Big Miracle by Tom Rose Read Free Book Online

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