecting, even guiding each other. It sure looked as if the whales had worked together to develop a breathing system designed to allow them to share the hole. They pulled their heads back under and away from the hole to give each other a turn to breath. Remarkable. This behavior was new to Geoff and Craig. Nothing quite like this had ever been seen by anyone before. Neither biologists recalled learning or hearing anything about whales acting so cooperatively in any similar life-threatening predicament.

After the second whale surfaced there was a long pause. What happened to the third whale? Roy Ahmaogak reported seeing three. They didn’t have to wait long to have that question answered. The third whale emerged; much smaller and much more timidly than the first two. It looked battered and tired. Nearly all the skin on this whale’s snout appeared to have been rubbed off; probably from having scraped up against the sharp edges of the air hole. It swam with much less authority than the other two whales.

It seemed like the larger and older whales stayed under longer in order to give the smaller whale more time to breathe. How old was this third whale? Was it a baby … or somewhat older? Geoff and Craig could not immediately tell, but that it was a young one they had no doubt. When the two bigger whales surfaced, they rammed up through the sharp sides of the hole. Whales are many things but self-destructive is not one of them. The whales weren’t purposely trying to hurt themselves; they were trying to expand their shrinking air hole. Their ramming kept slush from turning to ice. Here was more evidence that these whales possessed a keen and sharply developed social intelligence.

Billy knew a bowhead could break breathing holes in ice up to half a foot thick. These grays had trouble even with soft ice. No wonder it was grays and not their bowhead cousins that drowned under the ice. Each whale took several turns breathing and then dove for about five minutes. Craig dug into his knapsack and probed for his 35-millimeter camera. He had borrowed it from the borough to document the whales. Whatever photos he took would belong to the government. But this was a fantasy performance; he wanted copies of every shot for his photo album.

For almost an hour, the three men consumed as much sensory imagery as they could absorb. There was nothing they could do to actually help the whales yet since they still couldn’t reach them. All they could do was watch and learn. None of their training and experience prepared them for this. They knew how to study whales. They were paid to help Inuits hunt and kill them. They didn’t know how or even if they could help these whales.

The whales were tantalizingly close … so close that the men were lured to test the ice. The three men trod upon uncertain ground, which of course was not ground at all, but frozen ocean. Giddy at their unexpected good fortune, they carefully walked out until the ice could hold them no longer. Now they were only fifty feet or so away from the whales. From what little they could see, the hole did not appear much bigger than any of the whale’s head.

Billy went to his sled to fetch the hollow aluminum pole he used to probe ice. He scampered nimbly back to where Geoff and Craig kneeled at safety’s edge. Billy carefully measured a few paces beyond his companions and pushed the end of his pole deep into the hardened surface. He had to lean quite hard to get the ice to break. Once through, the pole easily probed the slush. Billy knew it would not stay slush for long.

Craig held the camera under his parka to shelter it from the cold. The brittle film nearly snapped in the sub-zero weather. (The days of digital cameras had yet to arrive.) Learning from the past when he would rip or break the film from winding the spool too roughly, this time he wound deliberately and tenderly. The sun vanished behind a low-lying bank of thick Arctic fog as he waited for the whales to begin their next breathing cycle. He popped open the back of his camera to adjust for the changing light conditions by replacing the film.

The forecast high for that Tuesday, October 11, was four degrees above zero degrees Fahrenheit, seventeen degrees colder than the average for this time of year. Since it seldom got that cold at that time of year without insulating cloud cover, the men knew they might confront “whiteout,” a dangerous but common Arctic weather condition. The slightest wind can trigger it by whipping the dry, almost weightless snow into the air, blending it so uniformly with the white sky that all else is obscured. Whiteout blinds everything in its midst, but since it usually sticks very low to the ground, the Arctic’s most deadly predator, the polar bear, which on its hind legs can stand up to fourteen feet high, uses the paralyzing condition to hunt defenseless prey. While aware of the danger, the three men were smart enough to be cautious but calm.

