Always stay with your vehicle

“Death is natural and necessary, but not just. It is a random force of nature; survival is equally accidental. Each loss is an occasion to remember that survival is a gift.” – Harriet McBryde Johnson

I am haunted by the thought of James Kim’s last hours.

Haunted. Haunted.

I can’t think of it in very graphic terms for too long because it makes me panic, smother, shaky, short of breath, cold, sick.

James, 35 years old, died this week, his body found 11 days after he, his wife, and two young children were stranded in a snowstorm in the woods of Oregon while on a Thanksgiving vacation trip. They missed their exit and became lost on logging roads during a snowstorm. They simply missed their exit.

They burned the tires of their car to keep warm, his wife breastfed their two children to keep them alive, and god only knows what else they did in the week they survived without food or heat before James set out on foot, desperate to get help for his family. He left them last Saturday morning, his family was found alive on Monday, and his body was found yesterday. He was only a mile from the car, even though it is thought that he had walked some ten miles in treacherous terrain, a desperate and panicked attempt to save his family.

He ended up so close to them, looping back to them, but separated by canyon walls from the car. Some have reported that he died just hours before being found—he was so close to making it. He was found fully clothed, on his back, in a creek. It is utterly heartbreaking to think of the fear and hunger and bone-wrenching cold and, I’m sure, the disbelief, that kind of disbelief that leads you to say, over and over in your head, “this cannot be happening to us, this cannot be happening to us.” It pains me to consider his desperation at leaving his family, at his inability to get back to them. We would all be clawing at the earth to crawl back there.

Would I be prepared to survive as his family did for that long? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I think I might be book smart and pound foolish when it comes to Real Life. In my happy, warm world, the elements don’t affect me, not much. I’m immune…until I’m not, say, in a typhoon off the Aleutian Islands where it looks like death is imminent, or in a plane plunging to the ground with no hydraulic system, or in a plane on 9/11. I’m not sure I could survive, not if left to my own devices. Do I know what to do if my car is swept away in heavy rains? Do I understand where to go in an electrical storm?

I fairly well suck at those team-building games where you’re in a hypothetical situation and have to determine what would be the most important items to keep – the flashlight or the hubcap, the piece of plastic or the bourbon? I don’t play well in role plays, so I defer to the people in the group who like to grab the Mr Sketch marker and pound their chests in defense of keeping the shard of glass and the tweezers.

Perhaps it is important to know these things.

I was on one of the first flights out of Washington, D.C., following the attacks on September 11, 2001. A nervous flyer in the best of circumstances, it was a  business trip accomplished only with the help of Xanax.

In my fear, I carried with me a phalanx of what I deemed necessary survival tools: a smoke hood, flat and sturdy shoes, cotton clothes because natural fibers don’t burn as quickly, a flashlight with extra batteries, a headlamp with extra batteries (evidently I was intent on seeing in the dark), a first aid kit, a cell phone and extra battery, a camera and extra battery (to get photographs of the terrorists, no less), a small package with a pen and index cards (for goodbye notes, of course) and family photographs, a compass, a whistle to signal for help, a Grundig Yacht Boy world receiver radio, a dust mask, extra glasses, duct tape…well there was more, but it’s just way too embarrassing to list the whole paranoid bundle. I even carried a heavier than usual hardback book what to hit the terrorist in the head with. I’m, unfortunately, not making this up.

In times of panic, or fear, we create whole worlds of sense in our minds. Every item made perfect sense to me; I carried fifty pounds of armor onto those planes, none of which would have saved me, but all those items allayed my fear or put it into a more manageable space in my head. We spend our lives planning against death; I carried the planning with me in a carry-on bag that could double as an anchor, some feeble attempt to stave off the fear.

I also made sure that my seat was an aisle seat near the front of the plane. Not so I could escape easily, but so that – in my flat, sturdy shoes – I could storm the terrorists when they made their move. I was going to win, damn it.

We lived in D.C. at the time, so 9/11 hit close to home. Our basement turned into Emergency Central. Within hours, we had enough clean drinking water stored down there to keep us hydrated until 2015. We had batteries and flashlights enough to light up the National Cathedral just down the block. A NOAA Weather Radio with tone alert, food and can opener, Rice Krispie bars (priorities, my friend, priorities), a sleeping bag for each of us, household chlorine bleach and a medicine dropper, a fire extinguisher, and most important, paper and pens. The list goes on. I packed plastic evacuation boxes for each of us in case we needed to leave D.C. in a hurry, I created an evacuation plan, I went to the Red Cross preparedness website and downloaded checklists and ordered kits and organized first aid information. I was a poster child for über preparedness. I was your first line of defense if you happened to live at 34^th and Porter in D.C., your go-to girl, your lifesaver. Tourniquets, CPR, hand-cranked short-wave radios, I was there for you. John made me stop just before I ordered the portable defibrillator.

None of us plans to get stranded in a snowstorm or lost at sea, but we do sometimes, both literally and figuratively. Sometimes all it takes is a missed exit to launch us into a world we cannot know and aren’t prepared for. I know full well that we can’t plan against surprise and that sometimes all the technology in the world can’t save us, but I’m not one to go down without a fight and one boatload of research behind me about what will increase my odds.

In this age of technology, it’s so easy to discount nature. We seem to be so on top of it, most times. Forecasting it and shielding ourselves from it with great efficiency. But I know from my experience in a typhoon on a big, big ocean and from the Asian Tsunami and earthquakes and Hurricane Katrina  that Nature is way bigger than we are. We do what we can.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

I know in the days to come, we will be overrun with helpful lists of things to save us in the kind of emergency situation in which this family found themselves, out for a Thanksgiving trip and then facing death. And I know that we will be vigilant for a time, then not. But one writer has put together one of the best such lists I’ve seen and I hope you’ll read his whole essay and take heed. Numbers 3-6 on his list are the same: Always stay with your vehicle.

I know we can ultimately do very little in the face of the universe, nature, fate, life, and I’m fairly certain that I won’t be saved by carrying a heavy hardback copy of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions with its 1000+ pages and some dust masks and a flashlight if terrorists are intent on killing me or if I’m attacked by a wild bear, but I’ve grown to love you, dear readers, so just to ease my mind so I won’t have to resort to Xanax, won’t you create an emergency kit this week, one for your car, one for home, one for work, take an emergency preparedness class from your local Red Cross, and always—always—always—stay with your vehicle.

I hope the Kim family can find some peace, somehow, sometime. And I hope you never, ever, ever need your kit.

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