----- 3 stars ----- The Frontier Couple Who Chose Death Over Life Apart / Outside Solovyov later told me that, when he saw the little boat crammed with art that March day, he should have known. For years, the couple had talked with close friends about their intention to die together when Pam’s time came. She did not wish to see her disease through; Eric did not plan to live without his wife. But it was one thing to talk about this in the abstract. It was another for Solovyov to stand in the harbor and realize that his friend had prepared his last exhibition. “He brought everything with him,” he said. The show went well. Bealer’s work sold briskly, as it always does, and when he motored out of the harbor and headed home, his boat was a great deal lighter. [...] Once they got settled, Eric turned to an important issue. He needed a new press to create his prints, but getting that kind of item delivered to a rural homestead would be a major challenge. Enlisting a friend to put a 60-year-old, 1,149-pound Vandercook #3 on a barge from Seattle was the easy part. The barge, carrying everything from food supplies to construction materials to hay bales, along with one 1939 printing press, arrived as winter loomed. With help from a crane and a forklift at Pelican’s loading dock, Eric was able to wrestle the press into his skiff. He putted home carefully, then, over several strenuous hours, managed to get the press from boat to dock to dry land, and finally into the house. He later described the operation as “a master of orchestration involving me, my wife, a strong neighbor, some slab lumber, four metal rods, and two come-alongs.” The episode was vintage Eric: achieving something others might consider extraordinary through resourcefulness and ingenuity while keeping a sense of humor about it all. [...] Their isolated lifestyle might suggest standoffishness, but Eric was warm and charismatic, with a presence that swept you up in his energy. (“I love your aura!” he would declare to a new friend at Pelican’s pub, Rose’s, before settling down to draw them.) Pam balanced Eric’s hyperactivity with a calm reticence. In his art, Eric often depicted his wife as a bear, cool and dignified, and himself as a squirrel, manic in comparison. “I’d never known a couple more in love,” Kate Landers, a close friend and a year-round Pelican resident, told me. “In love, and a part of each other.” They were “just… fused,” another local said. Sharing goals and dreams, but bringing their own skills and temperament to the life they were building together, they balanced each other perfectly. [...] There were no loose ends. The troopers wrapped up their investigation, and after a court proceeding, the Bealers were legally presumed dead. Still, the people who loved them were left to grapple with their choices. Even those who’d known about their intentions hadn’t expected the Bealers to leave so soon. At least one friend was angry; others were simply sad. Most people were broadly understanding of Pam’s situation but less sure about Eric’s decision. “He should have stayed around,” says one friend, who’d tried to talk Eric out of the idea years earlier. “But then again, I don’t really know what a soul mate is. I don’t have a soul mate.”
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----- 3 stars ----- The Frontier Couple Who Chose Death Over Life Apart / Outside Solovyov later told me that, when he saw the little boat crammed with art that March day, he should have known. For years, the couple had talked with close friends about their intention to die together when Pam’s time came. She did not wish to see her disease through; Eric did not plan to live without his wife. But it was one thing to talk about this in the abstract. It was another for Solovyov to stand in the harbor and realize that his friend had prepared his last exhibition. “He brought everything with him,” he said. The show went well. Bealer’s work sold briskly, as it always does, and when he motored out of the harbor and headed home, his boat was a great deal lighter. [...] Once they got settled, Eric turned to an important issue. He needed a new press to create his prints, but getting that kind of item delivered to a rural homestead would be a major challenge. Enlisting a friend to put a 60-year-old, 1,149-pound Vandercook #3 on a barge from Seattle was the easy part. The barge, carrying everything from food supplies to construction materials to hay bales, along with one 1939 printing press, arrived as winter loomed. With help from a crane and a forklift at Pelican’s loading dock, Eric was able to wrestle the press into his skiff. He putted home carefully, then, over several strenuous hours, managed to get the press from boat to dock to dry land, and finally into the house. He later described the operation as “a master of orchestration involving me, my wife, a strong neighbor, some slab lumber, four metal rods, and two come-alongs.” The episode was vintage Eric: achieving something others might consider extraordinary through resourcefulness and ingenuity while keeping a sense of humor about it all. [...] Their isolated lifestyle might suggest standoffishness, but Eric was warm and charismatic, with a presence that swept you up in his energy. (“I love your aura!” he would declare to a new friend at Pelican’s pub, Rose’s, before settling down to draw them.) Pam balanced Eric’s hyperactivity with a calm reticence. In his art, Eric often depicted his wife as a bear, cool and dignified, and himself as a squirrel, manic in comparison. “I’d never known a couple more in love,” Kate Landers, a close friend and a year-round Pelican resident, told me. “In love, and a part of each other.” They were “just… fused,” another local said. