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Archimedean Screw Tractor,

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Great Graywhale Rescue,

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Friday

Feb172012

The movie, Big Miracle, and what I witnessed in real life, part 8: Michio Hoshino froze his fingers; I threw away my chance for wealth and fame; Kool-Aid pressure ridge bombs; polar bear; interspecies Pied Piper; tarps over the hole; CNN learns the home is a sacred place

Friday, February 17, 2012 at 1:03AM

This is reknowned wildlife photographer, Michio Hoshino, outside the North Slope Borough Search and Rescue hangar waiting for a helicopter ride. He has blisters on his fingers because they got frostbit while he was out photographing the trapped gray whales. Michio was born in Japan but loved open space and wildlife, and so relocated to Alaska in the 1970's. In 1996, on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, he was mauled to death by a brown bear that attacked him in his sleep and dragged him out of his tent.

This week, a play about him is being performed in Anchorage. If I were not overloaded with tasks between now and when I leave for Arizona/India in two nights, I would go see it.

Except to try to sleep, I did not spend much time at the NARL quonset hut that then served as my Barrow home, but when I was there my phone rang almost non-stop. The calls came from people all over the world who had seen my wire service photos in the planet's newspapers.

One of the first calls came from Newsweek at 6:30 in the morning, after a night in which I had gotten no sleep at all. Newsweek wanted to contract with me on the spot, to commit me to photographing the rest of the rescue for them, in color. Newsweek was prepared to put a few hundred rolls on a jet and send them to me immediately.

My first commitment was to Uiñiq magazine, which then was all black and white and I intended to photograph in black and white. I turned them down.

This was followed almost immediately by a call by lady from SIPA Press out of Paris. She wanted me to swear off any further relationships with the wire services and to commit to shoot exclusively for SIPA - again, in color. She gave me a price. I refused it. She nearly doubled it. I refused it again. She doubled the second figure. I refused it again. "Well, how much do you want?" she pushed. "We can work something out. This one's going to be big." She offered to make black and white dupes from the color slides she wanted me to shoot for her and then send them back, "for your little paper."

She promised me fame and and fortune overnight.

I didn't negotiate. I just told her, "no." She called a couple more times. Same answer. One editor in Sweden proved so persistant that for the next week I received a call from her every time I came within earshot of my phone. There was one magazine that I hoped maybe I could get some photos into - Life. Life was the magazine that had first shown me the magic and wonder of photography. At the beginning of my career, I had given myself two magazine goals - to be published in both National Geographic and Life.

I had made it into National Geographic. I had not made it into Life. Life frequently ran black and white essays. Maybe this was my chance. I called the science editor, Jeff Wheelwright, who loves Alaska and has become a friend. He was on extended vacation, and couldn't be reached. Not long after that, I received a call from Lynn Weinstein at Life's picture desk. She had also seen my wire service pictures. She asked if I would shoot for Life.

Color or black and white? I asked. "Color." She answered. I told her about Uiñiq. I told her I had to shoot black and white. Would she maybe reconsider? She said, no, she would find someone to shoot color, but if I could send her some black and white prints by the following Thursday, she would consider them. That was eight or nine days away - surely, this would end well before then and I would have time to make some high-quality black and white prints and send to her.

Ok, I agreed - but no color.

I promised my UPI reporter friend Jeff Berliner that I would make a print or two for him every day. I did not really want to, because one cannot shoot while one is developing film and printing. I did not want to be distracted from shooting. But I figured I could print after midnight and before first light, when there would likely be no action to shoot.

As I was no one's employee but a free agent, some might not understand how I could put Uiñiq ahead of Life, Newsweek, the wealth and fame promised by SIPA and all the other national and international requests that I received, but - Uiñiq was my creation. It was my magazine. Through it, I was shooting this for the people of the Arctic Slope - most especially, for the Iñupiat people. Of course I would put Uiñiq first.

This is Cindy Lowry of Greenpeace, talking to NOAA's Ron Morris, whom the federal government had put in charge of the rescue effort - a charge he took seriously. In the movie, Big Miracle, Drew Barrymore plays Greenpeace volunteer Rachel Kramer, Lowry's fictional counterpart. From all that I read, Lowry is very pleased with the way Barrymore portrayed her.

