Dec. 26, 2004, Krabi, Thailand

By Sarah Norris

So the tsunami is going to hit us in five minutes – this is a true story – and all I can think, all I can ever think anymore, is that it is about time for Robert to propose.

I tick the months off my fingers. “If he asks me to marry him today, December 26th, then we could plan for a wedding in the fall. With colored leaves and caramel apples and hot cider served with cinnamon sticks.” Cinnamon sticks!

We’d spent two years in a long distance relationship from different countries, I in New York and Robert in London. I’d finally realized that it felt much, much easier to obsess about details like “strapless or with sleeves?” than going to that dark pool of doubt that says: “This relationship isn’t really going anywhere. And all those Saturday nights you’ve spent reading paperback culinary mysteries and doing crossword puzzles in flannel pajamas instead of going out to bars to dance with future failed rock stars? There will be no reward for your waiting.”

Except here we are in Thailand for the holidays, a fantastic adventure, the two of us staying in a straw hut with a bed on stilts. We had mouth-burning, hiccup-inducing red curry for Christmas dinner yesterday. Now it’s 9 a.m., yoga out of the way, coffee drank two hours ago, and I’m doing a mental revision of the guest list. Simultaneously, I’m trying to appear as unconcerned with marriage as possible so that when Robert looks at me, instead of feeling like a cornered dog, he will feel incredibly lucky to have a girlfriend who could obviously not be less concerned with commitment.

On the beach, our deck chairs in the fully reclined position, our heads are propped with rolled-up beach towels just high enough to fit the straws into our mouths from the frothy drinks, piña coladas served directly in fresh coconuts.

I fold down the corner of my Siri Hustvedt novel and recognize a French family with three teenagers who’d been on our flight to Krabi. They were the ones who, when the plane was delayed for an hour, sat in a circle on the floor of the Bangkok airport eating McDonald’s fries and sharing a tiny paper tub of mayonnaise. Flippers already on, they climb aboard a boat and motor out toward the open sea for a snorkeling expedition.

Robert puts down the stack of printed work emails he’s been reading, sits up, and announces that he’s going for a massive swim. The day before, he’d been out for an hour along the Phra Nang peninsula, accidentally shredding his chest and the tops of his thighs on some coral. He’d met me on the other side of the resort, the cuts bleeding ribbons down his legs, and had already determined that today’s swim was going to be “even more heroic.”

“By the time I make it back,” he says, snapping on his goggles, “there’s going to be a Thai folksong written about me. Will you rub this on my back?” He’s one of those people who likes to put on sunscreen on his way into the water. I reach for the bottle.

I don’t know which is trickier – avoiding the spiky coral while trying to get out of the water or beginning the swim in the first place, navigating around dozens of wooden fishing boats filled with locals selling cans of Fanta and beaded sarongs. Because there’s no such thing as a private beach in Thailand, even the most difficult-to-reach coastline, if it attracts tourists, is blanketed by these fishing boats.

I look out at the ocean, where suddenly everyone around us is pointing toward a tiny speck on the horizon that seems to be growing larger. I pull off my sunglasses and sit up tall, reaching out for Rob’s knee. “A shark!”

People around us are loading rolls of film and fitting zoom lenses onto their cameras. While parents call out to children in the water, running forward to scoop them up, the adult swimmers are slow to turn back to land and, too far away to hear, a couple surfers paddle further out to sea.

I squint and make out the shape of a breaker so large, it’s like a giant white stripe cutting the sea into halves. Within seconds, the wave is 100 yards away. It’s as if someone has yanked the surface of the ocean off – the world’s largest tablecloth – and upturned every boat that had been resting on it before crashing onto the sand. No one moves.

We are standing on a deck, separated from the beach by a one-foot tall concrete barrier. Still, a wall is a wall, I think. There’s no way the water is going to come over the partition. Behind that wave, another one is headed toward us, at least four times the size of the first. People scurry behind this tiny wall and turn back to the sea, focusing their cameras. An elderly Thai man unpeels a banana.

“Everyone move!” a British man in an orange Polo shirt screams. “Run for your lives or you’re going to get hurt!”

It’s as though we’d been waiting for directions, because that’s exactly what we do. I hurry, flip-flops in hand, into the wooded area behind us, losing sight of Robert in the crowd of people wearing wet bathing suits and beach towels. The enormous wave smashes boats and tables and chairs into trees, into the swimming pool, into the huts – and it keeps coming.

The water is up to my ankles when I see Robert through the coconut trees, when we grabbed each other’s hands and kept running. Everyone is shouting – Thai, German, Spanish, Mandarin, languages I don’t even recognize. The resort employees, recognizable because they’re the only ones in life preservers, are shouting, “The end! It is coming! It is coming!” A manager with a neon green flotation device tied around his waist lifts a megaphone to his mouth and booms, “Head to the mountain! Another wave is coming – 50 meters high!”

