Who
Is Harold Stephens? Foreward
to: The Strange Disappearance Of Jim Thompson And Other Stories Of Expatriates
Living In SouthEast Asia by Denis D. Gray
The
fires of youth may have burned down low. We may have reached mid-life
or even beyond. But moments come when we still dream about it: an emerald
green cove in the South Seas with our own yacht lilting at anchor; throbbing,
libido - unleashed ports - of - call; a life free of niggling bosses and
nagging children and nasty bill collectors. Yes, many people dream about
it, but Harold Stephens does it. Once upon a time, pre-1959 to be exact,
Stephens was just another one of us tropical dreamers, a teacher of English
in a Washington, D.C. private school with a wife, children, dogmatic principals
and mortgage payments. But that year he cut loose. He headed first through
Latin America and eventually found himself in that ultimate of escapist
havens: Tahiti. He had $24 to his name.
Life
since those days, Stephens recalls, could not have been better, richer
in experience or denser with excitement. Stephens can't remember how it
feels to wear a necktie, has not had to say "Yes, sir"to anyone when he
really was thinking"No way, you son-of-a-bitch,"and he has remained
a sailor-trim, handsome, mustachioed bachelor who at 50 plus looks at least
ten years younger.
How does he
do it? Let's take a year in his life, say from July 4, 1981 to July 4,
1982. On the 4th, Stephens and his seven-man crew arrived in Tahiti after
a 20-day passage from Honolulu. They spent three weeks and were given a
Tahitian farewell by 65 island dancers who came aboard his 70-foot schooner,
The Third Sea, for an all-night party.
The schooner's
9,600-mile odyssey ended 215 days later under the skyscrapers of Singapore.
En route Stephens and company made 21 anchor stops (Tongareva, Bora Bora,
Rabaul and Zamboanga to name only a few)Explored the still littered
battle fields of World War II, dove on one wreck to bring up 2,000 silver
coins, listened to tales of crusty. colourful South Pacific diehards and
even climbed a few volcanoes to keep in shape. North of New Guinea a typhoon
blew out their sails and nearly sent them to the bottom, and off Indonesia
his schooner was riddled with bullets in a hair-raising encounter with
pirates.
No sooner
had they anchored in Singapore and his sea legs steadied, Stephens was
off by air through half a dozen Asian countries and the United States,
looking into sumo wrestling in Japan, rodeo riding in Texas and the legacy
of an old friend and Gauguin-type artist Theo Meier who was ill in Northern
Thailand. The year ended with Stephens driving across the United States
with his sprightly 82-year-old mother, a trip which ended on July 4th with
an old-fashioned American Independence Day celebration in Bridgeville,
Pennsylvania, his hometown of 5,000 which he had last seen a quarter century
earlier and where the folks asked him, "Yes, that's all very interesting,
Harold, but what do you do for a living?" A fair question. How can Stephens,
one may honestly ask, maintain his kind of life short of having a rich
grandmother pass away or being on the payrolls of the CIA, KGB or the drug-smuggling
Mafia?
Stephens has
neither rich relatives nor dubious paymasters
And he doesn't
like to be called an adventurer, at least not in the cliched sense of the
word. Stephens is a very gifted, infinitely curious and highly disciplined
writer with 10 books and countless newspaper and magazine articles to his
credit, and many more dancing in his brain.
He
has also managed -through a fertile imagination and the courage of acting
on his dreams-to put his craft in the service of a lifestyle to which he
has grown eminently accustomed-and vice versa.
Take his schooner
for example. Writing magazine pieces, taking bit parts in Pacific-location
movies I "The Mutiny on the Bounty" is one, although he didn't exactly
star opposite Marlon Brando) and even signing up as a hand on island trading
boats, Stephens managed to scrape up enough money to start building The
Third Sea. He put it together in the early 1970s at the bargain basement
price of $50,000 after taking a crash course in yacht building and persuading
30-odd friends to help out in exchange for future free berths. The schooner,
which sleeps a dozen, has since saved him heaps in rent money and, more
importantly, has served as a vehicle to as well as the subject of many
of his books and stories. And when Stephens ventures from the water (he's
driven a jeep across the Soviet Union and a Toyota land cruiser around
the world, made frequent treks through the Malaysian jungles and has ridden
ponies into the Himalayas), there are plenty of editors and travel business
types ready to hand him a free airline ticket to just about anywhere.
With his "modus
operandi" cleverly plotted, Stephens can roam the world. But his true beat
and his real home is Asia and the Pacific. Asia, says Stephens, is the
last great challenge, the last adventure-and it still yields the Asian
characters a la Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham: Romantics and soldiers
of fortune, rebel souls with mysterious pasts. Artists in search of paradise,
men and women who like Stephens have found in Asia a niche, a life, a fulfillment
of some personal quest. "You often get people claiming that these characters
have disappeared," Stephens likes to say. "But they haven't." In other
times things moved more slowly so these people stood out. On a six-week
sea voyage you got to know everyone on board. Today, you may be sitting
next to the most amazing character on a jet plane but barely have the chance
to exchange a few words."
Stephens takes
time to know people. His lifestyle, again, allows it. He'll miss an airflight
because he gets too deeply immersed in someone's story. He'll spend a few
extra days at anchor in some remote outpost to catch up on what's been
happening to an old friend. Some of these people-as exciting and romantic
as the landscape of Asia--appear in Asian Portraits. Many, like Stephens,
are expatriates because the writer can best understand their problems and
longings. Some have become close, personal friends. None are portrayed
without genuine empathy.
Stephens was
working on this edition of Asian Portraits the last time I saw him-a rover
tumed disciplined writer, anchored to a typewriter for several weeks in
the home of a Bangkok friend. From his writing table Stephens could look
out over a lush, tropical garden and a pond filled with graceful Victoria
lotuses.
"Listen, Steve,
for this introduction I think I should put in something about where you
go from here, " I told him. For a few moment Stephens fell silent and pensive.
"From time to time I think about settling down and getting married. But
after a while a woman will ask me: 'How long are you going to do it, Steve?
I mean, how long are you going to live like this?"'
He soon answered
the question. He was off again in his mind's eye, talking as enthusiastically
as a youngster packing for his first summer camp about the vast, little-known
stretches of the Indonesian archipelago, helping his game warden friend
save the rhinos of the Malaysian jungle from extinction, about taking The
Third Sea up China's Yangtze River . . . I can see it now. Stephens and
I are meeting again in some comer of Asia years from now. I have
dreamed my last dream of cutting loose and he's a little stooped, with
much grey in his hair and a lot less robustness in his stride. But the
The Third Sea--or its successor--is being readied for another voyage. Stephens,
like the aging Ulysses of Tennyson's poem, means to drink life to the lees
until he casts his last anchor in the Happy Isles.
Denis D.
Gray Associated
Press Bureau Chief Bangkok.
The
fires of youth may have burned down low. We may have reached mid-life
or even beyond. But moments come when we still dream about it: an emerald
green cove in the South Seas with our own yacht lilting at anchor; throbbing,
libido - unleashed ports - of - call; a life free of niggling bosses and
nagging children and nasty bill collectors. Yes, many people dream about
it, but Harold Stephens does it. Once upon a time, pre-1959 to be exact,
Stephens was just another one of us tropical dreamers, a teacher of English
in a Washington, D.C. private school with a wife, children, dogmatic principals
and mortgage payments. But that year he cut loose. He headed first through
Latin America and eventually found himself in that ultimate of escapist
havens: Tahiti. He had $24 to his name.
