James Kim was lying on his back in two feet of water. Snowmelt, draining down Big Windy Creek, tugged and billowed the fabric of his jacket, worked its way through the denim weave of jeans, through tennis shoe eyelets, just as it wound its way around boulders, through fallen branches and forest debris; the frigid water—like the wind, the snow, the winter cold—indifferent to his frail clothing, flowed on, past James, to join the wild tumble of the Rogue River, half a mile away. Dense fog had just lifted from the steep-sided canyon near Oregon’s Wild Rogue Wilderness, revealing to the searching helicopter crew James’s figure. Eleven days after he and his wife compounded their ill-conceived drive up Bear Camp Road with a turn onto a dormant logging road, four days after he left his family behind in their impotent auto, setting out on foot to seek help, the San Francisco technical editor was recovered.

• • •

Too late for rescue: James’s body had, perhaps days before, succumbed to hypothermia, exposure, exhaustion. Tragic, this lifeless form in the creek, and tragedy demands of its witnesses reason. Silently, the corpse raises the question: how, in this day and age, could this happen? How could a man driving his family station wagon on Interstate 5 become lost—and ultimately die—in the wilderness?

In hopes of comprehension, follow the water uphill, seek the source. Retrace James’s sixteen-mile trek, as authorities did. Skim over the winter-dark stretch of still water, deep as a man’s neck for twenty-some feet, down which James must have drifted—conscious or not, alive or not—to end up where he was found. Wind slowly up the steep, boulder-strewn ravine a half-dozen miles, past the bright garments—a red shirt, a girl’s blue skirt—abandoned along the way (signposts alternately interpreted as intentionally marking his path or of hypothermia’s tightening grip). Pass the tattered fragments of road map to the place James’s footprints veered off the logging road. Track each step, plainly pressed into snow, follow them easily all the way along the dirt road; the same road down which James turned his family’s silver Saab station wagon ten nights earlier, in the midnight confusion of a winter storm. From the stranded auto and charred-tire remnants of signal fires, the family’s route becomes clear: twenty miles down this desolate, treacherous single lane of dirt (known by the benignly bureaucratic label of service road 34-8-36). Over that narrow track, the family car wound precariously around the jagged geography that cradles a wild river, on a road alternately pressed in by forest here, there exposed to slopes that drop precipitously toward the Rogue in a craze of rivulets and creeks endlessly feeding the river’s watery hunger. To reach 34-8-36—the literal fork in the road that proved fatal for James—the Kims had already driven more than twenty miles up Bear Camp Road; past snow plows, looming up out of the night in the sweep of headlights like stone sentinels stationed on the shoulder before Bear Camp began to climb; past no less than three oversized yellow signs warning of hazardous road conditions, snowdrift blockages, and no road maintenance. Past a gas station inquiry about road conditions that left James aggravated by the clerk’s failure to comprehend their intended route. Past sufficient indicators of concern to give a prudent man pause.

Yet the Kims were not stupid people. James, a senior technical editor for CNet (a prominent, heavily used consumer electronics website), researched, tested, and critiqued cutting-edge gadgets with great passion; under favorite color in his CNet profile, he listed “silicon.” His wife Kati, too, had worked at CNet and now mothered their two daughters while running the couple’s pair of hip retail boutiques in San Francisco’s Noe Valley district. The Kims were successful, intelligent, savvy.
On a lark, they opted for a leisurely return home from Thanksgiving festivities in Seattle: the serpentine windings of coastal Highways 101 and 1, with a couple nights in off-season luxury lodgings, more enticing than the ramrod expediency of Interstate 5. From a stopover in Portland, the family set out in the late afternoon. On the dark, rain-soaked freeway, after a dinner at Denny’s in Roseburg, they missed the exit to Coquille and the coast. But the map offered a remedy: another road, a relatively straight shot—from Grants Pass to their lodgings in Gold Beach. Drawn as a dark line, Bear Camp Road appeared an obvious solution. After all, they lived in a modern world, and this was America, land of paved roads and plenty. What could possibly go wrong?

Besides, if anything did, they had cell phones.

• • •

By the end of 2006, about the time James and Kati were turning onto Bear Camp Road, roughly half the people in the United States subscribed to cellular service; some had more than one phone (James and Kati had three). In little more than a decade, cell phones changed the human experience. At the mall, on the freeway or beach; in line at amusement parks, concerts, the post office; while hiking or camping in the mountains—in certain areas even at sea—a cell phone brings a reassuring connection to family, friends, in essence, to civilization. We begin to believe that wherever we may wander in the wide world, we need no longer feel alone. We invest great faith in these devices: they are more than tools to us. As if in homage to their quasi-magical nature, we adorn our phones with faceplates, ornate carriers, signature ring tones, making modern-day talismans that help us feel safely attached to society by an invisible tether—a somewhat shamanistic belief substantiated by statistics: about one-third of new cell phone buyers cite emergencies as their chief reason for purchase. That reason represents an implicit belief that whatever crisis might arise, help is only a phone call away—a magical button summoning the police, an ambulance, a tow truck, the reassuring voice of a loved one.