The entire cape is now covered with fish and chaos. Flipping around on the tennis courts, gasping for air on the manicured lawns, the fish are so thick around us, it’s impossible not to walk on them. Even as we’re being herded to higher ground – a “mountain” the height of a seven-story townhouse – Robert and I can’t bring ourselves to step on the fish. I hop around them, a woman dancing over coals, but Robert goes further: he won’t abandon them. Strangers are streaming around him, following the Pied Piper megaphone man, but Robert picks up two sticks and heads against the grain, picking up fish with his improvised chopsticks and carrying them to the Koi pond. Only when that’s filled does he look up, in search of more un-chlorinated water.

A couple other men are interested in the fish as well, though their stake isn’t in rescuing but in collecting. A fisherman fills bucket after bucket while vacationers scurry around shouting names – Sheila! Inan! Diego! – desperate to locate missing family members. One Chinese girl in her early 20s inhales deeply and lets forth a long shriek; there are no words but the volume and pitch of her voice communicates so much pain, I stop moving and stare. When she’s out of breath, there’s a second of silence as she inhales, and then the wailing begins again.

We have to go now because there’s a whole circle of employees in life vests around us, pushing us toward the biggest hill. All the huts on either side of the isthmus have been knocked down, smashed and splintered, and are floating around us now, along with suitcases and clothing. No bodies but a lot of shoes. “Where is my daughter?” an American woman beside me asks, watching a collection of silk scarves wash away with the wreckage. “What in God’s name has happened here?”

That’s the question no one knows the answer to. We ask each other, over and over: “Where did those waves come from?” Because of course they came from the ocean – but none of us has ever seen anything like this before, seen the ocean stand and turn on us, like The Blob. I can’t stop thinking about that French family and their boat bobbing out in the water, just before this happened, and wonder where they are and if they saw it coming.

At the base of the mountain, at least 200 people race to cram into a single-file line that snakes up the skinny trail. The crowd, a morass of bare feet and tangled hair, is spotted with fights over life preservers, which the employees refuse to relinquish. On the way uphill, people clutch at loose electrical wires to pull themselves higher as families with young children scream demands that everyone needs to move faster or else. Kids, taking cues from their parents, break out in tears, wipe forearms across their runny noses, and command to be picked up, now.

Robert hands me a pair of fluffy white slippers that someone must have dropped on the ground. As I slide them on, I see that the soles of my feet have been cut. “Thank you,” I say. Robert is behind me when I stumble, stepping out of the too-large shoes, and he catches my wrist, pulls me upright. We keep moving.

This is what it must have felt like outside The Who’s Ohio gig in 1979, when 11 people were trampled in a stampede of concert-goers anxious to get inside. If a 50-meter wave comes, I think, do we really believe that standing on a tiny hill is going to save our lives? It’s the same mentality as the one-foot wall. But then, what else can we do? Lie out at the beach and wait for the end to come? I press my hand against Robert’s back, still slick with sunscreen, and we keep climbing.

A Dutchman in his 70s or 80s is sitting on a boulder with a hand on his chest, gasping for breath. Next to him, a young Thai woman in a paper nurse’s cap is crouched low to the ground, rifling through a First Aid kit of Band-Aids and aspirin. She extends a plastic bottle of water to him and says, “Can you breathe? Must go higher.” The man tries to unscrew the top and his face crumples, an embarrassed and panicky shade of scarlet.

The crest of the mountain – although I’m hard-pressed to call it that – resembles an airport smoker’s lounge. German and Japanese and English, the same mix of languages from the beach, are more relaxed now that people have found their family members. Conversations about what might have caused this – no one uses the word tsunami – are interrupted by employees shouting: “Fifty meter wave is coming soon!”

The electricity has been turned off and no one can get cell phone reception, which underscores the morning with a Gilligan’s Island feeling. Neither of us believes that this hilltop will save us, but the alternatives – returning to the beach, playing tennis, not swimming with the fishes – scare me.

At the top, Robert and I look through the forest to the ocean, as far as we can see, searching for the next big wave, and for rescue, for others, for evidence that we’re not alone. But for miles, in every direction, there is only water, and the sea’s small waves lapping at the wrecked shore. I don’t think about how I look to Robert – but what all of us might look like from above: a cluster of people, praying for life.

Sarah Norris is a freelance writer living in New York. She has written for the New York Press, Downtown Express, the Tennessean newspaper, the Waverly Review, and online in Lost magazine. She and Robert survived the tsunami and, a year later, she ran into the French family on the Left Bank of Paris.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, April 16th, 2007 | Email This Post

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