Next Year in Bangkok

Louis is an interesting guy. I have hardly spoken to him before; we worked together for a few months, but he keeps very much to himself.

Nevertheless, I got him talking quite openly recently.

Louis is intensely interested in the Second World War; we were able to talk a fair bit about that. His father had most of his face blown away with the Canadian forces in Italy. After that, Louis says, he could not find work and did not want to live. The family grew up poor. Louis remembers scavenging fish heads and entrails from the docks for family suppers.

Louis managed to get a BA, and then decided to travel around the world. He shipped on a freighter, got as far as Genoa, but opportunities were limited for Canadian sailors. So he heard about and got a working visa for Australia, easy to get in those days, and worked in a Melbourne hotel with his brother. Eventually, they made enough money to travel through Southeast Asia and India; so they quit the hotel and harnessed up the backpacks.

Both fell in love with Thailand. They continued on through India, but both ended up there at the end of the expedition. “Thailand” means “land of the free,” and it is serious about the name. Thais value their freedom a great deal.

And this, I realize, is the theme of Louis’s life. Like many, maybe most men, his ideal is freedom. Real freedom, not paper freedom: wearing no man’s collar, being beholden to no one, being free to do what you feel is right day by day.

Louis fell into the teaching of English, for it was a way to stay in Thailand. For sixteen years, he lived and taught there, and was happy.

Both Louis and his brother married Thai women. Now needing to support a wife, Louis decided he needed more professional training. He and his wife moved to Montreal for a TESL certificate; then to Carbondale Illinois and Southern Illinois University for a Master’s.

Now they are in the Persian Gulf. But Louis’s strategy is to stay only a few years. With care, they can make and invest enough to retire in Thailand, in their early fifties. Louis is counting the days.

Escaping to sea, running off with the circus, signing on with the railroad, trucking the empty roads of night, owning your own business, being a cowboy and sleeping out on the range—it’s every boy’s dream, and it’s all about being free. Women do not seem to feel this need, and do not seem to understand how deep it is in men.

Most men want freedom more than money, comfort, prestige or security.

It is the dream Western civilization was founded on. Those Greeks who left their island posts to trade in far seas—they were seeking freedom. It is no accident that democracy and philosophy developed in Athens and the islands, not in the inland empire of Sparta. In ancient Palestine, the lamp of freedom was nursed by the shepherds, and all those prepared to leave settled places for the deserts—most notably the prophets, who did this to preserve their freedom of speech.

Freedom was also the essential possession of the desert nomads and traders who founded Islam, and the woodland hermits who founded Buddhism and Hinduism.

Again, it was the northern sea peoples, of Denmark, Sweden, England, Iceland, who invented parliamentary democracy and the idea of human rights. The same quest for freedom is personified by Don Quixote and his ideal of the knight errant.

It is in turn the dream America was founded on. It is the dream of the open frontier.


My hat is off to Louis. I raise to him a glass, and wish him “Next year in Bangkok.” I admire a guy who has sacrificed other things for personal freedom more than I admire a rich and powerful man.