• • •

Just as mechanized technology—beginning with the wheel and spinning even now out into space—expands the distances and environments into which humans travel, so microchip technology alters the mindset of travel. In the past, travel definitively removed us from the familiar here and took us to a there: wherever you go, there you are. Here was home, family, and community, the familiar center of daily life, sharply contrasted by a there composed of all things other, unknown, and alien. With a cell phone in hand, it seems that wherever we roam, we can spontaneously, reassuringly connect to our sense of here. As humans, we are adaptable creatures, so both the immediacy and frequency of this experience has begun to blur our conception of place; through our phones, we remain psychologically linked to place and people even when physically absent so that we no longer feel truly dislocated when we go there. Emboldened by this easy, instantaneous connection to civilization, quite literally at our fingertips, we step through our front doors virtually fearless. With a cell phone in hand, everywhere is here.

• • •

Once upon a time, fairy tales, fables, and stories typically contrasted the safe here of human contact with the ultimate there of Wilderness, that massive dark yin threatening civilization’s clean, well-lit yang. In the landscape of myth, Wilderness was the realm of fear and hazard, a treacherous terrain in which human beings were the alien-other—alone, outcast, in peril. Wilderness served as the metaphorical stage upon which the epic struggle of man versus nature could play out; the arena where man might rage against forces far greater and yet, in his triumph, celebrate the superiority of human ingenuity. But that was before postindustrialist notions recast the villainous Wilderness as the romantic hero Nature, metamorphosing America’s regard for its wild lands. In contemporary mythology, Man has become villain to Nature’s imperiled victim; Wilderness, a tenuous space clinging to the world’s fringes—remote, inaccessible, far from the reach of the average American. In the twenty-first century, Wilderness cannot conceivably be found on any road map, a scant twenty miles from an interstate exit. Certainly not some place with a cell phone signal.

• • •

Yet somewhere in the woods, as the Kims crept along the desolate service road, searching vainly for salvation and slowly running out of gas, one of their cell phones received text messages, connecting to the network momentarily—seemingly magically—via a cell tower fifteen miles away. A full week after the family became stranded, days after their fuel was exhausted and James set fire to the car tires as a signal, and just a few hours after he set out on foot, a resourceful if unauthorized cell phone engineer traced those pings (that briefest connection of phone to network), identified the receiving tower, and reported the discovery to authorities. The mojo of the cell phone talismans had worked; technology, it seemed at that moment, would save the day.

• • •

From the several-hundred-mile expanse between Portland and Gold Beach, the search narrowed, concentrating efforts in the area between the Kalmiopsis and Wild Rogue wildernesses. All the way to Bear Camp’s snow-packed summit, volunteers hunted for traces of the missing family. James’s father hired three private helicopters, the state launched a Black Hawk, and hundreds of emergency workers and volunteers aided in the operation, which proved energetic but fruitless. The forest itself thwarted search efforts: trees shrouded aerial views of service roads, and the rugged terrain, crenulated with steep-sided ravines, kept the helicopters at bay.

In the end, a local resident, a man familiar with the treachery of service road 34-8-36 and the tourist-luring promise of its smooth asphalt apron, speculated as to the Kims’ whereabouts. In his private helicopter, he regularly commuted home to Agness, a speck on the map further along Bear Camp than the Kims made it. With such intimate aerial knowledge of the area, he scoured the mountain contours, going in low enough to spot a set of tire tracks in the snow, which eventually led to Kati Kim dancing around on a clear patch of road and frantically waving an umbrella.

By this time, the family’s plight had attracted national attention. People across the country tracked the unfolding drama, holding out hope of a happily-ever-after ending. Yet for two full days prior to the rescue of Kati and her daughters, as overnight temperatures dipped near twenty, James was on foot, trekking the woods without food or shelter. Authorities continued to search, their hopes tempered by practical knowledge. For two days more, crews ranged the Big Windy Creek drainage. Their way hindered by boulders and downed trees, search teams slogged through moss, mud, snow, dense brush, and poison oak—a half-hour on the ground soaking them through. Three days after Kati last saw James, the strange miscellany appeared in the searchers’ path—pants, the red shirt, a wool sock, sweatshirts, the child’s blue skirt. Whether intended to mark his path or abandoned in hypothermic delirium, the items appeared overnight, so authorities believed James was “still on the move.”

And on that day, the day before his remains were recovered miles downstream, he may well have been. Still on the move.

