Melodrama Draws World Attention : The Whales of October: Three Stayed for Dinner

Like a lot of good folks, three California gray whales lingered too long over dinner, only to learn when they started to head south for the winter that ice had closed in around them, setting the stage for a curious melodrama that has caught the attention of the world.

Poutu (ice hole), Siku (ice) and Kannick (snowflake), as they have been named by the Eskimos, were discovered two weeks ago by a passing hunter who told local marine biologists that the whales were staying alive by breathing through a small hole in the ice.

Unusually cold weather for this time of the year had already frozen the shallow waters along the coast of the Arctic Ocean, which borders the small Eskimo village of Barrow. The hole was just a few hundred yards offshore, about 15 miles from the village, and the permanent Arctic ice pack farther offshore was moving gradually closer to the newly formed coastal ice.

The whales, who had spent too long storing up food for their long journey south, must surface for air every four or five minutes. So by the time they were discovered it was already too late for them to swim several miles under water to the narrow band of sea that lies between the coastal ice and the Arctic ice field.

Unless the whales could be somehow helped to safety, they would soon die.

The effort to help them began slowly here, as Eskimos from Barrow worked alongside biologists who are assigned to this area, to keep the small hole from freezing over. They used chain saws to continuously carve off pieces of the ice.

Through their ordeal, the whales seem to have grown almost affectionate, allowing biologists to reach out and touch them as they brush against the razor-sharp edges of the ice.

Scene Becomes Chaotic

It wasn’t long before word of the rescue attempt was picked up by the press, and what has happened here since is nothing short of phenomenal.

One day this week Ron Morris, a marine biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who is coordinating the effort, was talking on the telephone in a small office in a hangar that is serving as rescue headquarters.

At one point he looked up at the window that separates the office from an adjoining room and found himself staring into the bright lights and cameras of NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN. About a dozen other photographers and reporters poked their heads and cameras through the arms and legs of the network crews.

Morris, who could not be heard inside the closed office, chuckled to himself. All he was doing, after all, was talking on the telephone.

Enjoys Center Stage

Yet for a man more accustomed to the laboratory than the spotlight, Morris seems to be enjoying his brief appointment to center stage, joking with a crowd of newspeople the likes of which he probably will never see again.

The drama of the trapped whales has also attracted news crews from as far away as Japan, London and Australia.

They are covering a story that has undeniable human interest. The three whales, long romanticized by people who flock to the beaches of the West Coast to watch them migrate to their breeding grounds off Baja California, have traditionally been hunted by many of the people who are now working so hard to save them.

The rescue effort has brought together military personnel, scientists, oil company executives and environmentalists, more accustomed to feuding among themselves than working together. Now, caught up in a mission that has all the drama of a life-and-death struggle, they are struggling against nature in a cold and forbidding landscape, but one that can become strikingly beautiful when the sun skirts across the flat horizon, washing the air in pastel tones of blues and greens and reds. For a long time Thursday, a spectacular rainbow arched through atmospheric ice crystals from one horizon to another.

“And people wonder why I like it here,” mused Robert Whisenhunt, director of business operations for the giant native corporation that owns much of this community. “I can walk outside and look forever in any direction.”

Power of Nature

To the north, there is the Arctic Ocean, with high pressure ridges where its ice floes have been crushed together, forming a distant range of temporary mountains of ice, a testament to the powerful forces of nature.

To the east and the south, there is the tundra, a land that never completely thaws, underlain by vast deposits of oil. To the west, there are the Aleutian Islands, pointing to Asia and the most likely route followed by the first persons to come this way so many years ago.

The urgency of the rescue effort has taken top priority here, and the fever is running so high that no one has stopped to count what it is all going to cost.

Most of the money--roughly estimated at more than half a million dollars--is being borne by the oil industry and the Alaska National Guard, which is using one of its Skycrane helicopters in an attempt to tow a 185-ton icebreaking barge 200 miles from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. The barge is owned by VECO Inc., one of the companies that developed the huge oil production facilities on the North Slope.

That rescue effort may not prove successful, but many thousands of dollars have already been spent in repeated attempts to lug the barge across the ice.

Some of the cost is also being picked up by the town of Barrow, but this tiny community is not exactly a pocket of poverty. Barrow collects property taxes from the entire North Slope, and it has a county treasury equal to that of some countries.

Much of that wealth has been used to build modern communications facilities and a high school that would be the envy of any administrator to the south. It has a huge gym with an indoor Olympic-sized swimming pool, heated year around. And every student in nearly every classroom has his own personal computer in a school that is better equipped than many scientific research labs.

But prosperity has not always agreed with Barrow. A seemingly endless federal investigation has cast a cloud over the community, as numerous past and present officials have been accused of misusing public funds.

Some say that goes with this frozen territory where, despite the relative prosperity, life is hard. Barrow has taken some measures to protect itself from the plague that strikes so many similar communities.

Alcoholism in the Alaskan bush is legendary, frequently leading to violence.

“We have a saying about most of those towns,” said an airline official. “It’s B and B. Booze in and bodies out.”

To keep that from happening here, drinking alcoholic beverages is illegal in Barrow, a fact that many reporters found more distressful than the weather.

For all its wealth, the town itself is not much to look at. Austere but functional buildings have replaced most of the dilapidated shacks of pre-oil days. Many structures stand on stilts, making the town look somewhat like the small communities that dot the Texas Gulf Coast. The stilts allow the sometimes raging waters of the Arctic to flow under the buildings, not through them.

These days, when the temperature can suddenly plunge to 40 degrees below zero with a quick shift in the wind, no one goes outside even briefly without being covered from head to toe.

Townsfolk have emptied their closets to help some reporters who showed up ill-prepared for the weather.

Dwight Johnsson, who is in charge of cargo operations for Markair, the airline that serves this region, took pity on a Los Angeles Times reporter who showed up wearing what passes for foul weather gear in Southern California.

“You can’t go out on the ice like that,” barked Johnsson, who flew up here from Anchorage with his 82-year-old father just to see the whales.

“Take this,” he said as he stripped off his own parka and handed it to a reporter he did not even know.

Later, he added about $1,000 worth of Arctic survival gear.

“You can drop it off for me when you go through Anchorage,” he said.

He paused for a moment, reached into his suitcase and pulled out a .357 magnum revolver.

“Take this too,” he said. “Just in case you run into a bear out there on the ice. I want to get my gear back.”

That incident tells something about the kind of people who chose to make this their home. Survival--whether of whales or men--is something no one takes lightly.