The whales resumed surfacing after a four-minute dive, right on schedule. First the two larger whales, followed by the smaller one. Craig snapped his way through an entire roll of film in one such respiration cycle. He hurriedly reloaded his camera to shoot more before the whales dove again. He was tempted to get flustered, but remembered he was an expert, not a tourist. Suddenly it dawned on him that he could take all the time he wanted; the whales weren’t going anywhere. He could hang around the edge of the spit for as long as he could stand the cold. The next time the whales reached up for air, he could take even better pictures.

For nearly an hour the men said barely a word. Then, when the silence was broken, all three spoke at once. Their exhilaration was tempered by their inability to help do much for these magnificent creatures. The whales seemed stuck in what looked to be a hopeless quagmire, yet they were rational and deliberate. They avoided the panic they must have instinctively known would doom them. Their fate was intertwined and they seemed to know it. The whales had to work together to survive, which required both leadership and cooperation. One of the three whales had to be in charge, but Craig and Geoff couldn’t quite figure out which one that was yet.

It was a mystery that would remain unsolved until the very last hours of what was to be a nearly three-week odyssey. What was it that enabled the whales to prioritizetze, strategize, and improvise their own survival? Was it genetic code, sheer intelligence, or a combination? These were some of the questions that would dog biologists, rescuers, reporters, and millions of people around the world for the weeks to follow.

The whales’ unusual surfacing was the most obvious unanswered question Geoff and Craig could not answer. By the late 1980s, the gray whales’ migratory and habitat patterns were well known; but only in its warmer, winter waters off the coast of Baja—not in the Arctic. Younger whales, especially grays, rarely wander more than a mile from shore. Shallow waters are safer waters—there was less room for killer whales and great white sharks, the gray whales’ two natural predators.

In normal times, the gray whale, like all whales, breathes while swimming parallel to the surface. The whale only needs to arch its back just enough to expose its blowhole ever so slightly above the waterline. But these were no ordinary times. The only way these whales could survive was to shoot out of the small hole like a submarine-launched cruise missile.

“We have to get this on videotape,” Craig shouted. “These would make great pictures.” He wanted to get back to town to see if he could borrow equipment from local TV studio operated by the North Slope Borough’s public access channel. The two biologists tightened their hoods, pulled down face masks, affixed goggles, and throttled up. Craig looked at his watch. Four hours had passed since they first saw the whales. Getting to town and back before it got too dark would require operating on fast forward.

Living in pre-Internet times, Craig was forced to find the studio’s phone number by actually looking it up in a hard-copy seven-page Barrow phone book. He called Oran Caudle, the director of the borough’s then state-of-the-art television studio and filled him in. He asked if they could take a video camera to get some footage of the stranded whales. Oran was intrigued. Originally from Texarkana, Texas, Caudle didn’t know much about whales—but compared to everyone he left behind in the Lower 48, he was a veritable expert. One thing he did know, however, was that the Arctic could all too easily devastate his expensive equipment. “Sorry,” he told Craig, “no can do.” While disappointed, Craig was hardly surprised.

It wasn’t that the thirty-one-year-old Caudle didn’t want to share his equipment. He wanted it to be used as often as possible so long as it wasn’t ruined or lost at sea. He knew if anything happened to his equipment, getting any of it replaced would be hard to do. After all, anything would be more exciting than his current production job on the North Slope Borough’s employee benefits package. Oran was so anxious to get the hands-on television experience he knew he needed to get anywhere in the cutthroat, high-skilled, but low-paying world of TV production, that he was literally willing to move to the end of the world to get it. Ever the intrepid type, Caudle was always on the prowl to produce interesting and valuable local programming for Channel 20, the North Slope’s local public access channel, and these whales sounded like a chance to do just that.

The more Oran heard the two men talk, the more he sensed this might actually be something interesting, really interesting. But rules were rules, and Caudle followed them. He told Craig there was just no way he could lend out any of the NSB’s equipment to nonauthorized personnel. After all, this was government property they were talking about. Sure, he could assign a camera crew and would just as soon as he could, but there was no way he could get any of his people out there until tomorrow at the earliest. As the light on his phone went off, the light in his head lit up: Caudle determined he would go out to the whales himself.

