The Kim family ordeal
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Timeline: The Kim family ordeal
The trip that ended with Kati Kim and her two daughters rescued and James Kim dead began with a family vacation at Thanksgiving. Here is a timeline of how events unfolded, according to family and friends:
Saturday, Nov. 25
After visits in Seattle and Portland, the Kims were headed to Gold Beach, but they missed the turnoff to Highway 42 south of Roseburg and decided to take a shortcut north of Grants Pass, heading west.
They drove up Bear Camp Road, which becomes a single-lane road. Although fine during summer, the road often is impassable in winter because of snow. Rescuers have to go up every year to bring back travelers who get stuck in the snow.
At one point, they had to get out of their car and remove rocks from the road. It was snowing hard, and the Kims apparently could not continue on Bear Camp Road in their all-wheel drive Saab station wagon. They tried to back up, but turned down a Bureau of Land Management road. The agency closes it off with a locked gate in the winder, but somebody had vandalized the gate, leaving it open.
They drove the side road about 15 miles to get below the snow line. They stopped for the night at a fork in the road at about the 3,000-foot elevation.
Sunday, Nov. 26
When they woke up, it had snowed so much overnight that they were trapped.
They drank melted snow water. The parents ate berries, saving what little food they had for their two children. 4-year-old Penelope and 7-month-old Sabine had baby food and crackers. Kati Kim also nursed her two daughters.
The temperatures were in the mid-20s and they tried to save their gas by running the car periodically to keep warm.
Two text messages sent to the family’s cell phone early this day would help authorities and family narrow the search.
Wednesday, Nov. 29
On about Wednesday, they began burning their tires to keep warm and also hoping the smoke would alert searchers. But the tires apparently burned out before searchers could see it.
Friday, Dec. 1
A formal search is launched for the family, involving agencies across Southern Oregon.
Saturday, Dec. 3
After being trapped for six days, James Kim left his family at about 7:45 in the morning. He told them he would be back by 1 p.m. if he didn’t find anything.
James Kim apparently walked back up the side road about 3 miles before leaving the road and heading downhill toward a creek, Big Windy Creek. At some point he left a pair of gray pants behind and continued downhill. He got out of the snow near the creek and apparently headed east, toward the Rogue River.
Monday, Dec. 4
A helicopter hired by the Kim family found Kati waving an umbrella. She and the two girls were airlifted out by helicopter and were in good shape.
Tuesday, Dec. 5
Searchers had found two gray long-sleeve shirts, a red short-sleeved T-shirt, one wool sock, a girl’s blue skirt and pieces of an Oregon state map, according to Hastings.
Today, Dec. 6
James Kim’s body is found shortly after noon.
Sigh. There are a lot of opinions on this incident, many of which are at the SF Gate blog. Despite the insensitivity of some of the 280 or so comments, I was fascinated by the variety of people’s reactions. Some were sympathetic and found no fault with the couple, preferring to encourage readers simply to have hope that James Kim would be found alive. Others gave wilderness survival advice and pointed out all the Kims’ mistakes, which they saw as having a cascading effect ultimately leading to disaster. The commenters reacted to each other and some ended up in a comment war.
My obsession with this incident (and it is an obsession…I have spent hours reading about it online) is strange and unexpected. I think it’s because I am a big “regret” person who is always thinking of the shoulda’s and coulda’s. To this day I still feel really sad and depressed when I think about how my wedding video didn’t turn out and how easily it could have been prevented.
Same with this tragedy with James Kim. It didn’t have to happen. We all make mistakes and have close calls, but some choices can kill you, and that’s what happened here. The chain reaction went like this:
They got a late start on the 296 mile drive from Portland to Gold Beach, Oregon. They stopped by a tourist center and asked for scenic routes to Gold Beach. They ate dinner in Roseburg and left the restaurant at 8:30pm to drive the remaining 138 miles, in the dark. They missed the turnoff to the 42 West and decided to take a Forest Service road, whose turnoff was almost 40 miles south of the 42 West turnoff. (Why??? I mean, on the map it looks a little shorter and more direct to Gold Beach than Highway 42, but even then you can see how thin and curvy and full of switchbacks it is!)
They didn’t see the entrance sign warning the road is dangerous in the winter, or ignored it if they did. Then as it started to rain, then snow, they kept going even though they had to get out of the car and move rocks off the road. They backed into a side road that should have been gated but was not due to vandalism. They slept in the car overnight because they were too tired to keep going – because they got a late start, and should have stayed the night in Roseburg or any number of cities along Interstate 5.