I would note, though, that there are some major differences between the two. Kramer begins the movie despising the Iñupiat whalers and the hunt that sustains them. When I first learned that Lowry was coming to Barrow, I was prepared not to like her as I thought she might be just as depicted in the movie - someone opposed to the Iñupiat bowhead hunt, someone who wanted to shut it down, someone who could be rigid and unreasonable about the subject.

But she wasn't. When I first met her at the NSB-SAR hangar, she completely disarmed me. She was charming and personable - rational and reasonable. She told me that she had once looked unfavorably at Iñupiat whaling, but had come to understand that it was also a part of the natural order and that she, and Greenpeace, supported the hunt and would continue to as long as it did not threaten the bowhead population.

She was not shrill. She was not extreme. She was passionate. Devoted to her cause. She struck me as a good human being. She found it easy to get along with whalers, to get along with everybody. Well, maybe not quite everybody. She does look a little stressed in this conversation with Ron Morris.

Ron Morris, by the way, had no direct counterpart in Big Miracle - nor did anyone in the NSB Wildlife Management Department, Public Information Office or Mayor's Office. NSB-SAR did have its helicopter counterpart.

At the beginning of the rescue, conversations with Ron were pleasant and amiable, but as the rescue wore on, he grew ever more stressed and conversations with him became ever more stressful.

I guess because I was shooting film and had to conserve in a way I do not have to do now with digital, I only shot two frames of Cindy in this hangar shoot and this is the next - and it immediately followed the frame in which she conversed with Morris.

One day early in the rescue, I stepped into Pepe's (Amigos in Big Miracle) for lunch, found her sharing a table with a man I had not yet seen. Cindy invited me to join them. She introduced me to Jim Nollman, - an "expert on interspecies Communications" from Friday Harbor, Washington. Nollman had his own company - Interspecies Communications and had come to communicate with the trapped whales, lead them to open water and send them on their way to Baja. He had brought tapes of whale sounds, including gray but also orcas, which like to eat grays and of music. He must have also brought a guitar, because he had plans to use one.

If I recall correctly, Greenpeace had paid for his plane ticket in the hope that his gray whale recordings could be used to lead the whales to open water. Yet, after I visited with them for awhile, it became clear that Nollman believed music would be the best lure. He had brought different musical tapes, but what he really wanted to do was to take his guitar out onto the ice, sit at the edge of one of the chainsaw holes that the whales had so far refused to use, strum his guitar and sing to them through a microphone attached to an underwater speaker.

He believed the whales would then leave the security of the breathing hole that had thus far kept them alive and would swim to the one where he sat playing. He would then move a hole away and would strum and sing all over again. In this way, he would lead them all the way to freedom - just like the Pied Piper.

"I need three days and I can lead them to freedom," he told me.

I can't remember for certain if it was at this lunch or another, but I remember that I was eating lunch with Cindy when she first told me that Greenpeace had contacted Soviet officials and were trying to persuade them to send a nearby icebreaker to Barrow, and US officials to get the permission. This was a few days after Ron Morris had first spoke confidentially in the car of Ronald Reagan and how high US and Soviet officials were discussing the possibility of such an icebreaker.

Once the whales did begin to move through the chainsaw holes, it was a fact that their seaward progress would be stopped short by the pressure ridges, if no way was found to clear a way through them. A couple of different possibilities had been discussed - dynamite could be used to blast a way through - this would almost certainly kill and injure other marine life - and might even cause the whales to panic, swim off under the ice and drown.

The other possibility involved sending the Sky Crane and ice punch back out to hammer at the ridge and weaken it so a gap could be cleared through it. The oil industry and the National Guard remained eager not only to help but to prove they could get the job done, so this was chosen over dynamite. Two local Iñupiat ice experts were sent by helicopter out to the pressure ridges to search for structural weaknesses in the ridges - senior whale hunters Whitlam Adams and Alfed Leavitt.

They would seek out structural weaknesses. NSB senior scientist Tom Albert would then mark those spots with red cherry Kool-Aid bombs.