Oran Caudle was a big bear of a man. His ready smile radiated genuine warmth. He endeared himself to almost everyone in Barrow, even Eskimos, many of whom resented a non-Inuit presence, let alone a successful one. But this was a decidedly minority view. Tales of racial tension between Eskimos and non-natives were greatly exaggerated, particularly by those seeking to profit from their grievance peddling. The worse the problem, the greater the need for more publicly funded “intervention” and “mitigation programs.”

Locals joked that the intermarriage rate was over 100 percent—when you factored in multiple marriages. Barrow’s divorce rate was the highest in the state—75 percent. Caudle’s own marriage recently ended in divorce. He was trying to rebuild his life, but Barrow was not the easiest place to do it.

Despite a generation of being conditioned to view themselves as victims, self-reliance died hard in Barrow. In addition to being at the highest latitude on the continent, the small town at the top of the world was bigger, richer, and safer than ever before. Statistics that looked appalling when compared with other American towns—high rates of murder, rape, suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence—did not look nearly as bleak when measured against the only metric that mattered to them: their lives were measurably improved over that of their fathers and grandfathers. It was a bridge too far for many to even pretend otherwise.

Still, the obstacles were formidable. Aside from the isolation, the desolation, and the cold, there was the darkness—three months of insufferable, inconsolable, and complete darkness. Oran had to create his own support system that many locals simply inherited. He joined the Barrow Calvary Baptist Church. Its geographically tailored message that “only in darkness can small lights shine bright” had special resonance three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. After church on Sunday, October 9, he talked with some of his fellow worshippers about the whales Roy Ahmaogak found two days earlier. Almost everyone in town seemed to have heard about the stranded whales.

Caudle knew about gray whales not from books or Sunday-night nature specials on PBS, but from seeing them near the shore. Even when he didn’t see them, proof of their presence was all around him, from the slimy barnacles that were always washing up on shore when not iced over, to the bounty of whale meat enjoyed during the long winters. If he could get close enough and the video proved interesting enough, Oran thought he might produce a twenty-minute evergreen segment for Channel 20. If there was anything that interested the people of Barrow more than whales, Caudle sure didn’t know what it was. Aside from government, Barrow had only one industry and that was whaling.

Wednesday morning, October 12, 1988, came early for Oran. All mornings came early for Caudle; a self-described night owl. The division between day and night, taken for granted in more southernly climes, took on a completely different meaning in the Arctic; a meaning very hard for a tunik (white) like Oran Caudle to adjust to. In Barrow, a midnight in summer means broad daylight, while a winter “high noon” is marooned in pitch-dark blackness. The time of day just didn’t mean the same thing. Humans react like other animals in the Arctic. During the long season they sleep more; during short season, they sleep less. Psychologists call it “seasonal affective disorder”; everyone else called it “the winter blues.”

It was all Oran Caudle could do just to sit up in bed to grab the remote control. He clicked on CNN, which at the time was the only cable news channel. It was his (and everyone else’s) link to the outside world. He showered, shaved, and downed his daily breakfast: a granola bar and a can of apple juice. Hearing the first bars of the music jingle for the show Sonya Live signaled it was 8:00 A.M., Alaska Standard Time and his cue to be out the door—which was just as well for Caudle, who couldn’t stand the high-pitched Sonya Friedman and her lowbrow show. He slipped on his new felt-lined boots his mother had bought for him. Caudle thought they looked ridiculously large, but since they managed to keep his feet warm in temperatures down to eighty degrees below zero and everyone else in town wore them, he made his peace with them. He wasn’t sure how long he would be out on the ice, but at least his feet wouldn’t freeze.

Craig had warned Oran that unless the ice grew stronger overnight, fifty feet was as close as they could get to the whales. Maybe Oran could use the expensive zoom lens he persuaded the North Slope Borough into buying. This was the first time he took it out of the box since it arrived air-freight from Seattle three months before.