All the way to the end, it seems that James Kim made bad choices – his last apparent choice was to leave the road and go down a decline to follow along a river, which perhaps he thought would lead to civilization. He made this choice somehow by consulting a map he carried with him.
Anyway. No matter how much I think about this and analyze it, I am continually baffled and saddened at all the bad luck this couple had. I’ve driven on dangerous mountain roads at night before and risked driving in snow without chains, and I was fine. After this, I wouldn’t do any of that without adequate preparation. I am grateful to be in my element (suburbia) most of the time.
I mean, just look at the Google Earth image of where their car was found. (Type in +42° 37’ 50.52”, -123° 47’ 23.64.) Scary, even after the snow has melted! And if you look at it in “Map” mode, without the satellite image, and zoom in a bit, you can see all the tiny vein-like logging roads winding everywhere. It is a maze.
It is a miracle the mother and children were found, thanks to a cell phone ping from the family cell phone to a nearby cell tower that gave their general area, and Kati Kim’s own resourcefulness in taping reflective tape to an umbrella and waving it around.
This makes me all the more cautious when using online maps to plan my trips. If you type in Grants Pass, OR to Gold Beach, OR, it shows the route the Kims took. It makes sense because it’s the most direct route, but the safe route is to take the 99 into California and 101 back up the coast to Oregon. Some mapping programs do it that way, some don’t. Google and Yahoo don’t.
OK, I need to stop obsessing so I can get some work done. Let me know your thoughts if you are so inclined. It’s just so sad.
This is a tricky post to write. Saying it in person would be better, but I’m not going to be around for a while. Maybe email would work, but…whatever.
“I think it’s because I am a big ‘regret’ person who is always thinking of the shoulda’s and coulda’s.”
I think you’ve hit on something with that statement, but that its actually just a symptom of something deeper. I think you obsess a little about some things you actually regret, but actually obsess a lot more about the possibility of having regrets, most of which never come to pass. You seem perennially worried about what the consequences might be if you don’t make the “right” decision in each and every situation: where you’ll live, if you’ll have enough money, if your employer will see your blog, if you said the right thing in an interview, if you’re on the right diet, etc.
I’m going to try to write the rest of this comment without getting into the enneagram <span class="caps">AGAIN</span>, but I think the issue boils down to “the need to be secure.” It seems natural that the Kim family tragedy would upset you, because Kim more or less had the security you’re chasing and it didn’t protect him. Maybe its presumptuous of me, but I can imagine you asking yourself how can you restructure your life so the same thing couldn’t happen to you. What precautions can you take? What risks can you eliminate?
Well, you can’t. Or if you did, there would be nothing left of you to protect. The natural conclusion, if you pursue it, is obsessive-compulsive disorder, spending every waking hour thinking out contengencies for everything that could possibly go wrong. And for every scenario you can account for, there are thousands more you haven’t even thought of. You never leave the house, because “something might happen.”
But what’s the worst that could happen? We all die. Okay, so what? If thats the worst we have to worry about, then I think there are better ways of spending our energy in the meantime, particularly since we can’t even prevent it in the first place, and if we were thinking straight, we’d be looking forward to it anyway. So for now, bad things happen, and we deal with them the best we can. And occasionally, God rewards us by showing that its for the best after all, even when you lose your lucrative job because of some blog post and your family thinks your stupid because of it.
Hopefully it is clear that this is not something I have all worked out. My anxieties tend to be over different things than yours, but they are still there, and they still often rule my life. So there is no judgement in what I’m saying to you. But here are a few things I’ve been thinking about a lot the past couple years that you might consider.
In the protestant church we like to pretend that all sins are equally bad. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory,” thus any sin is bad enough to separate us from God, and in comparison to any other possible consequence, that is far worse than anything we might face, ergo “sin is sin”. I think its a strange and generally counter-productive theology, and not particularly biblically sound.
Meanwhile, most of the consequences for the sins we commit today are meted out by society and not by God directly, and society has its own ideas about which sins are “bad” and which are “really bad.” Murder and rape and other acts of violence can get you executed, so those are the worst. Theft and various other forms of dishonesty are a step down from there. Depending on what social context you’re living in, sexual immorality can be seen as pretty bad, or not really a big deal. And things like greed and pride hardly get mention. And finally, Fear is considered so basic and universal that we don’t even consider it a sin at all. We like people who aren’t afraid, but we don’t place any blame on those who are. And there are lots of very well reasoned justifications for why this is so, and even for why God would condone this ‘scale’ of sinfulness.