With James’s body found, the search ended, but attention did not wane. Articles, editorials, blogs, and discussion posts fixated on the same stunned set of questions: How could this happen? Why was rescue so slow? What could have prevented it? In other words, everyone was asking, what will protect me? Accusations flew. In the face of the family’s harrowing ordeal, however, few were willing to fault the Kims; accounts tended to paint James as heroic, even superhuman. Instead, fingers pointed at everyone from search officials and government agencies, to credit card and cell phone companies, to news media and Internet map sites. Above the din, a lamenting chorus sang of technological salvation: GPS-linked cell phones, auto-tracking devices, greater cell coverage. Technology would have saved James Kim. Not surprising, this technological faith, in an age in which we check the weather by opening a browser window, relegate orienteering to our GPS units, get restaurant recommendations from the Internet on our cell phones. We mediate the world via technology. But does this chronic reliance atrophy our ability to interpret the signs and symbols of the physical world?

Consider the Kims.

In alien terrain, on a dark mountain road, the Kims persisted, driving further up a precipitous mountain path into a blizzard, despite obvious cautionary signage, the late hour, and deteriorating road conditions, against reason, distancing themselves from civilization. What defenders speculated (that the narrow road lacked room to turn around) Kati revealed, more than a month after the ordeal, as true. James wanted to turn around, but she thought the road too narrow, the edge dangerously steep.

She also divulged that they passed 34-8-36, sticking with Bear Camp, the correct coastal road. As they gained elevation, the snow deepened. So James opened his door, stuck his head out, and backed down the road. At the fork, 911 calls from all three phones failed. Then, rather than turn around on the wide paved Y, the Kims drove twenty-one miles further away from the known world, disregarding additional opportunities to turn back. From this multitude of incautious choices, a defense might be fashioned; the excuses of darkness, cold, disorientation tacked together. All might be reasoned away. All except this: Kati Kim told authorities that, on their way up Bear Camp Road, long before the forking road, the snowfall, or the midnight retreat (in reverse) down a snowy slope too steep and narrow to turn around on, the couple stopped the car, got out, and removed boulders that blocked their path.

• • •

What urged these intelligent people on? What fueled their obstinate twenty-mile progress down a logging road most find fearsome even in daylight? They pressed on in faith. Surely every road led to the comforting safety of a civilized here. Someone—a forest ranger, a local, a snowplow driver—would arrive in the next moment and rescue them. They never turned back because they had all-wheel drive and cell phones, because they did not read the world around them and simply did not comprehend their very presence in the wild. They did not understand that they were on their own. One might imagine that the elemental combination of darkness, cold, snow, and disorientation would have tripped a switch in the back of the brain, some hard-wired survival instinct, and filled them with foreboding. But faith in technology, like faith of any sort, can blind: the Kims were lost four days before they noticed the warning on their Oregon road map—“Not All Roads Advisable.”

• • •

What might have prevented James Kim’s death and his family’s life-shattering ordeal? Perhaps approaching the unknown with a bit of caution; evaluating the physical world for signs of danger; and realizing that help is not always a phone call away, that sometimes, despite the reassuring trappings of civilization we drag along on our journeys, each of us is all alone in the world.
Soon after the resolution of the Kim search, an injured climber, curled into a snow cave on Mount Hood, managed a brief cell phone call to his family. His two companions had set out for help. Despite injuries, he was in good spirits, and their families were hopeful: the climbers were smart, tough, experienced, confident. So confident, in fact, that they attempted a north face ascent of Mount Hood in winter, when winds on the 11,000-foot peak reach 100 miles-per-hour. Confident enough to travel lightly provisioned, intending a one-day turnaround. December storms—the adrenaline-edged challenge of a winter ascent—crippled rescue efforts. Eventually, like James Kim’s eleven days earlier, the injured climber’s body was recovered in its cave. But months after that last call, the other two climbers remained lost. The final traces of their attempted retreat dangle from a ruinously steep slope beside a 2,500-foot drop known as “the gullies”—an area infamous for claiming thirteen lives in four decades. Searchers discovered, beneath a shroud of freshly fallen snow, aluminum anchors driven into the ice and rope fashioned into slings that hung ominously empty. The two men may never be found, as if the snow and wind, the sheer immensity of the mountains, swallowed them whole. And yet, even though they might never be recovered, never be seen by humans again, their frozen bodies are definitely somewhere. Out there. Somewhere. Far beyond the reach of any of us here.

Lisa Polito has published essays in The Big Ugly Review and Invisible Insurrection and is currently seeking publication of a nonfiction narrative that reveals both the fantasies and realities of nouveau Harley-Davidson culture. She holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from Goucher College and lives in Kodiak, Alaska. This essay was a finalist in the 2008 Oregon Quarterly Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest.