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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?"

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?" Harold Stephens - Adventurer - Expat In another article in this issue we have excerpts from Harold Stephens book At Home in Asia: Expatriates in Southeast Asia and Their Stories. Harold Stephens is a well known expatriate in Asia having written thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and 19 books. He is currently writing travel articles for the Bangkok Post and we can assure you that you will not find better more interesting writing anywhere.  We asked Harold to supply some information about himself for our magazine. He replied with the a copy of the Foreward to his book Asian Portraits. The Foreward is written by Denis Grey, the Bangkok bureau chief for AP. The book is being reprinted by Harold's publisher Wolfenden who intend to bring it out again in a few months under the title "The Strange Disappearance Of Jim Thompson And Other Stories Of Expatriates Living In SouthEast Asia" To read Harolds unique travel writing view: - www.bangkokpost.net/travel - Purchase a copy Online  At Home in Asia: Expatriates in Southeast Asia and Their Stories - Click Here -

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 in fact 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.
 

The Third Sea "It became an emotional thing for me. I had complete, honest trust in that boat, I could do anything with it. It became so much of a living part of me and then when I wasn't there when it wentdown: I feel like I deserted it, because I could have saved it. When I went back to California, I left it with two people in Honolulu, and a hurricane came up and they left it with the portals open and it just went over and broke up." From a profile, "Harold Stephens - A Modern Day Marco Polo" by Scott Murray - Click Here -

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.
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