I've been thinking a lot today about James Kim and how this awful mess could've happened to someone like him.
I'd never heard of the guy nor his family before they became a news item, but I identify with them. James Kim was my age, was involved in the tech industry, lived about an hour's drive from my house and died about a two-hour drive from where I grew up. I know exactly what it's like to get lost on those little logging roads in the mountains that look OK on the map but get desolate and scary all too quickly. Sometimes they're narrow with steep, tree-lined borders, and it can be hard to find a place to turn around right away; sometimes, and this sounds like what happened to the Kims, you might feel like you must be getting close to a larger road and will be OK if you just keep going - until you realize that your gas gauge is getting low and there's no out in sight. I've been in a car that broke down on an isolated road at night with the temperature below freezing; my friends and I huddled together through a night that seemed to last a week, using carseat covers for sleeping bags, until someone drove by at dawn. That was bad enough - and yet we weren't even in any danger; there were houses within a couple of miles. We were just cold and unwilling to walk as far as it would take to get to a phone, knowing eventually someone would come by or that we could walk out the next day.
A lot of people might find it easy to armchair-quarterback the decisions that the Kims made on that night, trying to get to their hotel after dark in an unfamiliar part of the state. We wonder how an intelligent young couple, equipped with things like cell phones, maps and GPS's, could still get so perilously lost in such a short time. We reassure ourselves that we would've made different decisions. However, it's scary how many disasters are not derived from one devastating event but a series of small problems or decisions that by themselves might make sense, but which stack up into something FUBAR. I'm certain the Kims made choices based on what seemed to be reasonable assumptions. I can only imagine the surrealness of the oh-fuck moment when it became apparent that they had dug a dreadful hole for themselves out there. We'll never know why James Kim didn't stay on the road when he went for help instead of going down into a ravine - was he hoping to follow the creek to the Rogue and find a house or a bigger road? I doubt he was down there without a good rationale, at least in his mind. The trail he left behind would tend to support this...
At any rate, very few of us can say with certainty with how we'd act or what would seem the most effective thing to do if we were that hungry, freezing and stressed. For James Kim, his family - his babies - had been slowly suffering for over a week, far longer than I'm sure he could ever have imagined they'd be out there without rescue. Just imagine - 9 days in a car in the freezing woods with two babies and no food. 9 days - when 6 hours was a cold, hungry eternity to my teenaged ass shivering in a broken-down hatchback a couple miles down the road from town. A countdown was booming, loud as a kettle drum, for the Kims. So James did what he thought he needed to do, and he did it as logically as he could manage. Possibly he overthought it, overengineered a solution that ultimately made it harder to find him before it was too late... but who's to say?
Another thing - I think many of us, especially the urban and gadget-crazy, might be too complacent in the thought that technology will always be there for us when we need it, when in fact technology was not enough to help this family make their way out of those deep, cold woods on their own (although admittedly a cell phone ping was enough to help three of them be found). We think of ourselves as smart people who could solutioneer our way out of any bad situation. I'll bet that if you'd asked James Kim the day before this happened whether he could seriously imagine that this is how he'd die, alone in the woods with not one tool that could help him, he'd have said no way. I'm smarter than that. I have a good car, a cell phone, a travel plan. And yet.
The whole saga has just really struck a chord with me, because if it could happen to people like the Kims, it most certainly could happen to me. I'm grateful that I at least married someone with a lot more caution and sense of practical survivalism when it comes to travel than I myself have. The next time we're planning a road trip anywhere arguably remote, however, I hope that I'll think about the Kims, and about Murphy's Law, and maybe be inclined to stock up and consider contingencies. It can't hurt - and man, it certainly could help.