He packed a sensitive directional microphone that he stored along with batteries, assorted cables, and plenty of blank videotapes in specially lined cold-weather bags. He loaded it all into the back of the TV studio’s white Chevy Suburban. Oran and two technicians picked up Billy Adams and together they drove to Craig and Geoff’s office located out at the old Naval Arctic Research Laboratory, known to everyone as NARL. NARL was a sprawling complex that combined old World War II Quonset huts with more modern prefabricated buildings on wooden stilts at the northern edge of town. NARL used to be the center of town and a key component of U.S. national defense. Before the rise of satellite technology, NARL was the site of a massive radar station designed to warn against a transpolar nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. It looked a bit like NASA(National Aeronautics and Space Administration) drawings of futuristic Mars or moon colonies set against the backdrop of strange and hostile surroundings; and in truth that is very much what NARL really was. There was not another permanent man made structure between NARL and the North Pole.

When Oran, Billy, and the technicians arrived at NARL at 8:30 A.M. Wednesday morning, they found the biologists looking worried. Craig and Geoff thought that time was running out for the whales. The National Weather Service said temperatures could fall to forty degrees below zero out on the ice. With such cold, the whales’ only hope was for wind to keep the sea from freezing, but the forecast predicted no wind. Without wind, the holes would freeze and the whales would drown before the day was out.

The ride out to the whales took longer than Oran expected. When the six of them brought their ski machines to a halt ten yards from the snow-covered beach, Geoff and Craig were amazed at how much new ice had formed overnight. The whales were right where the biologists left them. They continued their grim dance. The baby seemed steadier, taking more regular breaths. Billy Adams crept out to see how much farther he could walk. He was able to get much further beyond his earlier footprints. Remarkably, his tracks from yesterday looked as if they were just made—proof of the Arctic’s low humidity and quiet winds. At this rate, the whales did not have long to survive.

Too excited to lament their fate, Caudle was spellbound just by the sight of the whales and almost dropped his camera. Craig told him to calm down. “Just relax, these whales aren’t going anywhere,” he assured him. “Take your time. Do what you have to do to get ready. The whales don’t have much choice; they have to wait for you.”

This was new. Here were three animals in their natural habitat that could be treated as though they were props back in his production studio. Normally in the wild, photographers are lucky to get any pictures. Oran calmed himself down and set up his camera. Equipment failure was still his main worry. At forty degrees below, any failure was not only possible, it was likely. Still, even if his gear worked, Oran wasn’t sure how long he could keep it working. It was more than cold; it was dangerous, both for him and his gear. When he breathed the bitter air too deeply, it singed his lungs. In weather this cold, bones become brittle and easily break.

When Oran looked into the viewfinder, he saw only fog. He knew not to rip the camera apart to get at the droplets of water causing the condensation. There was only one thing to do. He put the camera on the tripod and waited for the inside of his camera to get as cold as the outside so that the condensation would vanish. Geoff and Craig noticed the whales were still not comfortable with all the commotion on the top of ice. The animals most likely feared the men’s footsteps were those of a prowling polar bear. Breathing holes are favorite stalking grounds for polar bears. Like fish in a barrel.

The trapped whales were extremely vulnerable and they knew it. Every time they rose to the surface, they were dangerously exposed. A polar bear could kill a giant whale with one devastating swipe of its paw. The whales tried to stay underwater as long as they could. But sooner or later they had to face whatever was stomping around above them. They had to breathe.

While Oran fiddled with the expensive equipment, Geoff and Craig tallied the effects of the whales’ predicament. They tried to think of ways to nudge the whales toward open water. The ultimate question was whether they could influence gray whales even if they could come up with a plan to do so. Oran asked Craig to sit down so he could take his first pictures of the whales surfacing in the background. He lifted his heavy twenty-five-pound video camera onto his shoulder, focused the zoom lens, and squeezed his thumb against the soft rubber record button. Caudle lumbered about trying to record every aspect of the whales. He put the camera on a tripod and filmed Billy Adams testing the ice in the foreground with the whales bobbing their gigantic heads against the stark white background.

Since the water was rapidly freezing, Caudle wanted to know how far the solid ice now extended. Would it be safe to walk right out to the edge of the breathing holes by the next morning? Billy Adams thought it might. In a guttural Eskimo accent, he said, “If the holes aren’t froze over, we could probably get close enough to pet ’em.”

