Posted: 1/7/2005 8:38:22 PM EDT
The last time Anders Bang-Ericsson saw Ragnar, his 2½-year-old son, the boy was "floating away on the waves, away from me, on his blue water wings."
The tsunami that struck on Dec. 26 demolished the two-story beachfront resort villa where the family had taken refuge and wrenched Ragnar from his father's grasp.
"It was like being in a big washing machine, thrown around, tumbled around," Mr. Bang-Ericsson said, speaking deliberately for fear of losing control. "I had to change grip in order to swim better. But then I lost hold of him for a second. The last thing he said to me was, 'Daddy, I am scared.' "
Almost two weeks after the tsunami roared through their lives, Mr. Bang-Ericsson and his wife, Lise, sat on the edge of a hotel room bed here Thursday night, recounting their hope that Ragnar, in his beloved water wings, had been swept into the temporary care of a stranger.
"If he didn't get caught into debris, maybe he floated ashore and is alive and well somewhere," Mr. Bang-Ericsson, a Swede, said of his only child, who started swimming lessons at 6 months. "We will stay here in Thailand until we know one way or other. We cannot leave him. He is just a small boy." . . . The day after Christmas, the Bang-Ericssons were at the pool by 9 a.m. "It was a perfect morning, and we had just had breakfast and we were playing with little Ragnar in the swimming pool in the back of the bungalows," Mr. Bang-Ericsson said. "Suddenly someone came shouting, saying 'climb up, there is a tidal wave coming.' "
Scanning the normally gentle waters of the Andaman Sea, they soon found themselves facing a roaring, rapidly advancing wave twice as high as the two-story villa where they sought refuge.
"I was carrying Ragnar in my arms, but we were all flushed out of the room through the concrete wall," Mr. Bang-Ericsson recounted. "We were floating at a speed that I was later told was at 30 kilometers an hour. We were struggling with a lot of debris, garden furniture, trees, cars, electric cables."
From this maelstrom, someone pulled Mr. Bang-Ericsson into the safety of a tree's upper branches.
Meanwhile, his wife was clinging to a floating door, essentially body boarding for over a mile until the force of the wave finally died on the edge of a rubber plantation.
"There were cars in the water, houses floating next to me, refrigerators, beds," Ms. Bang-Ericsson said, recalling her desperate effort not to be crushed by floating debris. "Then I saw an electricity pole started crashing down in front of me. I thought now I am going to get strangled. Then, everything went black."
Twenty-four hours later, the husband and wife were reunited, suffering from relatively minor scrapes and bruises. Since then, they have been searching for their son.
"Please help us find little Ragnar!!" appeals their one-page flier, posted everywhere, from Phuket's international airport to Buddhist temples being used as morgues. From the flier grins a big-boned, square-headed Scandinavian boy, a perpetual-motion machine caught in a slightly blurred image.
"Sometimes, I think it unfair that we survived," Ms. Bang-Ericsson, a Norwegian, said. "It is not fair that he is alone. There must be a reason that we are alive."
Moving quickly to steady his wife, Mr. Bang-Ericsson said firmly, "We just want to know if someone has seen him or can give us information about his destiny."
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