Alfred Leavitt. When he was a young man, Alfred had once taken his dog team onto the ice to hunt and had taken a polar bear. All by himself, he pulled and tugged and hoisted the bear onto his sled, then began the return trip to Barrow - only to discover the ice he was on had broken off from the shorefast and was drifting seaward. A lead, about 100 feet wide, separated him from safety. He ordered his dogs into the water and they obeyed. As they swam, he rode the sled with the bouyant polar bear, but still went in up to his waist. When he reached the other side, he jumped onto the ice just as the last couple of dogs in the team went under. He shoved his hands into the water and pulled them out.

When he was an old man, he again went hunting on the sea ice, this time by snowmachine instead of dogs. He again got a bear. Again, he strapped it to his sled. Again, he found himself cut off from land by a break in the ice and a growing lead of about the same breadth.

This time, he took as good a run at the water as he could, then went skipping across the lead on his snowmachine. The snowmachine sank just before he reached the other edge. Alfred took out his knife and shoved it into the ice as a grip to hang onot. Another nearby hunter spotted him, came and helped pull him out.

Alfred, by the way, was the father of chainsaw crew boss Johnny Leavitt.

Whitlam signals to Tom in the chopper. Now, I am sad and frustrated. I took some pictures of this scenario that had both Whitlam and the chopper in it and they are much better than this one - in fact, I am certain one of them would have made the dozen or so I plan to put in my store and offer up as prints.

I found the contact sheet. I found a packet of negatives with the same number as the contact sheet - but it had different negatives in it. I opened nearby negative packets - none of them contained it. I found the contact sheet that had the same images as the negatives I found in the packet. They weren't there. At random, I pulled up other negative packets and, in the process of "scanning" images for this series, have opened up almost all the packets.

I cannot find the picture. So I had to substitute this one for it. I am so disappointed. I hope I find it someday.

Here is Tom Albert, dropping a Cherry Kool-Aid bomb from the helicopter at one of the places where Whitlam had signaled. The Sky Crane - ice punch would come back and batter those places, but with little if any effect.

And here is a polar bear as seen from the helicopter. ADN outdoor reporter Craig Medred was in the helicopter with me when I took this picture. He then went back and wrote an article speculating as to the ethics of saving trapped whales, which, left to the natural order of things, could have wound up feeding a bunch of polar bears. What if the polar bears starved because they did not get to eat the whales? The story appeared nationwide.

This caused such an outrage among readers that the Daily News had to pull Medred out of Barrow. They replaced him with their top investigative reporter, Richard Mauer, who then also became the New York Times reporter for the duration.

Polar bears were once hunted in Alaska for sport, but no longer are. Only Natives of the Arctic Coast can hunt them, for "subsistence" purposes. Medred is a skilled and enthusiastic hunter and has taken about every kind of game that can be taken in Alaska, except for polar bears and other sea mammals.

"What a beautiful animal!" he exclaimed as we flew over this one. "I sure would like to shoot one."

Jim and Cindy went to the gray whales while I was out with Alfred and Whitlam and Jim conducted his Pied Piper musical experiment - not with a guitar, but with recorded sounds, piped into the water of one of the newly cut chainsaw holes with his underwater speaker. I missed it.

The whales did not budge from the original hole. There had been talk of covering the old hole with ice to force the whales out, or to remove the bubbler and let it freeze over, but this was rejected out of the fear of the damage the whales might suffer if they refused to leave and just kept trying to swim in the refilled hole.

Instead, a decision was made to cover the hole with tarps. Perhaps this would make it so unpleasant for the whales they would leave and go to the chainsaw holes.

Crossbeak beneath the tarps.

The whales not only appeared comfortable beneath the tarps, they seemed to like them. As always, there were those who could not resist the urge to reach out and pat a whale on the snout.

Please note the bubbler - bubblers were also being kept in the newly cut holes to keep them open until the whales decided to use them.

The experiement failed. A whaler pointed toward the open ocean. "Go that way!" he shouted.

Sometime afterward, I was talking to crew boss Johnny Leavitt when we suddenly heard Mark Fraker, an oil industry biologist who got deeply into the rescue, shout. "they're moving!"

We turned. A whale rose in the hole immediately behind us.

A bit later, someone observed that the small whale, Bone, was missing. Someone else then said that he didn't think he had seen Bone since Nollman had conducted his experiment. I thought he might be making a joke, but I was told that a TV reporter also heard the comment and broadcast it as fact.