Oran had an idea. “Let’s do some interviews,” he suggested. “We can edit them to go with the pictures of the whales for local TV. Which one of you guys wants to be interviewed?” Caudle inquired of his captive audience. Since the film would be shown on the local channel, Oran had to get some local flavor. That meant Billy or his assistant Marie.

Of the six people now on the ice, Marie seemed best suited to conduct the interviews. She was director of public information for the North Slope Borough. She was also Geoff Carroll’s wife. In spite of her title, she didn’t agree at first; Oran had to coax her. Geoff and Craig pretended to be completely absorbed in their various tasks. They were collecting lots of new data they would need to analyze, but they were also camera shy.

Oran assured Marie she looked great. Besides, if she didn’t, who would ever know? After more playful prodding, she agreed to question her husband and then Craig. Oran thrust the microphone into her hand and pushed the Record button. “Go ahead,” he said with one eye squinted shut and the other buried in the viewfinder. “Ask him what he is doing out here and what he thinks of the whales.”

Marie was quick to pose coherent questions. She asked Geoff how the whales were discovered and what he thought their chances that they would either be able to escape or be harvested. Geoff said he didn’t know for sure on either count; all he knew was what he could see in front of him. The whales were not in great shape.

She then interviewed Craig, who sounded professional, factual, and concise, if a little stiff. His stark face matched the terrain. With the whales active in the background, Oran knew he was finally recording some good stuff. (If he only knew how good!) Craig told Marie that the Wildlife Management office had a rare chance to study a natural phenomenon he was not sure anyone had been able to see before. “Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough data yet to comment with any authority as to how these whales got stuck or what their chances might be to swim free,” said Craig. Little did he know what good practice these quick sound-bites would be for the gathering storm looming on their personal horizons.

Oran wanted Billy in front of the camera to lend authority to the story’s locality. Billy was an Inupiat whom everyone in town knew and who would make the setting more authentic, the story more compelling. And it would get critics off Oran’s back. As much better paid advance men for major party presidential candidates were proving at the same time down in the Lower 48, visual backgrounds were rapidly moving into the foreground of what critics now deemed to be “good” television.

As Billy and Marie began speaking into the microphone, one of the two larger whales rose to breathe and burst brilliantly into frame. Oran stumbled in the slush as he backed up for a wider shot. He couldn’t imagine a more powerful image. He couldn’t describe what he naturally intuited. These creatures had a remarkable pull over the imaginations of everyone who saw them. Here the whales were fighting for each breath in front of people who went to great lengths and not insignificant personal risk just to see them. Oran’s reaction didn’t seem much different than anyone else’s. It was more emotional than journalistic. It had to be—other than new data collected, there was nothing inherently journalistic about three whales either stranding themselves or being stranded at the very tip of North America.

What would become clear soon enough was that this story’s real drama was unfolding not under the ice but on top of it: people gathering to watch captive whales becoming themselves captive to their fate.

As Billy spoke, he motioned behind him to note the stressed condition of the baby whale. At that moment, the baby rose timidly through the ice and stole the show. Bloodied and tired, the desperate animal lay motionless. The pathetic creature seemed to appeal to the camera for help, as if it somehow knew its message would soon be transmitted to creatures of an alien but caring species. The audio came across the bleak landscape perfectly, but Oran wasn’t paying attention to the sound. He was spellbound by the immense power of the pictures he was shooting. Billy and Marie called and shouted his name several times before they got a response. They were trying to tell him they were finished.

“What do you mean you’re done?” Oran bristled. “Just keep talking, I don’t care what y’all say,” he bellowed. “Just keep talking. Nobody will listen to what you say; it’s the pictures they want to see and the pictures need some audio. This is just too incredible.” Everyone was astonished. They never saw Oran so insistent. How could he possibly be so interested in hearing what they already said three times? Oran beseeched them to keep up the charade. Marie asked Billy the same questions over and over.

