Kai chairs the music department at Idyllwild Arts Academy, oversees everything from viola to music technology, and spends her evenings watching the sun drop behind the mountain from Inspiration Point. She is an introvert who has learned to perform extroversion, a classical musician whose credits include Michael Jackson's posthumous album and an Avatar film score, and a woman who came to this mountain not entirely knowing why, and stayed because she finally understood.

She came to music late. Most classical musicians begin at four or five. Kai started the viola at eleven. "It never felt like a barrier," she says. "Just more ground to cover. It made me work harder, say yes to everything."

The viola found her the way most important things do: accidentally. She was a child tagging along to her mother's school in Las Vegas, wandering the hallways while her mother taught English, when she stumbled into a music class already in session. The teacher stopped everything and handed her each instrument in turn. When she picked up the viola, something clicked. The viola is the alto of the string family, earthy and warm, a voice that doesn't announce itself loudly but carries in a room long after the others have faded. "It's the power and beauty you don't see coming," she says.

Her mother said string classes didn't begin until sixth grade, so she had two years to wait — what she calls baited breath. The moment she got into that class, she consumed the beginner books in weeks, found a private teacher, and by the end of her first year was playing a solo at the orchestra concert.

She won the state solo competition in high school on a finger she had recently fractured playing volleyball. She was already, by then, playing real gigs around Las Vegas, filling in for orchestras at the casino shows, sight-reading charts the day of the performance with no rehearsal, alongside musicians twenty years her senior.

Behind all of it was Carol Jackson, her junior high orchestra teacher and one of the great loves of her life in music. Carol was the founding director of the arts school Kai attended in Las Vegas, the woman who first showed her what it looked like to pour everything you had into students and into the art. She has since passed away. Kai speaks of her with the particular tenderness reserved for people who saw you before you saw yourself.

The USC Thread

Her full name is Kaila — the name itself a souvenir from a trip to Hawaii, where both her parents, themselves USC alumni, traveled with the marching band for a USC bowl game and eventually met. The university was always going to be part of her story too. She studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory for six years, a double major in viola and violin performance with a minor in Judaic studies, then came back to California for a master's in viola performance at USC.

After USC she won orchestra positions and solo competitions, performed as a section and principal player with symphonies across Southern California, and recorded sessions in Los Angeles; credits that included Mariah Carey's album, one of Michael Jackson's posthumous records, and a seat in the orchestra pit for Avatar. Then she married, and followed her husband's military postings through Monterey, San Antonio, and Maryland, subbing with orchestras in each city, always staying inside music one way or another. Along the way she picked up yoga teacher training, business coaching, and somewhere in the Maryland years, a healing practice that brought strings and sound back into the body in a different way. She had, she says with the composure of someone who has fully accepted it, a lot of life.

And through all of it, California was calling her back.

What Won Her Over

She first came to Idyllwild Arts as a ringer — a professional musician brought in to play alongside the students — around 2006, she thinks. She loved it, felt drawn to it, filed it away. Life kept happening. Then a few years ago, her close friend Jeanette — a fellow USC alumna, "musical soulmate", someone she had shared a Carnegie Hall stage with — told her the music chair position had just opened. Kai hesitated. Her career had been focused on performance, not education. She was also, she admits, afraid of mountains. Specifically afraid of driving up them and down them in snowstorms, of the isolation, of what it would mean to leave a city behind. Fortunately she is, at her core, someone who needs quiet the way other people need company. Idyllwild, it turned out, understood that.

When she describes what won her over, she doesn't reach for a practical reason. She talks about the spirit of the place. About people like Marshall Hawkins, whom she describes as clearly connected to a frequency beyond the ordinary, and what it feels like to be in his presence. About the sense that she had finally found what California had been calling her toward all along.

"This is a beautiful, witchy community that takes care of each other," she says. "If you're looking for a place that feels like home, this is where you want to be."

She started four years ago. Her first winter brought four blizzards.

Four Blizzards

She was living off-campus on Fern Valley Road her first year, on a stretch that gets particularly icy, and the storms came one after another over roughly two and a half weeks. The first one dropped what she estimates, with some admitted exaggeration, may have been twelve feet of snow. She was stuck in her house for four days. What she remembers most is not the cold or the inconvenience but the people who came: neighbors and colleagues who shoveled driveways and chipped ice and drove through the storm to bring firewood to whoever needed it. No one was left behind. We're all in this together was not a slogan. It was just what happened.

She had not expected that. She had come for the school, for the music, for her friend Jeanette, for California. The community was the surprise. It is also, she says without hesitation, why she stays.

And then there is what the mountain is doing for the next generation. Her daughter, now eleven, is growing up here and has already decided she wants to come to Idyllwild Arts herself one day, for dramatic arts and film. Kai says it with the quiet pride of someone who knows exactly how rare this place is, and what it means that her daughter already feels it too.

The Town as a Time Machine

She says Idyllwild reminds her of the 80s and 90s — not as nostalgia but as a living thing. Kids in the neighborhoods ride bicycles and play with each other without orchestrated supervision. Families watch out for one another. There is independence, freedom, a pace that most places have long since lost. She grew up in Las Vegas on her bike in her neighborhood and she knows how rare that is now.

She goes into town a few times a week, to Café Aroma and Ferro and Mile High Café, partly for the food and partly because living on campus can blur the line between work and life, and being in town with people reminds her where one ends and the other begins. She has made genuine friends at those restaurants, people she talks to about life and stars and music over a glass of wine. "It's like Cheers," she says. "Everybody knows your name." She has met families through her daughter's school. These are the tendrils, she says, that connect the campus to the town and make both feel real.

Over time, she began to understand the pull of the place in the only language she really trusted: sound.

The Music and the Mountain

She thinks about vibration the way other people think about weather: as something always present, always acting on the body, something you can learn to read. Her healing practice works by playing specific tones around specific areas of the body — strings and vocalization, tuned to the individual — to bring it back into balance. She believes the mountain is doing something similar to the people who live here, without their knowledge. Idyllwild sits on a massive formation of quartz granite, and quartz vibrates. "I try to frame it in frequency and physics," she says, "but I don't dismiss the mystical either. The two end up in the same place."

In her first year at the Academy, she performed a concert with the orchestra director where, midway through, she picked up her viola and walked through the audience playing — the music surrounding people from all sides, close enough to feel in the chest. "That was one of the most memorable moments I've had in this place," she says.

What drives all of it, she says, is something she understood clearly as a teenager winning a solo competition on a recently healed broken finger: the music is not about showing off. It is about perfecting the voice well enough to share it, to leave people feeling uplifted or changed. She has felt that purpose since she was young, and getting to pass it on — to rooms full of young musicians figuring out their own voices — is not something she takes lightly. She talks about watching her students find their sound the way she once found hers; the moment when something shifts from technique to expression, from playing notes to saying something. She has seen it happen in this place, in these mountains, and it still moves her every time.

She does not take her viola outside much — the instrument is too sensitive to temperature and humidity, and the mountain air, beautiful as it is, can knock it out of tune in the walk from one building to the next. At home, she practices in front of a large glass door that opens onto the garden, letting the mountain in without leaving herself exposed to it. She makes music while looking at the trees and the sky. When the day is done, she goes to Inspiration Point to watch the sun drop behind the mountain.

When she needs something the mountain can't give, she drives two and a half hours alone to a strip of beach between the Venice pier and the breakers. Her spot. She sits and does nothing in particular. She has also, quietly, always written poetry — it started young and never stopped, another instrument for the same thing, another way of finding the frequency. The viola, the words, the ocean, the mountain. She has spent her whole life learning to listen. She is still listening.