I talked to Nollman later and he was vehement that this was not the case. He said all three whales were there when he left. He believed his experiment had convinced all the whales to use the chainsaw holes.

Bone was never seen again.

At 2:30 AM the next morning I preparing to develop and print when the CNN reporter and a cameraman burst into my office and demanded Geoff Carroll's phone number. He wanted Geoff to confirm that Bone was dead. I figured Geoff needed his sleep and so conveniently forgot his number. The reporter then ordered me to take him to Geoff's house. He knew he lived in one of the nearby quonset huts. I told him I wouldn't do that. "Then I will go knock on every door over there until I find him," he threatened.

He meant it. I reluctantly agreed. He wanted to ride in his truck, but I walked and made him and his cameraman walk, too. Geoff was not pleased to be woken up, but for all his physical and mental toughness, he is a gentle, mild-mannered person and did not protest too strongly. The reporter grilled him about Bone - was Bone dead? Geoff noted that Bone had not been seen and so had undoubtedly perished. Next, the reporter wanted to do a live interview over the phone, right then.

"Well, okay, I guess," Geoff responded. Marie then came out from the bedroom. She scolded the reporter for being "very rude," pointing out they had been getting hardly any sleep and had a new baby to care for. "There will be a press conference in the morning," she said. The reporter was already setting up the phone interview. He called Geoff to come over.

"No," Marie stopped him. "There isn't going to be a phone interview. I am the Borough Public Information Officer, my husband is a Borough employee and even though he is my husband, I can order him not to talk about this until the press conference tomorrow morning. In fact, that's what I'm doing. I'm ordering him not to talk to you about it."

The reporter did not give up, but presented this argument and that, about how the world needed to know, right now. "No! The home is a sacred place. We are not to be disturbed like this in the middle of the night again!" The reporter tried to argue further, to no avail.

I had taken the picture above just days before: Geoff, Marie, baby Quinn and some mostly young members of Geoff's dog team outside the quonset hut - their home, a sacred place. The dog house is sacred, too - but not the one the CNN reporter found himself in.

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Wednesday

Feb152012

The movie, Big Miracle, and what I witnessed in real life, part 7: tuttu comes to Malik, Malik provides dinner

Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 8:47PM

One afternoon, a caribou wandered into the rescue camp. Malik shot the "tuttu" for dinner and then turned it over to younger members of the chainsaw crew for skinning and butchering.

I have many more pictures than this "scanned" and lined up storywise, but I don't want to stop right now to take the time to write a story. I just want to keep "scanning."* I will write more stories tomorrow. Then, since I depart for Arizona (where Margie arrived today) late Saturday night, I will wrap this up, one way or another, by Friday night and will probably schedule the last post to appear Saturday, but possibly Sunday.

That's why I want to keep scanning. I think I can complete this quicker if I get all the pictures scanned now and then write later.

*As explained at the beginning, I no longer have a working film scanner. So I am using my camera as a scanner. I photograph the black and white negatives one at a time, then convert them to positive and work from there.

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The movie, Big Miracle, and what I witnessed in real life, part 6: Governor Cowper gets a new pair of seal-skin boots; hoverbarge fails, ice punch dropped; Iñupiat whalers cut holes with chainsaws

Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 4:40PM

As he never did go out to see the whales, I was going to skip over the visit of Governor Steve Cowper, which took place just as the rescue was beginning to ramp up. Yet, his fictional counterpart had a role in the movie, Big Miracle, so I feel I must include him. Oran Caudle's footage of the whales had already been seen worldwide on TV, the photos that I had sent to the Anchorage Daily News had appeared in just about every daily newspaper in the world, from the New York Times on, but the media had not yet descended en masse into Barrow.

Governor Cowper came to visit officials of the North Slope Borough and the North Slope Borough School District. I had been asked to document the visit and had committed myself to do so before we knew any of this would be happening. So, on the morning of the day that Arnold Brower Jr. would go out to make the observations upon which he would base his report to the Barrow Whaling Captains Association, I had followed the governor through the last of his visits. It was hard for me, because I wanted only to be on the ice, but when you commit yourself to the Governor of Alaska, the Mayor of the North Slope Borough and the Superintendent of the North Slope Borough School District, you must follow through.

