A Choice Story by Matt Hainstock
T
here are moments in life that shine into that liminal space between who we were and who we may be. In those spaces are opportunities to sense the world in new ways.
rounding us had the kind of primal beauty Eric etched into his woodblock prints. As the waves crashed with their unending rhythmic booms beyond the breaks, Pam told me in a calm and decisive way she no
The choices we make are powerful. Camus said we might choose each day whether we want to step into the arena of life or remove ourselves from it. People suffering from chronic pain see the world differently. Pam Bealer had to live with the daily pain of multiple sclerosis, and she eventually decided to choose to end Letting Go by Eric Bealer (courtesy Sitka Conservation Society) that struggle rather longer feared death. “When it is my time, than prolong her Earth-Life. She told me I will go.” She meant it. she had made peace with that decision about three weeks before she and her husband Eric, “by their own free choice This conversation with Pam and and will,” committed suicide. Eric Bealer occurred when I traveled to We were in the homemade wooden Greentop Harbor on Yakobi Island with dory that Eric had made, traveling over my dad in August 2018. We had come cold water filled with kelp and the chop to visit a cabin that my great-great-uncle of waves in Greentop Harbor on the Joe Scott had carved into the Tongass western side of Yakobi Island, located in National Forest on land that had become the Alexander Archipelago not far from the West Chichagof-Yakobi Wilderness the mouth of Glacier Bay. Eric Bealer was in 1980. Like the Bealers, he had come an exceptional artist, his wood engravto Alaska to live an authentic life, a life ings—inspired by the elemental forces centered on his connection to the land. that surrounded him—were well-known He had been born in Iowa in 1902, and much sought-after in the galleries of and the family story goes that in the early southeast Alaska. The rocky cliffs sur40
The heartbeat of Cascadia
1930s, Joe and his father had a falling out, leading to Joe not returning to Iowa until his father passed away in the 1960s. Joe was known for holding a grudge for a lifetime. Though he seemed a hard man on the exterior, Joe was soft-hearted and social with those he trusted. Monthly, when he went to the nearby village of Pelican to get his mail, including his hometown newspaper, The Maquoketa Sentinel Press, he dropped off flowers he grew for people in town. Greentop Harbor is still home to three cabins; Joe’s and two others. One is managed by the National Forest, you can rent it for $40 a night. According to the logbook, about six to ten people rent it per year, mostly kayakers and the occasional wandering Joe Scott relative. There is a third cabin between Joe’s cabin and the Greentop Forest Service Cabin, last owned by Pam and Eric Bealer. When Joe built his cabin in the 1940s Alaska was the frontier of America, not yet a state, though it has been home to the Tlingit and other indigenous people since time immemorial. Tlingit history is the root human history of Yakobi Island, of Sitka on Baranof Island, and Southeastern Alaska. >>> Go to
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