The first rule of being a daddy is that you’re the only line of defense you can count on between your children and spouse on one side, and danger, injury and death on the other. Whether it’s at home in the middle of the night, at the mall on a crowded Saturday, or in the car far from home, you are the first - and sometimes you’ll be the last - person responsible for the health and welfare of your children and wife. James Kim learned this lesson, but he learned it too late, and he paid the ultimate price for it.

Let me say, before going any further, that this is not meant to be a slam on James Kim. James Kim died a hero, a death few of us will be fortunate enough to die. I look at the photos of him and his children and I want to scream in sadness and frustration that they’ll never again know their dad. Kim didn’t leave his children behind because he didn’t love them; he left them behind - literally and figuratively - precisely because he loved them. His fault was not one of compassion or love or selflessness or sacrifice, but one of preparedness.

Kim was a 35-year old editor for CNET, the big technology media company (they publish magazines and own Downloads.Com, among other ventures). Here’s the Wikipedia account of his ordeal:

After spending the 2006 Thanksgiving holiday in Seattle, Washington, the Kims (James, Kati, and their two daughters, Penelope and Sabine) set out for their home in San Francisco, California. On Saturday, November 25, 2006, having left Portland, Oregon on their way to the Tu Tu Tun Lodge, a resort located near Gold Beach, Oregon, the Kims missed a turnoff from Interstate 5 to Oregon Route 42, a main route to the Oregon Coast. Instead of returning to the exit, they consulted a highway map and picked a secondary route that skirted the Wild Rogue Wilderness, a remote area of southwestern Oregon.

After encountering heavy snow at high elevation on Bear Camp Road, they turned, by mistake, onto one of hundreds of unpaved logging trails loosely supervised by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). A road gate which was supposed to prevent such mistakes was open in spite of BLM rules requiring that it be closed. Media outlets reported that vandals had cut a lock on the gate, but a subsequent investigation showed that BLM employees had left it open to avoid trapping local hunters and others who might have ventured past it.

Early on the morning of November 26, the family stopped due to fatigue and bad weather. As more snow fell around their immobilized station wagon, the Kims kept warm by running its engine. When the vehicle ran out of gas, they made a campfire of dried wood and magazines. Later, they burned their car’s tires to signal rescuers. Search efforts began shortly after November 30, when co-workers of Kim filed a missing persons report with the San Francisco Police Department. After investigators learned that the Kims used their credit card at a local restaurant, search and rescue teams, including local and state police, more than 80 civilian volunteers, the Oregon Army National Guard and several helicopters hired by Mr. Kim’s father, Spencer Kim, spent several days looking for the family along area highways and roads, to no avail.

On December 2, James Kim left his family to look for help, wearing tennis shoes, a jacket, and light clothing. He believed the nearest town (Galice) was located four miles away after studying a map with his wife. He promised his wife to turn back the same day if he failed to find anyone, but he did not return.

This article in Salon makes some important observations:

The Kims had violated a number of rules that would have been familiar to locals or to experienced backwoodsmen, but perhaps not to them. They had left too late at night, they had left the main road, and they hadn’t turned around or tried to back up once it began to snow and their gas tank edged toward empty. More than once they had forged ahead when they should’ve backtracked to the known world and safety.

That’s not all they did wrong, though. None of their clothing was adequate to being stranded in the snowy mountains of Oregon, and they had woefully inadequate emergency food. The Kims made too many assumptions, and counted on too many things that ultimately let them down. There are, for example, numerous posts around the web that call into question the role Google Maps may have played in Kim’s death. You can read some of them here.

Be sure and read this detailed analysis of the terrain and the path James Kim took as he searched for help. Observe the futile, fish-hook-shaped path that took him far away from his car, close to a lodge that might have saved his life, and finally back toward his car. To look at the all the images of the terrain and follow the twisted, confused path James Kim walked is to share some of his final defeat, the realization that he was hopelessly, fatally lost.

But as the Salon article points out, being lost and stranded in the Oregon mountains need not be a death sentence:

Earlier in 2006, the Stiver family of Ashland, Ore., encountered a similar situation. The family of six were headed to the Oregon coast in their motor home in March when they got stuck in the snow on a logging road not far from where the Kims wound up. The Stivers were missing for two weeks before being rescued.

But all six of them were rescued. Much of their good fortune was due to following a cardinal rule of the wilderness, even if they did so inadvertently. They came prepared. The Stivers family was in a 36-foot-long house-on-wheels that was stocked with food and supplies left over from the Y2K scare. The Kims, on the other hand, were reportedly traveling through the Siskiyou with the bare essentials, something experts warn against even in good winter weather. And tire chains are recommended equipment even for those drivers in the Oregon-California border area who stick to I-5.

