The Man You Wished You'd Met

TUCSON — For years, my Facebook profile mug was a way younger me, mustache like a dead raccoon and too much black hair whipping in high wind at the brass and teak wheel of The Third Sea off Malaysia. In fact, I’m a chickenshit sailor. But Steve could make anyone fearless.

A stroke finally felled Harold Stephens in Bangkok at 96. Perhaps the best way to capture his outsized life is to start in the middle, go back to the beginning and then end with the end. I wrote this forward in 1995 to one his multiple adventure books, At Home in Asia. 

“As a foreign correspondent, my job involves the usual upheavals, small wars and workaday mayhem. Every so often, however, the mail includes a pleasant surprise which takes me away from that boring routine; a letter from Harold Stephens, filled with some real excitement. 

“You can spot Steve's letters from across the room: The address is written in urgent printed characters, with the no-nonsense, slightly askew strokes of a man who has struck gold and is racing to catch the last burro to Eureka. The envelope seems to twitch and quiver from all the energy within.  

“I remember one which reached me in Singapore, full of the usual chatty news: ‘chased by crocodiles...,’ ‘capsized off Tioman Island ...,’ ‘pirates nearly got us near the Celebes....’ At the end, when he added, ‘Wish you were here,’ and I thought: me, too.  

“If it was merely a matter of voracious reptiles, shipwrecks or killers afloat, I'd bet on Steve, hands down. What always struck me was the tone of the letters. Always humble, courtly, full of derring-do but absent of bravado. But this is only to be expected. Adventure is Harold Stephens' natural state. To boast of his exploits would be like bragging about breathing.

“A product of long nights with Conrad on a Western Pennsylvania farm, he grew up with a code of honor and a sense of ingenuous wonder. He is burly and broad-shouldered — in ‘Mutiny on the Bounty,’ he doubled for Brando when the action got intense — but his buckles don't swash. Handsome, with eyes that, in fact, twinkle, he is no lady killer. His code in that regard is more Sir Walter than Errol Flynn. 

“Steve can give you Lord Jim by heart: ‘He saw himself saving people from sinking ships ... cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line, or as a lonely castaway, barefoot and half-naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation.’ 

“He can tell you about every one of Maugham's rubber planters and district officers. He is always after something that eludes normal men. If someone tells him a prehistoric, enigmatic Big Kneecap is running loose in the Burmese backcountry, he'll be off before the informant finishes his sentence. If he hears of an ancient Greek olive oil convoy lost in the Mariana Trench, he'll head out with snorkel and swim fins. Unlike quixotic amateurs, Steve most likely will bring back the kneecap and olive pits. 

“One day Steve announced to friends that he would build a vessel to take him on his odysseys to forgotten archipelagos and against currents that others avoid as a bad idea. It would be made of cement. Of course, we thought. Months later, we were spending our weekends slapping concrete across a transom. 

“Steve's ‘Third Sea’ must have done a million miles, its low-slung pirate-brown schooner hull crashing the reefs in every lost corner of the Southern Hemisphere. He racked up

adventures even he hadn't dreamed of, from the nastiest straits of the Philippines to Cook's favorite waters across the Pacific. 

“One day, in another of these letters, the news was bad. The Third Sea was blown onto the rocks off Hawaii in a hurricane (he wasn’t there; a stand-in was skippering her). Even Lord Jim couldn't have saved her; it was a hell of a blow. If there was ever a time for self-pity, this was it. Not a trace. Steve had lost a love of his life, but he had others. 

“Once I tried to write a book about Steve. But who would believe it? Anyway, he writes his own books, and they're good ones. My notes spill out of a large crate. Steve lied about his age at 17 to join the Marines so he could fight in the Pacific…He rode a motorcycle across Australia, a jeep across Russia and - was it a pogo stick across the Arctic? 

“Occasionally, word slipped out about his affairs of the heart. A gentleman, he does not talk much of these matters. Only later, for instance, his family back home discovered why he returned from Tahiti with a cast on his arm. A Tahitian woman, distraught at his leaving, drove him off a cliff. 

“Once Steve was married to a woman of Philadelphia high society, with a respectable job in intelligence. The marriage ended. That was when he went to Tahiti. A ranking officer tried to talk sense into him. He invited Steve home to a family dinner and sat him down to watch a television series called, ‘Adventures in Paradise,’ to explain the ridiculous Hollywood romanticizing of a dull reality. Soon afterward, Steve was in the cast of the series. And in paradise. 