Watching these whales was like being on a drug so good it had to be illegal. As much video as Oran got, he had to have more. He had long since forgotten about the cold. Was it cold out here? When he finally ran out of tape, the others convinced him it was a good time to head back to town. By the way, yes, it was cold. In the four hours they spent out on the ice, the shelf of what appeared to be solid ice had grown an amazing twenty-five feet or so out toward the whale hole. If the cold kept up, they would be able to walk all the way out to the whales by tomorrow. But that begged the central question: just how long could the breathing holes stay open? In any case, it was time for these shivering humans to get back to town.

The return trip on the back of the snowmobiles was even colder than the ride out. But after all the excitement, enough adrenaline was circulating to keep their blood warm enough to manage the ride back without too much discomfort. After a chance to warm up and grab a bite to eat, Craig used Geoff’s office to notify the Coast Guard about the trapped whales and to see if they wanted to send someone out to see if they could think of any way to help them. The closest permanently manned Coast Guard office was 1,200 miles to the south in Anchorage. He and Geoff thought the whales could easily be freed if there were a ship in the area to break a path through the soft slushy ice. Maybe the Anchorage office could authorize one of its North Slope vessels to cut a quick channel from open water into the whales, which at that point was still less than a mile. They didn’t need a big ship; certainly nothing like an icebreaker. The ice was still slushy enough for any medium-size ship to do the job.

The biologists hoped their request would not be considered a big deal. Wednesday afternoon, they left a message with the Coast Guard duty officer who promised to pass it on. Later that night, a reporter named Susan Gallagher called the Coast Guard to see if anything newsworthy was going on. Gallagher was an Alaska night-beat reporter for the Associated Press. It was part of her job to phone the Coast Guard every night to find out if there were any late-breaking stories. The Coast Guard was constantly mounting search-and-rescue efforts to find lost or stranded hunters, whalers, adventurers, and who knows who else—especially late in the fall. But, a rescue effort for whales? That was a first. And within hours, the biggest rescue by humans of nonhumans in Alaska history—who knew, maybe even in all history—would be underway.

Gallagher dutifully took down the details as they were relayed to her by the Coast Guard duty officer and turned it into a nondescript, quick wire-service story. She couldn’t spend that much time on it as there were other, seemingly more important news—involving people—that had to get turned into copy before deadline. When the night editor of the Anchorage Daily News saw Gallagher’s story come across the wire, he decided to run it as a small item below the fold on the front page of Thursday morning’s edition. Six days after the whales were first discovered, a small story about them made page one—and with no pictures!

Lucky whales.

Gallagher wrote: “A trio of whales trapped by ice in the Arctic Ocean used two openings for life-saving air Wednesday as biologists sought help to free the animals. The three California gray whales apparently were swimming from the Beaufort Sea to their winter grounds off Mexico when they got caught in the ice east of Point Barrow a week ago, said Geoff Carroll, a biologist from the North Slope Borough. He said the whales’ movement kept open two holes in the ice, but those openings shrank as temperatures plunged and new ice formed. By Wednesday, when Barrow’s minus thirteen degrees set a record low for the date, the holes were 450 feet offshore.”

The chain reaction had begun. The next link in that chain was a television reporter at KTUU-TV, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage, named Todd Pottinger. Pottinger saw the front-page story in Thursday morning’s Anchorage Daily News as he got ready for work. Each day, work started with a morning assignment meeting that would determine which stories everyone was to cover in anticipation of that evening’s newscast. At the age of twenty-six, Pottinger had already been in the television news business long enough to know that whales always meant news. The minute he saw the story, he was sold. People loved whales. Whether they were beached, mating, or just swimming by, whales were always worth a segment—sometimes more—on the Anchorage evening news. The news director needed no convincing. Whales were sure, safe. It was Pottinger’s story to run with.

Pottinger flipped through his Rolodex for Oran Caudle’s phone number. Alaska was much too big for one local news agency to cover alone. Newspapers, wire services, and television stations relied on freelance stringers across the state to report on the areas they couldn’t cover themselves. For TV stations looking for footage of any kind from Alaska’s North Slope, Oran Caudle was that man. He operated that region’s only modern television facility.