“Transportation of any kind during the winter, whether you are driving, skiing, snowmobiling, you need to be prepared, especially in the backcountry where help isn’t going to be immediately available,“ related Steve Rollins, a 10-year veteran of Portland (Oregon) Mountain Rescue. He was not involved in the search for the Kim family, but was part of the search and rescue effort for three missing climbers on Mt. Hood late last year. “It’s always a good idea to have a survival kit with non-perishable food, water, iodine tablets and extra clothes and blankets.“

When Kim died, it was over a year since I had been shaken out of my preparedness stupor by what I saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and yet I still wasn’t prepared for an ordeal like the Kims’.

Now, I don’t live in the chilly Pacific Northwest. I live in the Deep South, where the number of nights during the year that are cold enough that you’d ever be in danger of freezing inside your immobilized vehicle - even without blankets and extra clothing, and not running your heater - you can probably count on two hands. Virtually all of my driving with my family is done in southern climes, so while being prepared for cold weather is important, it’s statistically less of a threat down here than it is the mountains of Oregon.

However, within two days of learning about Kim’s death, I had assembled an emergency kit for our SUV, designed to keep me and my family from becoming the next Kim family.

Let me qualify the rest of this post by saying that this is not the perfect emergency kit. It is a decent kit, and it is decent for me. I am not a preparedness “expert.“ I have seen some dire scenarios in play, I read and talk to preparedness experts, and I observe and learn. I base my plans and ideas on sound advice and as much experimentation as I can manage. You should do the same, carefully taking into account your lifestyle, vehicles, terrain, and climate.

99-point-something percent of the time, we don’t have to worry about getting trapped in the snow here in the Deep South, but I’ve seen an Isuzu Rodeo completely swallowed by a wall of kudzu when the driver left it unattended, in neutral and without the emergency brake on. It was sitting a very slight incline in a parking lot adjacent to a large ravine. Although I didn’t see it happen, it was obvious what transpired: The vehicle slowly rolled backwards, picked up a little speed, jumped the low curb at the back of the parking lot, then rocketed through the wall of kudzu and down the ravine. The kudzu closed back up and completely hid both the Rodeo and the path it took before coming to rest at the bottom of the ravine. A big laugh was had by everyone at the office (except the ultra-uptight bookkeeper, who had to explain it to the boss).

Not so funny was a similar scenario endured by a girl who was dating a friend of mine several years ago. She was on a drizzly, semi-rural road in Mississippi, and rounded a curve too fast in her small sedan. The car flew off the road, flipped several times, and came to rest upside down in a field that was well below the level of the road. Her car was largely obscured from view by the thick, rambling growth so common in Mississippi. She remained trapped in her car for two days, upside down and pinned inside of it, until two people hunting in a neighboring field happened to see the car and went over to investigate. Had it not been hunting season, she could have easily died undiscovered.

No emergency kit is going to help someone who’s pinned inside their vehicle and can’t get to it, but when I started thinking about what I wanted in an emergency kit, I put myself in James Kim’s place: Lost and stuck in the wilderness with my wife and daughter. What would I want, at the bare minimum, to improve our chances?

I bought a heavy-duty plastic toolbox from Lowe’s with a very strong closure on top. It has a shallow removable tray that lifts out to reveal a deep compartment. In it I have the following:

12 bottles water (16 oz ea)
12 energy bars
15 large heavy-duty black garbage bags
1 roll toilet paper (cardboard tube removed; flattened)
1 roll of duct tape
1 roll heavy twine
1 wire saw
1 Swiss army knife
1 mini Leatherman-type tool
1 folding compass with signal mirror
2 of my homemade firestarter kits
2 chemical hand/foot warmer packets (the kind hunters and snow skiers use)
Maps of the state and the neighboring states

We also keep a machete in the SUV near the emergency kit. It’s rugged, it can be used by either my wife or me to gather firewood, and it’s flat and stores easily. There’s also one of these packs of bungee cords in the truck.

Since we spend a lot of time at the beach, we usually have one or two large beach towels with us. The towels can be used as blankets, as can the garbage bags. (The garbage bags can also be used to improvise a tent, along with the bungee cords and duct tape - more on this some other time).

I estimate that, in a bad scenario, the food and water could be stretched to last the three of us for as long as 4 or 5 days, maybe 6. It would be plenty of food and water to keep us going for one or two days.

Sarah Keech in Salon sums up the role of others - namely rescuers and government agencies - in James Kim’s death this way (my emphasis):

James Kim was a hero for his efforts to save his family, and his father’s proposal about credit card and cellphone information merits debate. But any criticisms, no matter their source, of the search and rescue professionals and volunteers of southwestern Oregon seem harsh. And it’s also true that while Spencer Kim’s recommendations might save someone like his son, the circumstances of each wilderness rescue case are very specific. His proposals might not save the next traveler. Technology, whether in the form of GPS, cellphones or even helicopters, can’t save everyone. In the end it comes down to whether people are prepared for the wilderness, whether they respect it or even believe that such a thing still exists.

So let us die heroes like James Kim if we can, but let us do all we can not to sentence ourselves to death because we weren’t prepared for the worst.