“He now lives among the redwoods in Northern California, in what ought to be a tame environment. But this is Harold Stephens. When I telephoned him just before delivering these lines to his publishers, he and his wife, Michelle, an island girl herself, reported an earthquake that very morning, and the rains were causing havoc. The Eel River was overflowing its banks and flood waters raged all around, carrying off power lines and outing the roads. Normal people had evacuated. 

“But even more than he amasses adventures, he collects characters. He is drawn to people who distinguish themselves from the chairs they sit in. And anyone in that category is drawn to him... At Home in Asia…is a fat, rich sheaf of those Steve letters, to be savored and treasured and kept at hand for long nights when the ordinary world most of us know is just not enough.”

That, being a book forward, left some things out. In the Marines, he fought in Okinawa before reupping to a liaison unit attached to Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists in China. Mao Zedong’s troops overran his position and locked him up near the coast. He escaped and swam. Happily, a trading junk found him before the sharks did.

Back home, not eager to mill steel, he reenlisted. The Marines sent him to Paris as a security guard and then aide to the ambassador. He went back to study at Georgetown University and join the National Security Agency. But he was too free a spirit for government work.  

These days, anyone with plastic can be an adventurer. Steve did it on a dime, taking odd jobs, stringing for magazines, enlisting friends and finding sponsors. That’s how, with $1,000 to spare in 1967, he circumnavigated the globe, 24,000 miles in a fortified Land Cruiser.

His classic book, Who Needs a Road?, takes readers along: a freighter to Europe, then overland into southern Europe, across North Africa and the Middle East, up the old Silk Road, across Southeast Asia, a boat from Bali to Australia, then another to Panama for a not-leisurely drive back to New York.

I met him a few years later in Singapore when we helped Hans Hoeffer start his innovative Insight Guides. Steve was doing Malaysia the hard way. He had built the wooden mold for a 71-foot, two-mast ferro-concrete schooner and needed help troweling cement over steel rebars.

My day job was regional Associated Press bureau chief. At night, my then wife, Randi Slaughter, and I volunteered for hard labor. Finally, with great celebration, a shipyard crane hoisted up our motley crew’s handiwork, flipped it over and deposited it into the water. 

Randi and I, leaving at dawn for a new assignment to Argentina, were ready to party. But Steve had neglected to mention the hull would leak like a colander until the concrete swelled. We bailed until three hours before our flight. I still have those cutoff Levi’s, museum pieces.

Robert Stedman, Steve’s nephew but also what amounts to fourth son, along with brother, best friend and first mate, is a publisher in Singapore. I asked him for his thoughts.

“I’ve never met someone as energetic, enthusiastic, intelligent, happy, tough, creative, wonderful and inspiring as Steve,” he wrote. “Just being in the same room with him brightened your spirit…He had a magical ability to positively influence people. He was to shape and mold ideas and thoughts into reality. He accomplished everything he ever wanted to do.”

Once the Third Sea’s engine died trying to outrun a typhoon in the South Pacific. Robert told Steve it needed major machine work and new parts and said it can’t be fixed. “Can’t” was not in Steve’s lexicon. He replied, “I guess we’ll just give up and die.” Soon after, the engine running again.

Steve made dreams happen, Robert wrote. “Drive around the world in a Toyota Land Cruiser, no problem! Carve out a cattle ranch in the Mojave Desert, you bet!... He was never depressed, discouraged or downtrodden even under circumstances that were at best daunting, and at times seemingly hopeless. He always looked up and always saw the good in everything.”

I once caught up with Steve in Miranda, California, deep in the redwoods. One of his sons was growing pot in planters slung under the trees. Dope was not his thing, but neither was judgment. His kitchen was overrun by a litter of newborn black kittens. 

Odious Beast, my noble Belgian shepherd, a fan dog of Steve’s in Singapore, had died. One kitten followed me around. Steve painted a skunk stripe on her back with typewriter whiteout to be sure it was the same one. Carmen Miranda Redwood headed south perched on my shoulder and stayed through nine lives for 18 years. But that’s another story.

I last saw Steve in Bangkok. His shelves sagged under copies of his two dozen books. He’d written about 4,500 magazine and newspaper pieces. In his ‘80s, he was well-padded with Michelle’s cooking, and I figured he was done with the road. Sure.

At 93, he finally wangled a visa to travel with a friend across hermetic Myanmar, Burma, south to north. On the road, suspicious army officers locked them indefinitely in a foul tiny cell. His friend was terrified – of his captors and of Michelle in case the worst happened. Steve, meantime, was smiling. He had a story.

In November 2019, Steve’s Wikipedia page notes plans to build a new schooner in Singapore to explore Asian rivers while writing a book on Bali. Oh, and to outfit a jeep to cross China from Mongolia to Tibet. If that sounds like a lot at age 95, you probably never met Harold Stephens.