The State of Alaska's revenues go up and down both with the price and flow of oil, and this was a time of declining revenues. Hence, declining revenues were chief on the mind of Cowper, as well as those he visited. During a meeting with the mayor and Borough officials, the conversation turned to the trapped gray whales. The Governor's response was essentially, Isn't that interesting. Now, about those declining oil revenues...

He was offered a helicopter ride to the whale site, but declined, citing his busy schedule. He had no desire to involve the state in the rescue effort.

At a lunch hosted by the school district in the Barrow High School cafeteria, Rex Okakok presented Governor Cowper with a new pair of seal-skin kammiks, better known to the world as mukluks. Originally of Texas, Governor Cowper removed his cowboy boots, slipped the kammiks onto his feet and then, to applause, shook Rex's hand.

I then dashed off, climbed onto my snowmachine, and raced out to the whale holes. I was fortunate to arrive even before Arnold and the others.

Yet, although under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, all the legal authority and jurisdiction goes to the federal government and not the state, the governor and the State of Alaska would be drawn in militarily. After ARCO volunteered the use of its hoverbarge to break a path from the whales to open water, they needed a big, powerful helicopter to tow it and the only one available was the Sky Crane of the Alaska National Air Guard.

In the movie, Big Miracle, two Sky Cane helicopters towed the hover barge, flying side by side in the most nerve-wracking, horrifying, manner possible. In real life, there were also two helicopters, but only one pulled while the other flew along as backup.

Prior to this time, the barge had never been towed more than 25 miles. As to its potential speed, we kept hearing different reports - from five knots to 30. I could not even begin to believe the 30, given all the pressure ridges and jagged, rough, ice that it would encounter on the ocean.

The sky crane and hoverbarge launched their 210 nautical mile journey from Prudhoe Bay to Plover Point on a Sunday. It encountered so many problems that by the Ron Morris deadline of Tuesday, it had succeed in going no more than a few miles from Prudhoe Bay. None of us in Barrow would ever get to see it. Yet, given the intense interest of the world and President Reagan, there was no way the effort could be scuttled now.

Its initial effort had failed, but the oil industry is proud of its resourcefulness and creativity, and they especially wanted to display their capabilities in the Arctic. Next, ARCO offered up a five-ton ice punch. One Sky Crane returned to base and the other was flown to Barrow in the hope that it might be used in combination with the ice punch to poke a series of holes for the gray whales to follow from their holes to open water and freedom.

Among the whale hunters of Barrow, there had been great skepticism that the hover barge would work. Now they were eqaully skeptical about the ice punch. They did not want to wait any longer, until it had failed, to launch their own operation. Through the NSB Mayor's Office Jobs Program, the Borough hired a crew of mostly Iñupiat whale hunters to chainsaw a series of holes from the whales to the lead.

They would still have to face the problem of the massive pressure ridge that stood at the edge of the ice and was likely anchored on the ocean bottom. Still, they knew they could cut the holes to the pressure ridge and in the meantime hoped to figure out how to deal with it.

Whaling Captain Johnny Leavitt (right) was put in charge of the crew. Malik, left, came on both as a worker and senior advisor. Morris hoped that the hunters would not be needed, save to clean the ice punch holes. He wanted them to hold off until the Sky Crane did its thing, but the hunters were in no mood to wait any longer. They were ready to go. No matter how much a government official and his bosses in Washington, DC, might imagine himself to be in charge of Iñupiat hunters on Arctic ice, he never really will be.

"They should have just let us do this from the start and not even fooled with the hover barge," Leavitt told me as his crew fired up their chain saws. "They get all these professors. We are the PhD's out here."

Even as the Sky Crane - ice punch rig was being readied to begin its work, the whale hunters began theirs. I now had a hard decision to make - to follow the whale hunters or the ice punch - which would start near the pressure ridges and then work backwards toward the whales.

To me, it was more important to capture the whalers at work than the ice punch. If I followed it and it succeeded, then the major work of the whalers would essentially be over. I would have no pictures of them cutting holes. If I stayed with the whalers, I would not be able to photograph the ice punch at work out near the pressure ridges, but I would be able to catch it as it drew near the whalers and the whales.

