By PAUL FATTIG
Mail Tribune
When he was a youngster in northern Minnesota, Orcutt Frost hung a map of what was then the Alaska Territory in his bedroom.
He would look at places like the Bering Sea and wonder about the Europeans who first ventured into those uncharted waters.
"I've always been interested in travelers and adventurers who got into difficulties and had a hard time working things out," he says of that lifelong fascination with early-day explorers.
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He also edited "A Journal of a Voyage with Bering 1741-1742," a book based on the journal of Georg Wilhelm Steller published by Stanford University Press in 1988. Steller served as the doctor and naturalist aboard the ship commanded by Vitus Jonassen Bering.
About now you're probably wondering what a Danish sea captain sailing under the Russian flag has to do with Southern Oregon. Frost, 80, a retired university professor, lives in Medford with his wife, Mary, a retired elementary school teacher. They represent the fascinating human treasure trove we have in the region.
Besides, spending a cold drizzly February weekend day with a good book in front of a crackling fire is my idea of a good time. Another is being able to chat with the learned author who spent 16 years working on the Bering book, poring over journals, old maps and historical records.
"I used to think about Alaska as a child," he says. "I was always interested in reading Alaskan stories."
Hailing from Colquet, Minnesota, he earned a doctorate's degree in English from the University of Illinois where he would also meet the woman with whom he would share his life. After teaching for nine years at Willamette University in Salem he was offered a job at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage in 1963.
"We were in Salem during the Columbus Day storm," his wife recalls of that natural disaster in 1962. "We went without electricity and water for 10 or 11 days because we were out in the country. The next year we were in Alaska, living in Anchorage, four blocks from the Cook Inlet. After the '64 earthquake, we were two blocks from the inlet.
"And we went another 10 or 11 days with babies and cloth diapers and no water or electricity," she adds. "That was awful."
But she wouldn't have missed the Alaskan experience for anything.
"Alaska was a great place to go," she says. "We always had our survival gear, extra blankets in the car. Our four kids skied and skated. It was a good, hearty life for us."
Many winter days found her husband, now professor emeritus of humanities from the Anchorage university where he taught more than 30 years, skiing from their home on Turnagain Arm in Anchorage to his office at the university.
He also became one of the leading scholars on Bering and Steller. The Frosts visited Bering's burial site on the island that bears his name, the island where he died after becoming shipwrecked. They've been to Bering's birthplace in Denmark and Steller's native town in Germany.
With the help of fellow scholar Margritt A. Engel, a native of Germany, he translated Steller's journals written in Olde German.
"I see both Bering and Steller as very self-sufficient," he says. "They had to be very capable when hunting and fishing and when meeting with natives.
"I always thought Steller excelled in his talent to be welcoming and interested in native culture," he adds. "Bering was more the traditional commander in the Russian navy. He was very conscious of his position as a ruler."
Like Bering and Steller, Frost faced hardships along the way, albeit of a different nature.
"How do you support yourself as a writer in Alaska? That's always a problem," he says. Fortunately, he had a working spouse who supported him when he took time off to write his last book.
"My only requirement was that he had dinner ready when I came home at night," she says, smiling at her husband.
"We've always had a good partnership," he answers.
And good books to share on those cold drizzly February days.
Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or at pfattig@mailtribune.com