When Oran got to work that Thursday morning, a hand-scribbled message stating that Todd Pottinger from Anchorage had called was prominently placed on top of his desk. Oran was confused. He knew the whales would connect, but could Pottinger be calling about them already? How would he know about them? Oran himself had only just seen them the day before. No matter. Whenever anyone from Anchorage called, it was good news for Oran Caudle. It meant he had a chance to interact with someone in the state’s media capital, not to mention the opportunity to connect the North Slope Borough with the rest of the state. He watched Todd read the Anchorage news every night on TV up in Barrow and was proud to know him. The two were friendly and had worked together in the past. Part of Oran’s job was to assist outside television stations covering Barrow. While he was supposed to make sure that whatever coverage he helped outsiders collect would be favorable to the NSB, there was no real way to do that. Journalists were journalists; they report what they want. This wasn’t just a theory for Oran; he had been burned enough to know this to be the bitter truth. Barrow was too far for same-day delivery of the Anchorage Daily News, meaning he didn’t know yet that his whales were page-one news in the state’s most important city. Still, the instant he saw the message, he knew Pottinger had to have heard about the whales somehow.

One of Oran’s biggest frustrations running Barrow’s TV studio and production facility was that whenever he thought he had a big story, he had to go begging for his downstate contacts to consider it. The Anchorage and Fairbank TV stations only seemed interested in bad news from the North Slope—making them, in fact, no different at all from TV stations anywhere else. The bad-news stories from the Arctic usually fell in one of a few predictable categories: corruption, crime, alcoholism, bear attacks, or the weather. But for North Slope weather to make news in Alaska? Well, it had to be worse than bad. It had to be awful. And those were not the kind of stories that Oran could push anyway as the seventy-five-degrees-below story was not one local tourism folks were keen to publicize.

Sure enough, when Oran returned the call, Todd wanted to know if anyone had anything new to report on the stranded whales. Whale news was always good news. Pottinger wanted to find out more and hoped Oran could help. Not only did Caudle know all about the whales, he told Pottinger, he had just spent several hours filming them.

“You mean you’ve got video of them?” Todd Pottinger excitedly asked.

“You betcha,” Oran proudly answered, employing the ubiquitous Alaskan idiom.

“Can you wait just one second?” Pottinger asked, conveying his own excitement as he put Caudle on hold. Todd’s hunch paid off. Before Oran could collect his thoughts, Pottinger came back on the line asking how soon Oran could arrange a satellite transmission of some of that footage down to Anchorage. He knew Barrow was home to one of Alaska’s biggest white elephants, a highly sophisticated satellite-transmission facility that stood just south of the town’s runway—the only year-round transportation link in an ambitious billion-dollar state project to use some of the proceeds from the oil-rich 1970s to connect Alaska’s rural villages and settlements with the outside world. But like many other ill-conceived projects of that free-spending era, the transmission facility was rarely used. Although the giant satellite dishes constantly received transmissions, they rarely sent much.

Oran told Todd he wasn’t sure the “send” mode of the expensive system even worked. Caudle couldn’t recall ever having used it. To him it seemed like a fixture misplaced from a different decade in the frozen tundra. Todd urged him to get an answer back to him as quickly as possible. In the meantime, Pottinger adjusted KTUU’s satellite dish in Anchorage so it could receive a transmission from Barrow, should one be sent. Todd didn’t have time to wait for Oran to call back. If he wanted to try to get some footage for that night’s newscast with time to edit it, Pottinger needed to book thirty minutes on the satellite immediately. He called Alascom, the telecommunications company that owned the $100-million Aurora I satellite launched in October 1982. Aurora I orbited 22,500 miles above the Earth connecting the once isolated forty-ninth state with the rest of the world by telephone, radio, and television.

Pottinger scheduled the feed for Thursday, October 13, 1988, at 1:30 P.M., Alaska Standard Time. On behalf of his Anchorage station, KTUU, Pottinger agreed to the $500 satellite time fee whether or not Caudle could figure out how to transmit by then. Meanwhile, Oran Caudle sent his only technician back to the transmission shed to see if he could tune in the video test pattern Oran sent him from his studio to the transmission complex outside the NSB building complex. On the very first try—without any tweaking—the test pattern came in perfectly. Oran called Pottinger to tell him that things seemed all set.