However, if the ice punch failed, it would never draw near to the whalers and the whales and I would get no pictures of it at all. I hate to sound cynical, but I figured ARCO and the National Guard would take the ice punch out, try to punch out a few holes, would not succeed in creating anything practical and the effort would be called off. The whalers, meanwhile, would keep cutting holes, probably for days.

So, believing that it would be my only chance to photograph the Sky Crane - ice punch at work, but I would have many chances to photograph the whalers, I secured a seat on the NSB Search and Rescue Long Ranger helicopter and followed along as the Sky Crane went to work.

I had imagined that that the Sky Crane would have some kind of cable release that would allow it to drop the punch onto the ice. Then it would reel it back up and drop again, until finally it broke through the ice. I had imagined wrong. Instead, the helicopter would hover its mark and then suddenly the whole contraption - helicopter and sky punch, would plunge downward until the spiked punch struck the ice. Immediately afterward, the pilot would arrest the fall of his aircraft with his rotors.

Even though I felt the effort futile, I felt nothing but respect for the flying skills of the pilot.

This was challenging and dangerous work.

The crane would punch and punch away, often times making only a barely discernable dent. Then, finally, it would punch a hole through - but it was a rubble filled hole, of no use to whales or man. The effort failed.

The whalers had about four miles of holes to cut to reach the ice. When I returned, I was surprised to find that they had already cut about half-a-mile. Twenty chainsaws had been donated from someone in Oregon and some more from Prudhoe Bay. It was a bit of a challenge to keep the chainsaws going in the cold weather, especially as they were cutting into salt water - the whalers, however, are superbly skilled at keeping machines going no matter the weather, no matter the conditions.

It helps if they have the right tools, but even if they don't, they figure it out.

Whalers fire up a chain saw.

They cut a small test hole.

In the system quickly worked out, the outline of a large hole would be drawn in the snow and within it the slabs that would be cut out to from it. Then whalers wielding chain saws would cut along the lines. Jimmie Ningeok makes a cut.

Jimmie Ningeok progresses along the hole.

When they had first enlarged the whales original holes, the hunters had dragged the chunks of ice out of the water by pulling on ropes. Given the size of the slabs, this was no longer feasible, so they quickly devised a new method. Once a slab was cut, whalers would push one end of the slab down below the bottom level of the ice. As that end went down, the other end would rise. Other whalers would then shove their push-poles into it.

"Kiita!"* they would shout. Then, pushing and laughing, they would shove the slab entirely beneath the ice.

*Let's go!

And so a series of new breathing holes began to reach farther and farther across the ice, towards the pressure ridges... towards the open lead... towards freedom... if freedom were to come...

...but the whales refused to use the new holes. Except for one, quick, brief foray by one into the nearest hole, they stayed put. As trapped as they must have felt, it seemed that they were more frightened to venture away from the security of the breathing hole that had so far kept them alive.

The ice punch, at rest on the beach, near the whales its use had failed to rescue. The helicopter had suffered a damaged rotor and would be down for awhile.

At first, with some limited exceptions, the national media had paid little serious attention to the Iñupiat whalers, but had treated them mostly as a curiosity of the north. It was the oil companies, the National Guard, various of the many biologists, including two NOAA who joined in, and the federal government, as represented by Ron Morris, that they paid serious attention to.

Yet, it was beginning to grow ever more clear that, whatever technological wonders might yet be thrown into this absurd, terrible, horrible yet gallant, wonderful, determined and compassionate mission, if it were to succeed, it would be because of a few Eskimo whale hunters, wielding chainsaws...

...Jimmy Ningeok.

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Tuesday

Feb142012

Working on it - those who would save the whales

Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 1:14AM

I'm working on it, folks. Trust me, I am. I have all the photos prepared for part 6, the post I had planned for tonight, but to place them and write and review the text would take me another two hours or so, maybe more. I am sleepy... sleepy... sleepy... sleepy.

I don't want to stay up another two to three hours, and then spend another hour or two trying to wind down. So I am stopping for now - but I will start on Part 6 right after I eat breakfast, so it will be up early. Then I will get going on part 7. I might post it Tuesday also, but Tuesday is Margie and my 38th anniversary, and late Tuesday night I drop her off at the airport so she can go to Arizona ahead of me, so don't count on it.