The Tsunami at the Edge of the Sea

A childhood dream of water coming in to shore from both sides—seeing Phi Phi Island the first time and thinking the two opposing bays separated by just fifty yards or so might have been the place, and then six months later floating in warm water on Elephant Island in the Gulf of Thailand as several waves did just that and decimated parts of Phi Phi Island — the parts he had stayed in. The thought of water receding (Why, he’d remembered thinking about that on Elephant Island, meaning a tsunami was imminent.) The writer knew from a novel he read as a child — when the sea recedes quickly, it is time to get to higher ground. You can’t tell this man there is no reason to read fiction — readers of fiction knew what was coming. He’d had this thought on another trip to Elephant Island on a previous trip to this one. This one was the day after Christmas, Boxing Day, as some called it — the day Golem sat floating in the Gulf as a wave tortured so much of the world. On a later trip along the Andaman Coast, he saw a sign reading 21 meters on the worst hit beach of Koh Lak that meant that here the water rose 21 meters, and another sign a kilometer and a half inland stating 7 meters…and a ship two kilometers inland left to denote what happened on a day, as any other, when people had perhaps begun to think that man controlled his environment with a bit too much confidence, as the dinosaurs may have inherently understood that they controlled the earth before suddenly they didn’t, and for that matter, didn’t even know why or what had happened. On the worst hit beach of Koh Lak, he stood in the water five years after the tsunami struck, in waves not a foot high—the force of the water was enough to scare timid swimmers and enough to push one in and pull one out—twenty-one meters flowing on a slope that must somehow have slanted down to the shoreline, building up momentum more than a tsunami ever could. Five years later there isn’t much there. None of the families who ran the stands selling fruit shakes and coconuts are left … it is a barren and gloomy reminder of that day…a nearly deserted beach in Thailand—no one seems to want to go back and, indeed, everywhere in Thailand where the wave caused its most devastation, people shy away and are not rebuilding. Rebuilding is happening where the wave was more gracious but not on ground zero, and most likely, the next tsunami will approach from a different direction, thus showing once again that man does not control nature.
At night now on Phi Phi Island, the worst hit spots are nearly uninhabited, and I feel the presence of something, so aptly put by John Irving, trying not to make a sound. The Thais believe in ghosts and in these places so do I. Sandals floating in the water, mates missing—the sole survivors of those areas. I can see that day in my mind as if I were there. I stayed in the worst hit areas and now always look up the hill at what was once there. The bungalows where I watched monkeys on guard, as other monkeys tried each door, are gone. In their place, along the shore, are streetlights and nothing more, other than the something not making a sound. As nice as silence is, that silence is a bit empty now, that stretch of beach like a sparsely populated strand, surrounded by L.A., as now the corporations have taken the land from the families and are fervently rebuilding Phi Phi into a parking lot. If it wasn’t Disneyland before, it is now, and the water in the bays is sediment and feels slimy, and people go there just for beach and beer and seem not to care of their environment—of what had once been there. It is less possible now to hear the sound of silence on that island. It was on that trip that I found something—something I’d been looking for— something… I didn’t really know what before I found it; but, when I found it, I knew that I’d found something I’d been looking for, even if I never knew what it was I was seeking exactly, and was surprised at the simplicity of what I found. I thought before I found it that this was probably my last trip to Phi Phi and a farewell, for while I enjoyed her once more, it was all too apparent the motives of the government, and the ships in the bay carrying materials for construction were all too obvious. They all had Thaksin written on their sides. The same Thaksin I figured who had bought so much land on Elephant Island before promoting the development of that island—before causing the destruction of the little huts where I wrote so much of this tale—the little huts on the edge of the sea on White Sand Beach of which you will hear more. You see this is where I met CHarLie. At the time I didn’t understand why he waited to introduce himself in person on the porch of a bamboo hut. He’d been in mind for quite some time; I’d been hearing his words, and I was already plenty scared before I opened the door and saw him standing there.

Golem looked down at his manuscript for about the zillionth time and for essentially one parsec of Venus time of it, and saw what it was that made him mad: