Lee Hartmann had played jokes before.
One time, the former Hooper resident told his mom, Lois Jean, that he was in a Pakistani jail. Another time, he called and said he had the Asian flu.
But something in his voice was different when he called Sunday morning from a hotel room in Phuket, Thailand.
"Mom, I don't know what's going on, but all of a sudden the lights went out and the TV went off. ... It's not raining, but the streets are covered with water," he told Lois Jean who lives on a Hooper farm with her husband, Clarence.
It was only 9:30 p.m. Christmas night in Nebraska and Lois Jean who'd been asleep hadn't heard about the massive earthquake that struck beneath the Indian Ocean off Sumatra. Nor did she know about the quake-spawned tsunamis.
Even so, she thought a tidal wave might have hit Thailand, where her 32-year-old son has lived for years.
Lee's home is in Bangkok, but he was celebrating Christmas with his girlfriend, Kob, and her 10-year-old daughter, Neu, at a resort hotel in Phuket.
The evening before, he'd been on the beach enjoying the pleasant surroundings. Three hours after he first called his mom, Lee telephoned again this time to tell her that he was safe.
Back in the Midwest, the Hartmanns couldn't imagine what had happened.
"Then the next morning, it all started falling together," Lois Jean said.
That's when the Hartmanns learned about the magnitude 9 quake the most powerful in four decades. In the next couple of days, Associated Press reports would tell about walls of water traveling at 500 mph that crashed into the region's shorelines sweeping away people and fishing villages. By this morning, the death toll had climbed to more than 40,000 people in 11 countries.
The Hartmanns reached their son by telephone Monday morning. He had just walked into his apartment in Bangkok.
In an e-mail to family members, he wrote, "Made it back to Bangkok safe. The airport was a madhouse and full of people trying to get out. My flight was delayed and it took me eight hours door to door for a one-hour, 20-minute flight."
Lois Jean said Lee had stayed in a room on the hotel's second floor. He, his girlfriend and her daughter had escaped by walking down a dark hall, crawling out a window and walking on rooftops and car tops to reach dry land. Kob and Neu took a motorscooter taxi to their home in the mountains, about an hour from the resort. Lee returned to the hotel.
"I couldn't walk in through the hallway on the first floor of my hotel. It is full of debris and beach chairs," he wrote in the e-mail. "... I had to crawl up to a second floor balcony and climb through a window to get my golf clubs out this morning. I didn't lose anything or even get a cut, which is very lucky."
His girlfriend wasn't quite so fortunate. Lee found her car, parked around the corner from the hotel. A pickup truck had landed atop the car.
That was only part of the devastation.
"It was eerie walking around and when I would see a single sandal, handbag or piece of clothing, it made (me) wonder what happened to the owners and where they are now," he wrote.
Hartmann's parents are glad he is safe.
"He escaped with his life for which we are very grateful," Lois Jean said.
The Hartmanns also are pleased for a little bit of good timing.
Lee, who works for agricultural equipment manufacturer Chore-Time Brock of Milford, Ind., was scheduled to go to Indonesia in a couple of weeks.
They're glad he didn't go sooner. Otherwise he might have been in Indonesia a place hard hit by the tsunamis.
For now, the Hartmanns are busy fielding telephone calls and talking to news media.
But Lois Jean plans to tell her son one thing in the near future: He'd better never call and try to play a practical joke on her again.
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