I’ve been following somewhat closely the story of James Kim and his family. Kim was a contributor to shows on Tech TV and he is known to some of the folks on The Well, one of my online hangouts. Kim was reported missing on November 30, 2006. According to an AP report, Kim’s wife and two young children were found alive in their Saab station wagon on a snowy road in southwest Oregon. Kim had gone for help and has not been located. They had intended to take a state highway off the Interstate to get to a lodge near Gold Beach on the Oregon coast. They missed the highway, decided to take a different road, took a wrong fork in the road and ended up stuck about 15 miles from the fork.
James Kim was wearing tennis shoes, jeans, a gray sweater and a jacket as he left the car on Saturday, and had initially planned to return that afternoon if he could not find help, according to Oregon authorities.
They said his footprints eventually dropped down into a drainage known as Big Windy Creek.
By Monday, the search included three privately chartered helicopters and a fourth helicopter hired by the state. There were also dozens of searchers on the ground.
The search today will include helicopters with thermal-imaging technology, along with dog teams, a boat and horses. Roads in the area are commonly used in the summer, but are not plowed in winter.
As a father and a lover of the mountains — any mountains — this strikes a chord. What a nightmare. It further hammers home some of the rare advice my Dad gave me. He’s normally a joking sort. But when my buddy and I were out visiting him in Colorado then about to take off on our own into the mountains, he got uncharacteristically serious and said something to the effect of, “You be careful out there; you take the mountain for granted, and it’ll kill you.”
This does serve as a reminder of how much we take our comfort and safety for granted. I’m not really speaking of the Kim family now. I don’t have any idea what their preparations or mental state were like. But I can see getting into a jam like that, simply because I have a tendency to believe that just because there is a road, it’s safe to drive on. I believe this simply because it’s a government constructed road, not through any independent evaluation of the road or its conditions. It’s a credit to our society that we feel this safe, but it occasionally leads to some bad decision making.
Like I said, that last paragraph wasn’t directed at the Kims. I have no idea of their situation. Hopefully James will turn up alive and healthy.
Update: I frequently find myself drawing odd connections between things that seem, at first blush, unrelated. With the James Kim post still on my mind, this happened once again as I was reading a post at Paul Retherford’s site, itself referencing a Kemplog post, which was in turn referencing a Washington Post article about an eco-village in North Carolina. (If I’m not careful, we’re gonna get fractal or recursive here or, god-forbid, turn this thing into an Ouroboros. Sorry, I was just getting link-happy there.)
Anyway, the Retherford post highlighted a quote from the Post article:
We live in a world we didn’t make, by rules and customs and laws we didn’t invent, using tools and technologies we don’t understand.
He goes on to elaborate:
It is partly because our production systems are so efficient that we are so removed from them. Unfortunately, if we allow ourselves too much separation from the pork we eat or the electricity we use, we lose the big picture. We stop valuing the energy, engineering, and effort that gave us the end-product. And we lose the biological connection between the life of the pig and our need for nourishment. We lose the ecological connection between the land stripped for coal and the power line running to our house.
And what, pray tell, does this have to do with being stranded in the snow on a mountain? It goes back to my Dad’s warning. If you take the mountain for granted, it’ll kill you. Nature, as they say, is a Mother. And, she bats last. As we become further removed from nature, our appreciation for its power is dulled and, we end up making decisions that are not fully informed. And the consequences can be severe.
Update #2 Damn. The AP is reporting that Mr. Kim was found dead today (12/6/06).
New Orleans anyone? Sounds like a classic case of getting disconnected from what the reality of nature is.
When we built our house, we didn’t choose the lot based on the best look, or closeness to the main road, but on the fact it was farther up a hill. Less chance of flooding.
We also built the smallest house on the street, but used the extra money to build the basement that many of my neighbors ignored. I live in Indiana, I should expect that at some point a tornado or flood will hit near I live.
Too many people forget that city lines don’t matter to nature. My favorite quote is “Tonadoes don’t hit downtown areas, they just hit trailer parks”.
Sometimes people forget how wild and dangerous so much of the western US still is – particularly southeastern Oregon in the winter. A mildly mentally retarded boy went missing at Crater Lake earlier this year, and is feared dead after a couple snows came and went with no sign of him. There are more than a few stories every year of people who disappear or have servere accidents or drown while out in the wilderness around Washington, Montana, Idaho and Oregon. I’m hoping that the fact that they found Kim’s pants doesn’t mean he was hypothermic and disoriented. We’re all hoping it works out to a happy ending for all involved.
Your discussion of the distance between the us and the production of what sustains us explains a lot about how we can perish so close to safety. The Kims were out for a drive. Cars are dependable, as are roads. Suddenly becoming helplessly stranded had to be very disorienting. Being on the ground there, something made him decide that a trek through wilderness was preferential to walking fifteen miles on a road he had already travelled once. Probably unfamiliarity with the feeling of disorientation that comes with travels on the fringes of the map (plus a few days hunkered in a cold car with his family dependent on him to figure a way out of the mess) contributed to making an imperfect decision there.
I recall our trip to Yosemite, Doug. The airport lost our packs, we got started 12 hours late and were short on sleep and not acclimatized to the altitude. We had a map, compass, and knew how to use them. Despite that, about a dozen miles in we got off route and ended up on top of a cliff we should have been at the base of (though we couldn’t see that at the time…it just looked like a big forest from our perspective). Under those conditions a debate commenced about whether to improvise a route, or backtrack (something we really didn’t want to do, since we’d already lost so much time already and were getting tired and not in the mood for “do-overs”). And yet, untimately we chose well, and the backtracking led us within minutes to the proper route. It’s one of the tenets of the backcountry that you go to the last known point. And yet we had a real debate about it, and considered a course that could have had a bad result. Unexpected circumstances breed unclear thinking sometimes.
That disconnectedness from the production of that which makes us safe, etc., also leads to behaviors in adventurers who seek out a way to feel alive; to feel like life can still have thrills, and manageable dangers with real consequences. Do you remember how you felt when your dad warned you of the deadly nature of the mountains? I bet it made you feel alive. I bet it made you feel like your actions would have consequences in a much more immediate way than you are accustomed to in the rest of your life. That feeling is what draws a lot of us to the mountains. My best moment in the last year was climbing up toward the summit of Mt. Lafayette, NH, in fifty mph winds and horizontal rain. Sure I had shelter, food, water, clothing, etc. in my pack. I was prepared. But still–mountains, rain, and wind. I’ve rarely felt more alive. Our forefathers probably got a bit of that feeling knowing they had just downed some game to provide a meal for the family, or finished building a house by their own hands. But in our society with a restaurant on every block, heat and cold at the touch of a button, etc., that feeling is rare.
Of course, the Kims were just passing through, and not looking for such an adventure. Hopefully he is found in good shape. It is a credit to him and his wife that the family was found in such good shape. Now hopefully he will be found.