Education of a Wandering Man

1 IT WAS MAY 14. In a few days my class back in Jamestown, North Dakota would be graduating from high school, and I was in Singapore. The date is one of the few I know from those knockabout years, simply because I had the good sense to write it on the inside cover of a book I bought at the shop of Muhammed Dulfakir on the corner of High Street. The book was Kipling'sDepartmental Ditties, and my reason for buying it was that I had forgotten a line or two from a poem I liked to recite, "The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House." During those years I often recited poetry in bunkhouses in mining or lumber camps, and in ship's fo'c'sles. It was usually the verse of Robert W. Service or Rudyard Kipling, but there was a lot of poetry floating around written for, and often by, the kind of men we were, occasionally printed but usually passed from memory to memory. On that day several of my shipmates had gathered around a table or two in the Maypole Bar, a place no doubt long forgotten. Such men as "Hans, the blue-eyed Dane" of Kipling's poem would have known it, and probably British soldiers stationed in town. It was a nondescript bar, convenient to the waterfront. This is not the story of how I came to be in Singapore. That will be told elsewhere. This is a story of an adventure in education, pursued not under the best of conditions. The idea of education has been tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand. Today you can buy theDialoguesof Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon'sDecline and Fall of the Roman Empirefor the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline. Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That's absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places. I read on buses, trains, and planes. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long? Byron'sDon JuanI read on an Arab dhow sailing north from Aden up the Red Sea to Port Tewfik on the Suez Canal. Boswell'sLife of Samuel JacksonI read while broke and on the beach in San Pedro. In Singapore, I came upon a copy ofThe Annalsand Antiquities of Rajahstanby James Tod. It was in the library of a sort of YMCA for seamen, the name of which I've forgotten but which any British sailor of the time would remember, for the British had established them in many ports, for sailors ashore. At that time I could no more than skim the James Tod book, reading only a few chapters before I was off to sea again. But a few years ago I located a secondhand copy in a bookstore in Greenwich Village and it now rests on a shelf in my own library, a source for several planned books. A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination. My life may not be great to others, but to me it has been one of steady progression, never dull, often exciting, often hungry, tired, and lonely, but always learning. Somewhere back down the years I decided, or my nature decided for me, that I would be a teller of stories. Decisions had to be made and there was nobody but me to make them. My course altered a number of times but never deviated from the destination I had decided upoL'Amour, Louis is the author of 'Education of a Wandering Man' with ISBN 9780553286526 and ISBN 0553286528.