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Outside Magazine, March 2005
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There Can't Be a Word for This (cont.)

WHEN WE THINK OF A GIANT WAVE, we picture a surf break like Waimea Bay, on Oahu, where breakers can tower up to 50 feet. But unlike a Hawaiian big wave, which comes in as a wall of water followed by a crest and then a depression, a tsunami is a massive wall quickly followed by more great surges; when it recedes, it carries debris back across its original path, dragging anything and anyone out to sea. A tsunami also travels a lot faster than any wave Laird Hamilton would dare be towed into. The waves at Jaws, the infamous surf break off Maui's north shore, move between 20 and 30 miles per hour. A tsunami travels the open ocean at up to 600. To put that energy into perspective, if you jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, you would probably hit the water at about 120 miles per hour.

The calm waters off the Phra Nang peninsula are protected, Thai legend has it, by an ancient princess of Thailand's
The Phra Nang peninsula settled into a feeling of normalcy, save for the somber mood that seemed to override every pleasant moment; there was no code for dealing with this, no logical path to ease the suffering.
sea-gypsy tribe. The princess, it appears, was working hard on December 26. As Internet connections came back and newspapers arrived from the mainland, we saw pictures of the devastation the world was facing. By January 15, the U.S. Agency for International Development counted more than 157,000 dead and 27,000 missing in eight countries, plus 1.5 million left homeless. As we heard the numbers double each day along the Thai coast—149 locals and 111 foreigners dead on Phuket alone—everyone realized how lucky they were. Even at Railae, the casualties were far from clear, but our best local estimates had perhaps 30 tourists and resort staff killed or missing. Phi Phi wasn't so lucky.

The Thai government had evacuated the island, so none of us knew what was going on there. We knew that the sea was being searched by U.S. Navy Orion P3 aircraft and that the Thai military was bringing bodies back to the mainland, but not much more. The fact that it was plainly visible from Phra Nang, a silhouette on the horizon with a smoke plume and constant helicopter traffic, kept it a topic of conversation. The papers talked of something like 500 dead in the province, but the makeshift morgue at the wat, or Buddhist temple, in Krabi contained almost 700 bodies. (As of January 12, the Thai government confirmed 693 dead and 715 missing in Krabi Province, most from Koh Phi Phi.)

One thing was clear: Koh Phi Phi was decimated. Forensic experts from Israel's Disaster Victims Identification (ZAKA) organization, the group that identifies the remains of bombing victims in that country, were at the Krabi morgue, working to identify the dead. "This is hell," one volunteer, an Israeli policeman, told Merry Winslow, an American friend of mine. He was referring to the sheer number of bodies.

On January 4, I met my friend Luang at Bobo's, the sole beachside bar in Railae to have withstood the wave. He'd been to Phi Phi that day, giving a speedboat ride to a police official, and he said the destruction was as complete as rumors had it. In addition, Luang felt, the Thai navy's search of the outlying islands had been, for the most part, a quick skimming of areas that we knew well. We decided to go out and canvass the outer islands for the missing. More likely, we would just find lost belongings, but we hoped they could help someone, someday, piece together a relative's last moments.


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