I think I’m obligated to report on what everyone else knows, that James Kim was found dead. I am horrified that he died that way and quite thrilled that the rest of his family survived.
Chris, makes a point about the needlessness of the death. I realize some may disagree with tone and all that, but I’m of the opinion that you simply can’t make the point strongly enough. People do stupid things in order to believe that they are “doing something” to “fix the problem.” And they end up making the situation worse. When you’re in the wilderness lost, and watching your family go hungry and cold, you have to have it really nailed into your head to stay with the car or else you will permit the desperation to drive you to actions that only decrease your chances.
I’ve always felt really silly how frightened I felt when Jennifer and I first moved away from Saint Louis and drove to my first pastorate in Auburn, Washington. I don’t feel silly any more. Kansas was fine by Wyoming was like an alien planet awaiting terraformation. Almost all the signs of human construction that you would see from interstate 80 were unmanned–sheds with antennas sticking out of them. I expected to see the Viking explorer crawling around taking soil samples.
I wasn’t being silly. What was silly was that I didn’t take more precautions.
I hadn’t heard it confirmed yet. I was of course fully expecting it, but it’s still sad news.
The thing is, what you and others are saying that this was the wrong thing to do, is right, and need not be sugar coated.
But the stronger language some are using characterizing him as stupid — maybe I’m just a sentimental female, but if making the wrong choice on one occasion makes you a stupid person, then we’re all irremediably stupid and it’s a meaningless thing to say. Just because this one incorrect choice turned out to be more critical than the hundred other mistakes you and I and everybody else make every day, shouldn’t open the poor unfortunate man up to abuse. It’s one thing to say that we need to make clear that the tragedy doesn’t make his decision any more sensible, but it’s quite another to use the cold facts of survival wisdom to excuse making personally derogatory remarks about an intelligent man who made one very important mistake that we know about.
You certainly didn’t partake of that — I’m just reacting a bit to some of the comments at O’Donnell’s blog. There, got that out of my system.
That is part of what keeps bugging me about this. Kim obviously was a bright guy. The nine days they spent at the car could be a case study on how to survive in the winter. They did everything perfect. And then he wandered off. It just makes no sense.
He was strained to the breaking point and he did the irrational. I think that makes a lot of sense. The only thing that will get you past it are some slogans you have hammered into your head like, for instance, “NEVER leave the car.”
I’m not sure you have all the facts straight here.
Kim didn’t just “wander off.” He went down the road, thinking that it would lead back to the town of Galice. He also thought it was only about 4 miles away, whereas in reality it was about 15 miles away. Somewhere along the way, he must have thought it would be good to get the Rogue River and follow it to town.
The police said today that he didn’t make a bad decision. He wasn’t doing something stupid. He was simply mistaken.
Again, as has been pointed out extensively elsewhere, because his strategy didn’t work out, it doesn’t mean it was wrong. Anyone who thinks there are hard-and-fast, inflexible, rules for survival in a wilderness crisis better hope they never land in one.
Even the woman who was involved in the other very famous case where a young family was stranded says “the best advice is to stay with the car”. But she has already asserted earlier that, in their case, if her husband hadn’t walked 50 miles to find help, they most likely would have been found dead in the spring, in the car.
It is absolutely irrefutable, but perhaps still not the right strategic move, that he could have walked to help and safety before his family was rescued if he had walked in a different direction immediately, without first staying with the car for a week. It is also probably the case that if his relatives had not had the wherewithal and drive to conduct their own expensive search, waiting in the car would not have succeeded for his wife and children, either.
There is case after case after case where staying in one spot and waiting did *not* succeed, and the victims were found dead in the fullness of time. We can’t prove that moving would have saved them in those cases, but we know that staying didn’t work.
There are also many well-known cases where staying clearly would have failed, because searches had been abandonned, but walking out, after first waiting for an extended period of time, worked. I have read the Red Cross and other survival guidelines, and all of them that say to “stay put” also say something like “you’ll probably be found in a few hours”. When a week or more has elapsed, I think it’s really smart thinking to move to Plan B, particularly in the present situation where they believed that help was 4 miles away.
You folks who think there’s a hard-and-fast “stay with the car” rule: what if a month has gone by? How ’bout two? How about a year? Do you just build a cabin out there, around your car, and stay there the rest of your life? *Surely* you must admit that there is a point in time at which it no longer makes sense to just sit there waiting. If people want to debate, including the people who write the wilderness survival guidelines, maybe they should debate this: at what point in time does simply *waiting* start to become the really most stupid thing you can possibly do?
The initial reports when I wrote my post indicated he was going out exploring to see if he could find a route to rescue. This morning I saw that they now say he was headed to town that he thought was 4 miles away.
So yeah, in light of that the decision to hike for help doesn’t look quite so bad.
Although you would think a guy that reviews tech gadgets for a living would have had a GPS in the car. That probably would have saved his life.
I have never been in this situation, but I have read enough books about analogous cases, that this just breaks my heart. As with most stories I’ve read, luck appears to play the biggest part, and James was smart but not lucky in this case.
I read an entire book about a blizzard in the 1800’s that could almost be considered a controlled experiment. There were multiple independent groups of people caught in the storm, and in several groups some attempted to shelter where they were (the standard advice) and some struck out through the storm. And across all the groups, there were all possible outcomes: in some cases the “stayers” perished and the walkers survived. In other cases, there was the opposite outcome. I believe the surviving walkers far outnumbered the surviving stayers in that storm, which was one of the worst on record, but, having grown up in blizzard country myself, I personally would probably *not* try to walk out.
My brother was lost in a swamp when he was little, and he did what my dad had taught him: sat down and waited. The entire town fanned out in a line and swept the area, finding him in a few hours. But *they* knew where to look, and my brother knew that, and he absolutely trusted in my dad. Even our dog, when accidentally left behind on vacation once, sat down and waited at a gas station for a couple hours. Again, she absolutely trusted my dad to save her.
Unfortunately, as we saw with Katrina and with the World Trade Center, we can’t always trust that rescuers will come in time, or that they will come at all, if we follow the standard advice.
I suspect James would have handled this entire episode differently had he been alone. Given the two small children, though, and the knowledge that a starving mother could nurse them for only so long, he did what most dads would have done, I think. So sad.