Danger Signs

The truck was nearly full and starting to move when Choite’s middle-aged mother attempted to climb aboard. It took off and she fell backward, hard to the ground. With four or five others who were left behind, she limped back into the temple and stood there, irresolute, watching mutely as the first wave filled the floor to her ankles, then her knees. She saw the others slowly climbing the stone steps to the bell tower—and forced herself to follow, climbing its ten metres to safety.

All of the people in the bell tower survived. She learned the next day that everyone in the pickup truck had died within a minute of leaving her. It seemed as if the black water had chosen its own path here in Bang Niang, for when Choite’s mother climbed down from the bell tower one hour later, as soon as the water receded, she saw that some buildings had been unaccountably spared, while others—vaster, far more ambitious projects—had ceased to exist. The sacred Buddhist bell tower had survived, yet so had a tourist-retirement house built in a faux-Swiss Alpine style, while their own new house was part of a mass of foul garbage.

Her eyes, she told her family, could not take in what was. There was no sense to the scene; they kept returning to the few trees left standing, to the unbroken windows, to a steel gray Navy patrol boat that sat in a distant field, adrift on a cubist pond of broken pipes and lumber. Choite’s mother walked alone, along the coastal road, past bodies laid out by the sea on both sides of the macadam. Like the sandy beach down by the mild surf, the hard road 69 was swept clear, and passable, but now there was no place to go. Everything was blurry, indistinct; she does not remember crying. It was the world itself that had become a blur.

There were other escape stories. Choite’s third sister, Porntip, and her five-year-old son, out on Phra Thong Island, saw the wave coming and climbed a palm tree where the two of them stayed for an entire day and survived. More incredible was the story of her husband, the brother-in-law who was fishing off Phra Thong alone, who everyone had feared was lost. Nothing happened to him after all. The fisherman had been sitting in his long-tail boat, staring down at the empty water, coming to terms with the futility of yet another wasted morning. The fishing was unusually bad, as it had been for six weeks since Wisthnuth’s fantastic catch in mid-November. Suddenly, a flurry of activity under the boat tore his eyes from his inner reverie—colours, not fish, came roaring under his boat with scarcely a ripple showing on the surface. Red, yellow, black, brown, blue flashed by furiously. At some point the sign becomes the thing itself, and this happened right under his boat—a mass of flashing colours too busy to bother with him, and as he watched in shock they raced toward the distant shoreline with incalculable velocity, toward a scenic picture that began moving, slowly, then broke apart and remained a picture no longer.

Of Choite’s extended family, all but three were saved: his fourteen-year-old nephew had just arrived in Bang Niang that weekend and was sitting inside a beach restaurant, learning his new duties, when the wave crashed in; and Choite’s sister-in-law and her new baby, staying in the temporary house, were also torn away.

Choite, of course, did not see any of it; he was up in the hilltop, protected from seeing by the wall of trees. The only thing he had seen, he realized now, were the signs, and signs are always easier to read than the thing itself.

The signs he had seen, the signs that had told him something in nature was coming, were these: one, Wisthnuth’s boatloads of fish; two, the mature trees in the hills above Bang Niang, which he’d heard had mysteriously started falling in many places, one night about a week before the wave, in mid-December; and three, the scarcity of fish for at least six weeks before the sea went dry, when they had gone fishing every weekend and except for that one astounding day in November, had caught little. The current, too, had been much stronger than normal, and they could not reach the ocean floor with the usual 300-gram dakuwa, the lead sounding-weight. They had to use a one-kilogram weight just to find the bottom. Choite considered this last as a key sign. “Such a thing was incredible, so close to shore. Only twenty metres of water, and we couldn’t find the bottom, and no fish either. Nature was telling us something, but we were not thinking about it.”

Now, three weeks later, Bang Niang Beach was empty. Just as he remembered it from his childhood, twenty years ago. No vendors, no big neon umbrellas, no thatch huts. No people. Out on the blue Andaman Sea, a few Thai Navy vessels slowly patrolled the calm waters, looking for whatever the sea might have given up in last evening’s tide. And on the shore, mile after mile of twisted ruins where workers and volunteers sat under the trees eating box lunches, or stood in groups, listening to their briefings, or squatted under the shelter of solitary archways and porticos, sorting through documents, unused miniature shampoo bottles, wallets and towels and shoes.

Eventually the tourists will come back to these beaches—not this year, but maybe next year, and certainly the year after that. After they conceive and erect and consecrate a memorial to the dead, after they make a final decision about where to put it and what to say on it.

The word for sea in Thai is mahasamud, great sea; the word for sand beach is chaihard, rim or edge; and the word for wave is krone. Thai has two words for the colour blue: fa, which indicates light-filled blue, blue like the upper sky and which is also a popular nickname for a nice person, conveying hope and optimism; and nam-hgen, dark blue like the deep, unknowable sea. Whatever the final design, the monument might remind its visitors that the sea lapping at the pretty beach before them is a two-worded ocean.