“Oh, by the way,” Todd mentioned matter-of-factly before hanging up, “KING-TV in Seattle wants to downlink the feed for their news.” The Aurora I satellite was parked in geosynchronous Earth orbit 22,500 miles above the north Pacific—making Seattle the only city in the Lower 48 that was able to “see” the Aurora I. This meant that whenever someone in Alaska wanted to transmit or receive a signal from beyond the Pacific Northwest “gateway,” the signal had to be transferred—almost always in Seattle—to a different satellite. This was called “looping.” Even though looping added 45,000 miles to a picture’s journey, traveling at just below the 186,000 miles per second speed of light, this detour took less than half a second.

By the time all the arrangements were made, it was 11 A.M., leaving Oran Caudle only two hours to reduce the hours of whale footage shot yesterday down to a twenty-minute satellite-ready package. For a network news producer who did this kind of thing every day this would have been no big deal. But Oran Caudle was not a network news producer. He did not do this every day. To him it was a very big deal indeed.

A sudden fear seized Caudle. Could he do it? The footage he shot for local Barrow television was going not only to Anchorage, but also down to Seattle. He always wanted to work with real news professionals. Now he was getting a chance. Oran locked himself in the edit suite where he frantically fast-forwarded through two-and-a-half hours of videotape, screening it for the best shots.

The phone rang. It was Todd. He had called back to reassure Oran. When they last spoke, he had sensed Oran to be a bit on the nervous side. Todd told him to relax. No need to make every edit perfect, he said. That was a job for KTUU’s editors.

The task, when completed at 12:15 P.M., did not in hindsight appear so daunting. Now, Caudle needed step-by-step instructions on what to do next. He called Todd, who told him to put the edited cassette into the tape machine. Caudle waited for a pattern of color bars to appear on his screen accompanied by the familiar sound of the test tone. When it came through, he was looking at the picture coming back to him in Barrow from the Aurora I. Everything seemed to be working.

Todd Pottinger’s report that he saw the same thing at the same time on his monitor down in Anchorage confirmed that all systems were go. Patiently, Pottinger talked Oran through his first live television transmission. “Whenever you’re ready,” Todd said, “just hit the Play button and we’re in business.” Todd couldn’t believe how good the video was. The instant he saw the first shots of the whales, he knew this would be a big television story. He just had no idea how big.

Minutes later, KING-TV in Seattle called to tell Oran that NBC News was rushing to arrange an immediate transmission of Oran’s footage to New York. Something about Tom Brokaw wanting to run it on the NBC Nightly News. At their boss’ suggestion, Brokaw’s producers were always looking for a unique, visually appealing story to end the show. When the three trapped whales came up during Thursday morning’s conference call, NBC News bureau chiefs readily agreed with the Los Angeles bureau that if the video was any good, the whales might make a good “kicker,” TV slang for the story that ends each newscast.

Oran could hardly believe what he was hearing: His story on NBC Nightly News? He was just glad Todd didn’t pass on that bit of news before they finished transmitting. He was already a nervous wreck. Now he was a speechless nervous wreck. It wasn’t so long ago that Caudle was covering local beauty pageants back in Commerce, Texas.

Thursday, October 16, 1988, at 12:30 P.M. Alaska Standard Time, the three frightened whales still concerned only a handful of people in a small Eskimo town straddling the top of the world. Hours later, 15 million Americans saw them for the first time. (Back in 1988, people actually watched the NBC Nightly News.) They watched as the whales gasped for air. It was a sudden and unexpected diversion from the day’s big news: the closing weeks of the 1988 presidential campaign between Republican Vice President George H. W. Bush and Democrat Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.

The moment the first image of a stranded whale appeared on a television screen at KING-TV in Seattle, no one could have imagined that days later, America would turn its attention away from its great quadrennial event and direct it instead toward the nonevent of three California gray whales trapped in frozen waters off the continent’s northernmost point.

But for those assigned to cover the story, it was even harder to prepare for the world they would soon enter, the world of Barrow, Alaska—a world like no other.