IF IT ALL WERE BUT A DREAM

BY NEEL WAIN

A childhood dream of water coming in to shore —- from both sides —- and then seeing Phi Phi Island the first time and thinking the two opposing bays, separated by just fifty yards, might have been the setting of the dream -- 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.  All three, a guest house, a set of huts up a hill, and a hundred circular straw bungalows on the shore —- his soul.

     The thought of water receding, foretelling the wall of water. He’d remembered thinking about that on Elephant Island several months before it hit.

     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 guy 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; it 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 in memorial of what happened on a day, starting out 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 attacked -- 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 a bit upwards toward the shoreline, building up momentum more than a tsunami did in other parts of Thailand.  

     Five years later there isn’t much there on that section of strand. Two sections have been partially rebuilt by man.  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 to think ... 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.