ThailandStories.com - The Bay

I wrote this in 2001 after seeing it in my mind’s eye. I find it difficult to write any story unless I have seen it one way or another. This, I saw a few years before it actually happened on Boxing day. When I saw it in all of its horrible glory, I thought: “That sort of thing doesn’t happen in this day and age; natural disasters like that just don’t happen.” And I scaled back the magnitude of what I had “dreamed” to what follows.

What I saw a few years before the event was the same as what was shown on television after the event.

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I don’t go there any more.

The bay was shaped a little like a narrow “v” with the beach truncating it halfway down. The path one had to walk to get to the small beach was not easy. On the south side of the bay, there was a rock platform that was perfect for fishing; it yielded shellfish and small crabs for bait, and there were plenty of fish in the water.

One of my uncles was reasonably well-off, and was able to buy the land which controlled access to the bay before it became a known location, and then he was able to persuade the local council into granting a building permit for this land. He built a 4-bedroom cottage on a bluff about 40 metres above the sea level.

He then fenced the land, which meant that the beach was cut off from public access before the public could object. I guess that a lot of councillors got a lot of free lunches for all of that to happen.

So Uncle Gus would spend about one weekend in four at this cottage overlooking the bay, and for the rest of the month it would sit there gathering dust. Then one day, my mother suggested to Gus that he might like the cottage cleaned for free on the weekends that he was not using it. My mum was Gus’ favourite sister-in-law, and he thought that she had come up with a good idea. As a reward for such a good idea, Gus offered our family first guest rights.

I have always enjoyed fishing, but have never really been much of a swimmer. Roger, my brother likes to lie around on a beach more than swim, but our 3 sisters are water-babies, so we were all happy with the idea of an occasional weekend at the cottage.

We arrived for our first weekend there on a Friday afternoon, and soon set about our individual pursuits. The girls headed directly for the water, Pops set himself up on the beach in case they got into difficulty, my brother did his thing a bit higher up the sand, and I took a bucket and fishing gear to the rock platform. Mum stayed in the cottage to clean, saying that if we were there to clean the cottage for Uncle Gus, we might as well benefit from the cleaning ourselves.

I caught several crabs for bait, then I spotted a movement in one of the rock-pools. It could only have been one thing; it was not the scuttle of a crab, it was the smooth flowing movement of an octopus. Mum and Pops would be thrilled when they saw that – if I could catch it - they liked octopus. I reached under the edge of the pool with my hooked probe and gently persuaded the ‘pus to show itself, then recoiled a little when it did. It was a blue-ringed octopus. These nasty little creatures are quite edible, but have a bite that can kill with its neurotoxin venom.

Care was the order of the day and I actually succeeded in coaxing it into the bucket, where it set upon the crabs that I had collected. If I left it there, it would eventually reach over the sides of the bucket with its tentacles and pull itself out, so I set off to take it to the cottage. I passed my favourite fishing spot where a few drummer were always to be found and noticed that the water level was the lowest I had ever seen it. I continued up and commenced the ascent of the path to the bluff. That is when I heard the call from one of my sisters, looked around, and saw what was happening.

The bay was draining rapidly. So rapidly that one of my sisters was in difficulty, and Pops was running out to help her. The other two girls had managed to make their way to shallow water, and were wading back towards the beach. While Pops was running towards Gwendy I looked out toward the horizon and saw the disturbance a few kilometres out to sea. While I still see all of this vividly in my mind, it is still a little difficult to put it into words.

That is the best way that I can describe it. A disturbance in the water. Not a wave, just a line in the surface of the sea, parallel to the coast, maybe 3 kilometres away, and it looked different from what was in front of and behind it.

Of course, I had seen the shows on television that told about this, but until I saw that line of disturbed water, I didn’t know that I was looking at a tsunami.

With the realisation came fear. Not just a mild fear like a fear of heights or such, but a stark cold realisation that I was looking at the potential death of my father and siblings, and possibly my own as well. Our entire family group could be destroyed.

I screamed to Roger to follow me up the path as quickly as he could, and he did. The receding water had left Pops still in the shallows. He turned and heard me calling and saw me waving at him to come back. Gwendy was gone from sight, so he did the smart thing and started running back. He must have made the connection with tsunamis by then. Kassy and Cheryl started for the path too, but they did not realise the need for haste, so they were not running as they should have. I knew that Pops had made the connection, because he was sprinting up the beach. He caught up to the two girls and said something to them as he passed, and they started running too.

Watching Pops and the girls over my shoulder as Roger and I hurried up the path was an agony in itself. I was in the best position of all as I had been part way up the path when I saw the danger. Roger only had the path to climb. The girls had a short sprint to the bottom of the path, but Pops had the big sprint up the beach and the path to climb, and he was starting to flag by the time the bay began to fill. The girls passed him half-way up the path, tried to help him, but he sent them on.

None of us had any idea how high this tsunami was going to reach, we just had to climb until there was nowhere else to climb. The bluff was the highest point above the bay, so we ran a few metres towards the cottage, turned, and waited for the girls and Pops. The girls appeared from the path and ran to stand with us, waiting for Pops. He appeared, but how he survived was chance.

As fate would have it, the tsunami peaked just below the level of the bluff, and Pops nearly made it to safety. The rising water lifted him just as it peaked, and would have carried him back with it, but he caught the hand rail on the outside of the path and he was saved, despite being seriously shaken. We couldn’t believe having seen him rise on the peak of the water, then disappear from sight, that he could then limp back into our view ten seconds later.

The water rose in the bay in a matter of 15 or 20 seconds, and it also drained quickly. It actually rose and fell several times, like water in a broad and shallow basin, but within 10 minutes the sea level had stabilised, and we could see the results of the tsunami. All of the sand had been washed away when the sea had retreated, probably after the first peak. There was no more beach in the bay. The sea was crashing against the face of the stone base that had been used as a sort of a boardwalk. And when the water clarified after a few hours, more rock could be seen where the sand had previously been. We released the octopus soon after the rocks became visible under the water in the bay.

Time passed, we mourned the loss of Gwendy, but this was more than balanced by our mutual joy that no other members of our family suffered the same fate. Uncle Gus sold the cottage.

More time passed, the sea slowly replaced the sand that had been lost from the beach in those few frightening minutes, and it now looks much the same as it did before the tsunami.

I don’t need to go there any more, I can still see it here, in my mind’s eye. But not the same way that you would see it if you went there and looked now.

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This is a work of fiction, and is not meant to represent any real person, place, or event. The description of a natural phenomenon is not scientifically accurate.

The Bay

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