Morning Always Comes Too Soon

By By Duncan Wilson

21 Mar 2005

Morning Always Comes Too Soon

 

This is what I remember.

 

Dragged from sleep by sound, loud and strange; a low, booming rumble, water gushing, children laughing - not laughing, screaming. Senses spring alert. From the bedroom window an uninterpretable sight, the lower terrace of the garden is filled with water and it is rising fast, all around is immense noise, banging, crashing, voices. A white van is floating down our neighbour’s driveway. What is this? In seconds the wonder turns to terror as I realize that it is the sea, flooding in, drowning everything. I scream to Ajith, ‘the sea is coming, get out, get out!’ We turn and race out of the house, up higher to the lane at the side. Afraid to look back, we imagine that the water will not stop, will rise and rise to engulf us, the house, everything and everybody, it is horror. The Day After Tomorrow. The lane is crowded with people running up too – eyes wide with fear, many climb high, up to the temple above.

 

We stop then and turn around at last. Below us the water level has stopped rising, some 20 metres up the lane, perhaps 10 metres above the sea level. There is an eerie calming, a pause even. Then with more terrible, calamitous sounds the sea sucks back and in seconds has washed back, back beyond view. It sounds like waves tossing pebbles on the shore but magnified many times over - the pebbles are houses, cars, trees, people. The air is filled with noises of distress and pain, car horns blare continuously, people are screaming. Gradually figures crawl up the path towards us, soaking wet, many seriously wounded and covered in blood. We still don’t know what has happened, this is beyond our experience, and we have no terms of reference for such a thing. Beside us a beaten and bloodied German man says something I can’t understand – ‘Earth-wave’ Ajith translates.

 

We nervously go down to the foot of the lane and see a sight that beggars belief; where once stood a line of restaurants facing the sea there is a wide clear view of the ocean. The road is covered and blocked with rubble and pools of water and we see that many, many buildings have disappeared. The screams go on. I see Kumari, wife of our neighbour, hysterically seeking her husband Nihal whom we have not seen. As we run back to our house - miraculously untouched by the waters - he appears from behind us. Wife and husband are re-united, a moment of joy in what will be a day of horror.

 

Dazed, people begin to act. Ajith, now weeping hysterically, races off barefoot over the mountain to search for his family. We try to offer aid to those injured, many here are foreign tourists, late-sleepers, some are naked and battered. There is a man with a broken back, a woman with a deep gash across her face, a boy with two broken legs. Many come searching for missing friends and relatives ‘have you seen a blonde girl, a boy in school-shorts, my brother, my mother, my friend?’. In the hours that follow some will be lucky, lists will be made, we will see despondent groups traipsing from temple to temple.

 

Bodies begin to appear, carried from the beach side by men who are brave enough to approach it. There are cries of shock and recognition ‘Anais! Aiyo!’ Our house is filled with desperate people seeking to call relatives and friends; by some fluke, our phone is working and becomes a vital lifeline for news and information. In the garden, we survey the damage, the down wall has collapsed and the area is filled with an entangled mass of masonry, wood and glass. And there is a body there. It is Saman, the man whom for years sent off our faxes and connected our IDD calls from his small booth across the road. He looks to be sleeping; we find a sheet and cover his face. There is a mangled bicycle, a bucket, a sofa, a child’s dress, a laminated wedding photo, a packet of noodles, a scattered dice set (all 12 dice complete), debris of lives destroyed and taken. The weaving factory immediately in front of us is half gone, looms smashed and twisted at bizarre angles. High on the garden’s middle terrace, a silver fish, sparkling in the sun.

 

Back at the road all is chaos still. I see Kalu, beach bum and coconut seller. His eyes are wide with fear, “My babies” he says “have you seen my babies? I found one but the other is gone, please help me” and he races off, stumbling over the fallen debris.

 

A scream of panic goes up and for the first of what will be many times that day we race back up the hill to safety, ‘the sea is coming again’ they say. But it does not, though it faces us always angry and fomenting, filled with flotsam and washing high up on to where the road used to be. It is a bright and sunny morning but there is no bird song, no motor noise.

