Letters to the Editor
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jenvan
Thanks for the link and the informative post.
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mountain driving
I live in the Rockies, and I second what TomPayne and the Alaska guy said. You have to know what you're doing in these conditions. We get prima donna skiers who fly into Denver, rent a car and think they know how to drive on mountain roads. Even I-70 gets pretty squirelly at times in the winter (especially that long, curvy downhill near Idaho Springs), but then they go off on two-lane state roads and get all cattywumpus on the curvy passes.
I'm not dissing the dead. Mr. Kim is a hero who unfortunately died because his carelessness caught up with him. (There but for the grace of God ...) Let's just use his example as a tragic lesson learned.
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Done with the Entitled
Please spare me any defense of the Kims' actions. This was not just someone getting lost, this was someone forging ahead despite everything telling them not to - they removed debris from the road so they could keep going for God's sake. And as for familiarity with the area, I understand that she went to the University of Oregon, so she had to know that winter in Oregon is a dangerous time to enter the mountains. There were two adults in that car and they both made a series of decisions that only the idiotic or egomaniacal would make. As an Oregonian who grew up in the deep woods of Far Northern California (Humboldt and Trinity Counties) not the Bay Area, I have had it with people not respecting our wilderness and feeling entitled to do what they want and expecting someone else to haul their butts out of the flames. We have been hit with two of these episodes in short order with the lost climbers on Hood. These guys (the climbers) had no plan other than speed climbing and forced the issue most likely because they had a short time to be here before getting back to their jobs. These two incidents cost Oregon tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, meanwhile we can't fund our schools and state police and have plenty of homeless freezing in the same weather who get no attention. James Kim's father's whining does not suprise me when our society rewards Aron Ralston's behavior with beer commercials and an inspirational speaking career. (He's the idiot who had to cut off his own arm after going bouldering by himself without telling anyone where he was going.) My only question is whether James Kim's wealthy father has made any attempt to reimburse the extremely poor counties in question for saving his grandchildren. Lastly if he has such a problem with Oregon why complain to the Washington Post? Why not come to the source rather than try to get more attention?
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Think about it.
I can't be the only one who read this essay and thought, "Hell, I"ve done stupider things and survived."
Last summer my husband and I -- two middle aged adults with lots of boating experience -- took our canoe into a lake and tipped it. Stupidly, we violated almost every rule of canoeing. We didn't wear life vests. We wore sweats, not light-weight, waterproof gear. We turned our canoe sideways in a current. We fished off of a canoe (they are NOT designed to cast off of). We did not stick close to the shore in an unfamiliar waterway.
We were fortunate in that we had a few bad minutes, but we survived. Some good samaritans fished us out and were kind enough not to give us a tongue lashing.
I feel for James Kim and his family. Yeah, they could have made better decisions, but can't we all?
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"City slickers" have survival skills too
I don't have much to add to the previous posts vis-a-vis the debate on accountability for this tragedy (if there is indeed any to be had beyond the notion of bad fortune that Americans find it so very hard to accept). All sides make valid points.
However, I would like to respond to the thread of anti-city-slickerism that runs throughout many of the posts by rural folk. If you think urban dwellers have cornered the market on unpreparedness or smug inattention to their surroundings when outside their usual habitat, you're crazy. I live in San Francisco -- around the corner from one of the Kims' shops -- and I can't tell you how many times each week I witness tourists and suburbanites floundering around this city either on foot or in cars (often, uh, real *big* ones ;- ) ) with utter disregard for their own and others' safety. Have they bothered to research the best driving route somewhere (SF has many one-way streets, weird twists and turns, steep hills and is a very challenging driving town)? Or learn the parking and street-cleaning rules? Or figure out how to park on a hill or use the brake for navigating steep terrain? Or discover what neighborhoods are high-crime by night or day? 'Fraid not. On any given day, visitors here stumble into the paths of buses, tow their kids into areas teeming with the drug-addled, plow their SUVs into native bicyclists and pedestrians, clog our public services and transportation systems with bodies and the like. No biggie, and nothing one doesn't expect in a center of tourism -- just a friendly reminder that survival skills are relative.
The takeaway? I guess that people just have to help people. Stop pointing fingers. We've all experienced the stomach-churning aftermath of a close call. ALL of us.
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No more gates
I have lived in the Northern Oregon coast range my entire 57 years. For many of those years the logging roads were open to exploration. Only in recent decades have these roads been gated. Far too many of them are now, blocking access to thousands of previously open semi wilderness experiences. Please do not advocate gating and locking away any more of these areas in order to appease those who seem to believe that every single human experience should be safe and foolproof. That's a goal than no amount of misguided control is going to assure anyway.
The more we limit access to wild experience to people; the more we strive to control our entire experience and make it safe, the more we're insulating and removing people from the experience of real nature. If enough people don't experience nature and wild beauty then it becomes easier to write off these areas as "unused" and abandon them to commercial interests. Only by the force of a large pool of people who have experienced and value wild areas and experiences can we save some small semblence of this world from those who constantly seek to exploit it for short term gain.
I'm sorry that the Kim's horrible string of incredibly bad decisions led to James' death. I would be far sorrier and it would be infinitely more tragic if his death led to fewer people having the chance to experience the wild areas of our country on their own terms and with their own skills.