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Outside Magazine, March 2005

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There Can't Be a Word for This (cont.)

THE OCEAN WAS AS SMOOTH AS GLASS as Luang and I motored out of Railae Bay. Out on Koh Poda and Chicken Island, the day was calm and bright. The sea was distinctly colder, perhaps a function of turnover in the layers deep within the Indian Ocean. A sea eagle rode on a thermal, and the reefs still teemed with fish. Luang and I dug around half-buried longtails and swam around coral heads looking for wallets, watches, toys—anything that might show a relative where their loved one had been. In Koh Poda's Paradise Cove, we found a bright-yellow "Live Strong" T-shirt; on Chicken Island, a baby stroller, a wrecked Olympus camera, and a tiny Winnie the Pooh bathing suit.

On Bamboo Island, the coral on the windward side was mostly destroyed, but otherwise it was the perfect white-sand island I'd first seen 15 years before. Only three miles south, Koh Phi Phi's plume of black smoke billowed into the pale sky. Luang had friends missing there, and I felt it was likely that in the next few days I would be hearing from parents, spouses, and others still missing loved ones. A Vietnam War–era Huey choppered overhead, and Luang revved up the motor. We sped off after the helicopter, following it into the center of the destruction.

Phi Phi Town has always been a conflicting place to me. It was always so densely packed that when I stood in its center I felt as if I could have been in the slums of Bangkok or Bombay. However, just at the town's edge, it was once again clear that it was the most beautiful island in the world.

For the first time, I didn't hear blaring reggae bars or the engines of longtail boats. Birds chirped in the palm trees and waves lapped the edges of Dalam Bay. But the wreckage of collapsed buildings fumed with flies and creaked in the slightest breeze. Rotting food and the latex gloves of rescuers littered paths through the rubble, and all senses were overpowered by the odor of decomposing flesh. The town's electricity, created in distant generators, had been a maze of haphazard wiring, and the small sewer system had been designed for hundreds, not thousands. Now I walked those tight streets and saw roofs that had been ripped off, shattered windows, and hot electrical cables cut and swinging through the water. The overtaxed sewer system had ruptured, mixing septic water with the thick sludge churned up by the wave. Thai laborers struggled to pull apart debris, and backhoes pulled up the sand where it was thought hundreds were buried. I occasionally bumped into a sole Thai official taking survey of the damage, but Phi Phi was a ghost town.

Two days later, I was able to speak to Dusit Pabpet, the Koh Phi Phi resident who had phoned the warning to Railae. Dusit had been standing on the Tonsai Bay pier when the water suddenly rose.

"We didn't know for sure what it was," he said. "Some people were scared, and we ran to higher ground. Some moved back toward the Dalam side. That's when the big wave came in from Dalam and covered the town." The tsunami had come as a series of pulses, and the second one had been enormous. "From the hill above town I looked down," he said. "One side to another was just water, no land. I think it was about 50 feet deep."

People had gone from sipping a cappuccino one moment to being sucked into the ocean the next. Honeymooners had been made into widows and widowers. Almost every hotel, house, and resort had been wiped out, and those people who lived huddled together on the hilltops on either side of the flooded town until a rescue operation could be mounted hours later.

I saw no aid workers on Phi Phi, perhaps because anyone who could possibly need aid there was dead. I made my way to the rubble of a climbing shop that belonged to my friend Cathy Beoleil, who'd been back in France when the wave hit, and her husband, Eadt, who I'd already heard had survived. I started toward the main market, but then changed my mind and turned back toward the pier to meet Luang. I don't think I'll ever go back.

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