 

Ajith returns, some relief on his face, for his family, like so many, have been able to scramble to safety up the hillside. We are thinking now of others and for the first time properly realizing that this can’t be something localised, for the whole beach must have been affected. As news begins to hum through the grapevine, some from those who have fled here, more from relatives in other towns, we hear that other places are affected too. Hikkaduwa 20 Km North, Mirissa 50 km South. Stupidly, we do not yet comprehend that there are other places in between – the cities of Galle (where 3000 died) Matara (1500). I fear for my friends who have been staying down on the beach and I persuade Ajith to go with me to look for them. Cautiously, terrified, we run down to the beach and start to make our way along the former road. Going is difficult as there is so much debris and it is hard to find bearings with so many buildings gone or scarred, we find pathways that never existed before and move toward the main beach road.

 

There is no road, only chaos and disaster. In places we see huge chunks of tarmac lifted on their side. Enormous boulders, remnants of the beach wall, have been lifted and flung far and wide. We are forced to go along the beach, we are silent, numb. To our left the noisy and hostile sea, shimmering, silver and hissing with malevolence and force, filling us with fear and loathing. Out to sea we see boats, many adrift, but a few pulling people aboard, we see several clinging to beach beds and pieces of wood. The beach itself is barely recognizable, carved out in great swathes and littered with fallen trees. We reach the guesthouse where Tim has been staying in a low lying beach cabana; it is a bombsite, virtually flattened, filled with water. I think that he must be dead inside. Then a man says ‘no, he will have gone to the mountain, everybody has gone there’. We notice suddenly that there is hardly any one around, indeed the area is almost empty, perhaps then it is true?

 

A scream goes up and we run, blindly, panicking, no longer safe from hungry waves but trapped in the hell zone. We go a different way with many running behind us; we are knee, then thigh, deep in water and cannot run, we lose our shoes but carry on in panic. We reach a kind of safety, 300m from the sea, where the water has not yet come; we join a crowd of several hundred, blank faces, still in shock.

 

We run home along the line of the main road, littered everywhere with strange sights; boats smashed in two and on top of houses, cars and vans washed away and overturned, an upside down lorry, the signpost from the hotel washed half a kilometer from its place, everywhere collapsed  buildings, mud and rubbish. Back at the house the first thing I see is Tim, safe and rescued. We hug. He had run in bare feet high up the mountain behind his guesthouse, water knee deep, scrambling over sheer rock, his feet badly cut and bleeding. A child had died at his place, he had not gone back to look. There our friend Lesley had found him and led him to us the back way. The house is full of movement, refugees, bewildered and frightened neighbours. Later Ali too is there, she had watched helplessly from her second floor balcony as the sea rose almost to her feet, a writhing torrent carrying fridges, trees, motorbikes, whole roofs, then waded waist deep to higher ground as the water retreated.

 

Again and again we go to look at the scene by the beach, so difficult to comprehend. It is now that we start to hear about the numbers of dead, about the missing and, from friends in Colombo, about the true extent of the waves and the damage that has been done island wide. Yet another scream of alarm and we are back running up the lane. God forbid but this time it is real, and we see the sea rise again, washing back over the smashed buildings almost to the same level as before. We watch in virtual silence, we know at least that most will have been able to escape this time. As the wave retreats we see how far it has sucked back from the beach, exposing previously underwater coral outcrops and low lying rocks, too far, it is not natural, it is not what we understand. Second time around there is still more damage, cars float out to sea, more walls fall down – with a rumble, we are able to see the beach-front Peacock restaurant, 3 storeys and previously not visible from here, collapse and fall, furniture spilling from the upstairs rooms.

 

There is nothing to do. By now the phones are dead and the mobile networks are out of action. Weirdly, many of us have been able to call our families back home, wakening them in the night with the terrible news and listening as they have switched on the TV they have told us about Thailand, India, Indonesia. We sit around, villagers rush in and out, some people move sodden bundles of clothing, pathetic remnants of lost lives, to the safety of our garden.

