Danger Signs

Choite had come with his passenger seat empty just for him, and now his father said, “No! Leave me! I want to die here, in our house!” Choite lost his patience. He got off his motorcycle, pulled his father to the door, and the old man saw the wave for the first time, coming up the frothing, chaotic beach, already filling itself with trees and cars and broken construction materials; he got behind Choite and they roared off in a convoy: Choite and his father were on the motorcycle; three nieces and Choite’s older daughter were on another bike; Choite’s younger brother and his sister were on a third two-wheeler; and his brother Wisthnuth, Choite’s baby daughter, and his sister were on a three-wheeler.

Choite believes that in another eleven seconds they would have all been dead. Choite said that if you were in a car or truck that day you likely would have died. Choite also believes that if you were on foot you were sure to die—unless you were very, very lucky. The family group of four bikes headed inland, up a ragged course into the green hills that rose 150 metres like a dragon’s back.

There was a forestry station located about thirty metres above sea level, but soon they could not see what was happening behind them through the dense trees of the forest reserve. The beach was completely obscured; all they could see was the perfect blue of the open ocean above the treeline, which, at this moment, around 10:30, was as serene and silent as any Sunday morning in days past. Could they hear anything from their first resting place at the forestry station? Only the cries of the people who had made it with them to the safety of the hill, by scrambling one way or another up the dense, slick red slope. Choite remembers hanging on tightly to his steel motorcycle key. Maybe he would have to use it again, go higher still? Nobody knew what was happening below.

And the wave itself, the black wave? Did it make a noise as it came toward them? Choite, three weeks later, stops, looks down at the littered Bang Niang sand under his feet, eyes once again registering the heaps of kids’ plastic beach sandals, the broken pink parasols, the strangely intact credit cards and return tickets to Frankfurt, looks up again and shakes his head as if to clear it. But nothing comes. “Don’t remember,” he says. He starts to shake, nerves pitched high. “I don’t remember if there was any sound. Just that it came very fast.”

Because he was the one local who could speak English up in the forest hill that day, he spent his time going around, warning the foreigners to stay put, stay up here, and not go back down below the trees—not even for a look. “No one can tell us what is going to happen after this,” he reasoned with them, “no one knows.” Stay, he urged them, understanding that while his schoolboy lessons had saved him and his family, neither reason nor experience could help them now. They had to be prepared to move again, that was all. He dissuaded an Australian who was frantic about his girlfriend and her friends, vacationing on distant Phi Phi Island, from setting off downhill on a hopeless journey. “I think they must be all right,” Choite reasoned with the man. “Phi Phi Island is about forty-seven kilometres from us, to the east. Very protected. The wave would have little force there.”

Did Choite know at the time that this was untrue? That flat, sandy Phi Phi Island was so devastated few people on it that morning would survive, for there was no place for them to go?

By noon the miserable group—maybe a hundred individuals in all—decided to move en masse to higher ground. The day lengthened into afternoon and the shadows of the trees grew longer. Near the forestry service main office, they discovered a second group of over a hundred people. And in a flat, open area, a third group of about a hundred also waited, huddled, and talked. Night came. It grew cold in the hills; the foreigners had no clothes, many of them, only bathing suits. Babies cried; there was weeping and no food. People had their cellphones with them and kept trying them, over and over again. Nothing. Nobody’s cellphone would work for days.

In the morning they finally came down. From the Royal Thai Navy base in the south to Phra Thong Island in the north, a distance of over fifty kilometres, everything was destroyed: major hotels, concrete bungalows, new strip malls. Broken glass and twisted rebars and dead bodies were heaped together indiscriminately. Of the more than 5,000 people killed in Thailand, some 4,000 had died in the area around Bang Niang, and now they were lying about everywhere, out on the open road and in ditches and under tree branches and in hidden, darker places where they would not be found for days, even weeks. The water took them where it wanted to, and left them there.

Choite went immediately to his parents’ house. It was gone. Only the concrete foundation remained, and there was a dead person in the yard with no clothes on her. Many of the bodies were like this, fully naked, as if the sea had intended to leave another mysterious sign, along with all the others. Choite choked on a breath and bent down to look: it was not his mother.

What happened to her defies the odds of probable storytelling. His mother was in the Buddhist temple, praying with a dozen or so other local people, and this temple, of course, was close to the beach. The worshippers could see people getting excited outside, and at first they thought Thai policemen had carried out another roundup of illegal Burmese work gangs, for there was a lot of shouting and running. Yes, those Burmese were distinctly foreign. They sported black and red head-kerchiefs like ratty sea pirates, and they worked for low wages, taking every dangerous construction job they could get. But now someone cried out, “Move, the water’s coming, very bad!” and the people in the temple all ran outside to a canopied pickup truck, the kind with open plank benches, a simple cage or frame to hold on to, and brightly decorated with images of smiling Kinerees and other Thai folk deities of good luck.