Big Miracle by Tom Rose Read Free Book Online Page A

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