 

We begin to hear the stories; most are tales of miraculous escapes – for the dead take their tales with them. The man who survived by hanging onto the ceiling fan in his restaurant, still turning even as the water rose to fill the room, the German couple who found their bedroom completely submerged, fighting for life as their heads were engulfed, saved only when a wall collapsed and they were washed out onto the rubble, the Danish couple having early breakfast on the beach, at first delighted at the funny little waves that were suddenly lapping at their feet and then overwhelmed by the force of the ocean, swept into the room behind and tossed against the walls with tables and chairs all around them. Roshan, our friend, who had clung to a coconut tree as the wave encroached, then lost his grip as it receded, pulling him to the sea, his hands caught, then slid from, one, two, three trees then finally at the fourth, at the water’s edge, he held on, able to talk to others holding trees nearby. The 18-stone shopkeeper who not only managed to grasp her 3 year old son but her teenage daughter too and holding on for dear life, was washed out to sea, she had used a table as a float and they were picked up several hours later. The early morning swimmers swept far out beyond the bay who managed to reach rocky islands where they were bashed repeatedly against the rocks, most quite seriously injured. The man who had held on to his wife and 3 year old child and watched helplessly as first one and then the other were wrenched from his grasp and swallowed by the waves.

 

A full 4 hours after the first tsunami we see an army chopper overhead, it flies on, ignoring the frantic gestures of those below, surveying the scene, assessing the damage. Later we see many more choppers and small planes, but still they ignore us and we realize with horror that other places are far worse off than us and have a priority. It is a frightening thought.

 

The day goes by in a blur, more stories, visitors now who have braved the fear of more waves and walked to see us. We hear of the many bodies down at the sea, of the hundreds of people huddled together for safety on the hill tops, of the stranded tourists. The Australians who lost their 3 month old baby, the German lady crushed by a wall, the missing, missing, missing. We hear too of what happened at the start, people who saw the whole thing from upstairs windows. This no classical Japanese curving breaker but a gentle rising of the sea that just kept coming, and coming, and coming.

 

Night falls, more stories, we all have a tale to tell. The ‘what ifs?’ start, it could have been at night (more dead – sleepers), or not on a Sunday (much more traffic on the roads) or later in the day (many day trippers, and us?, on the beach) the could haves and should haves, the maybes. No talk yet of the will – it is too early to imagine a future. We feel that our lives are changed for ever and that things will never be the same again. We try to sleep, our house full of friends and strangers, Sri Lankan, British, Estonian, Irish, Italian, German. But sleep does not come, only an endless repetition of the moment, like a video rewound again and again. We are nervous, twitchy, traumatized.

 

The next days bring the first cycles of aid and relief, choppers airlifting out the wounded. Soldiers, on foot, walking tentatively and greeted with relief. The steady evacuation of the tourists, many of whom have nothing but what they stand in. Rapid burials are evident everywhere, lines of bodies are wrapped in white cloths at the roadside. The funerals are sparsely attended, families still too shocked to grieve, to cry. Soon the authorities will order the immediate burial of all bodies, many unidentified, for fear of disease and decay.

 

By the end of the second day an earthmover clears the rubble from the road and at last vehicles, and aid, are able to get through. For 2 days we call friends in Colombo and organize vans to come down - at first we need food, water, matches; then cigarettes, phone cards; then petrol. Later its clothes, more food, candles. The house becomes a mini distribution centre and hums with life. The power is out for 5 days, we live simply, not washing, drawing water from wells, cooking basic meals. Within a week the emergency part is over, supplies are coming in from the government; the UN is here, the Red Cross, lots of army. People scrabble through the remnants of their homes salvaging whatever they can, pots and pans, chairs, wood, filthy clothes. In time they will think of re-building, for now, the fear of the sea remains strong and potent and few have any desire to sleep within sound of the waves.

 

On the third day I met Kalu again in the street, His voice cracked as he recounted the discovery of his baby daughter, Neeli, buried deep under the wreckage of a house far from her own, wrapped still in her blanket. They had buried her swiftly, fearing disease. Kalu had little to say, he had lost everything that defined his life, his hut, his possessions, his mother and Neeli. He is typical of many in this village, almost everyone has lost someone, many, many have lost their homes and livelihoods. Everyone carries a memory, a painful recollection of the day that the sea, giver of life - once tranquil, beautiful and benign – came ashore and didn’t stop, swallowing the world and all within its path.

 

Unawatuna,  January 2005

 

PS

37,000 people died that morning in Sri Lanka