Two on the Rocks started life as an account of a youthful adventure. Newlyweds, the author and his bride signed a two-year contract in 1952 to teach school in the Territory of Alaska. Ultimately, they found themselves marooned on Little Diomede Island in the middle of the Bering Straight ... the frozen Bering Sea to the south, the endless ice flows of the Arctic Ocean to the North, a Cold War Soviet military contingent watching their every move from another pile of rocks to the west, and mainland Alaska thirty impossible miles to the east.

Responsible for the island’s one-room school, they were soon involved in every facet of village life – some happy, some comical, some serious, some tragic.

Returning to the Lower Forty-Eight, the couple raised a family, and grew older if not wiser. Forty years flew by, and they decided to return to "their" island – another adventure appended to the original book as Epilogue 2.

Gerald F. Carlson was born on Christmas Day, 1925. A high school dropout at sixteen, he was working as a shipyard electrician in Vancouver, Washington, when, turning eighteen, he was invited to enter the military, along with millions of others. Garnering a G.E.D. high school diploma at war’s end, he enrolled in college under the G.I. Bill. This led to the teacher’s certificate that took him and his bride on their Arctic adventure to Little Diomede Island, 150 miles northwest of Nome, Alaska.

On the island a year, the Carlsons returned to the Lower Forty-Eight where Mr. Carlson taught in public schools and worked summers as a National Park Ranger.

Retired and footloose, the couple returned to Little Diomede forty years after leaving it, another adventure chronicled in Epilogue 2 of Two on the Rocks.

Our return from the hunt was marked by an incident that could have had serious consequences. As we approached the Diomede Islands from the south, a blanket of fog moved in from the Arctic Ocean and blotted them from view. We were about six miles from our destination at the time and, because of our heavy loads, were moving slowly. Not long after the islands disappeared, the shroud of fog moved in on our boats, which had bunched together as the cloud bank approached. And there we sat. Where we had been basking in beautiful sunshine, we were now ensnared in a suffocating mist like that on the top bench in a Turkish steam bath. The only difference was in temperature – the steam in the bathhouse being devilishly hot while our fog was icy cold.

Without landmarks on which to take bearings and no compass with which to hold a course, we were literally blind. We continued moving slowly to maintain steerage, but in what direction was anybody’s guess. Hours seemed to pass, and I was almost positive that we had missed the islands and were blindly on our way to the North Pole. Then, when we had just about decided to change our tack, rocks appeared magically out of the mist. One of the islands for certain, but which one?

Cutting the engines, we listened. Nothing reached our ears but complete silence, broken only by the slap of waves on the rocks. We studied the boulders intently, but nothing looked familiar. Suddenly voices cut through the fog, muffled and far away. "Russians!" someone in the boats exclaimed in panic, and Tom Omak, sitting directly in front of me, reached for his rifle. I felt like a western saloonkeeper caught, with nothing but his apron, between two desperados ready to shoot it out. Holding my breath, I waited for the world to explode.