But if we look at sin in the Old Testament, especially when punishment comes from God directly (rather than say, levitical law), we see a very different set of priorities. It seems to me like there are two things God really hates: idolatry and fear. And even between those two, idolators get off pretty easy. God turns away, things suck for a while, they repent, everything is restored. Other sins? David rapes Bathsheba and kills her husband? God says he is “a man after My own heart.” But when Saul gets worried that the priest wont show up in time to perform the sacrifice before battle so he does it himself? It costs him the kingdom. God removes his favor from Saul and no amount of repenting brings it back. And when the spies Israel sent into the land come back talking about giants, the Israelites balk. God’s response, “You don’t believe me? Fine. You can wander in the desert until you all <span class="caps">DIE</span>.” An I could go on. Lot’s wife looks back and turns to stone.
So my conclusion: God hates fear, and he hates it like nothing else. It is the antithet of faith; an explicit denial of God’s goodness and power.
And like all the sin that actually matters, its usually a condition, not an action, and we are helpless to do anything about it except, mysteriously, through God’s grace. So here is my challenge to you. Dig around in the Bible for instance of people who were afraid, but dealt with their fear in a way pleasing to God. Then spend some time meditating on those passages.
I had a funny dream last night. I was in some field, it must have been a public park or something because there were lots of people around.
There was a Thing that made everyone wear yellow uniforms. We all had to get into line and go up some staircase to the top of a platform (kind of like the superslide ascent at the Maryland State Fair). At the platform we were supposed to jump into the air. I thought, what the heck, there’s nothing on the ground; we’re going to hurt ourselves mindlessly doing what The Thing wanted. But there was no choice.
I was at the platform. The first thing I did was make a false jump. For some reason I felt stupid for the start and then this feeling of resolution washed over me. The Thing wanted us to jump so I might as embrace the experience; I was holding everyone else up. I apologized and then I jumped.
The sensation of falling onto my back in my dream was interesting. The landing turned out to be soft, and I was alive in spite of the height of the start and in spite of the hard dirt/grass ground. It wasn’t so bad.
What was The Thing? What did The Thing represent? I remember feeling like It internally spewed malice but maybe that was something that I projected because I was scared for part of the dream. The malice left when I landed.
Embracing the experience are the words that stick out to me the most.
Anyway, for some reason your post combined with the comment reminded me of the dream.
Batman – Thanks for the exhortation. You’re right, I need to deal with my fears. That’s been a theme in my life. I don’t know if this is relevant but, my parents, who are non-Christians, seem controlled by their fears. My dad is like what you described – so consumed with what could go wrong he doesn’t like to leave the house or go anywhere he hasn’t been before. My mom fixates on what other people will think and do because of her actions. It’s not a way to exist. Thank you for pointing that out biblically.
M – Falling dreams are scary. I usually wake up before I hit the bottom. I was told when I was a kid that if you dream about falling, say off a building, and you hit the ground before you awake, you die in real life. I guess you’ve proven that wrong. =P
I talked to my dad for a long time about this last night (my dad is a wilderness expert and basically grew up in the forest). Over and over again in the conversation, I had to keep reminding him “but they were Californians…” You see, in Oregon (where i grew up) the Coast Range covers the whole area between the 5 Freeway and the ocean, the Cascade range covers a huge area to the east of the valley, and almost everything east of the Cascades is barren desert, forest, or mountain. For Oregonians (at least those not sheltered in Portland) it’s hard to understand that there are people who don’t know that windy mountain roads become impassable in the winter, that all high roads become impassable in storms, that side roads usually don’t lead anywhere (especially in December), and that waterways probably won’t bring you near civilization for days. But that’s the difference between living in big California cities and being in rural Oregon. If you’re not used to it, you just don’t realize how big and treacherous the wild is.
Jon – Hey, welcome! Thanks for the comment. I’m not surprised that your dad was astounded by the choices they made. There were a lot of comments from Oregonians on SFGate.com, and they were all like, we take this and that precautions, and we live here! I’ve lived my whole life in the suburbs, and would not have realized how dangerous it was in the same conditions. I’ve driven to Lake Tahoe while it was sleeting and that was a little scary but I didn’t think much of it. Pretty naive.
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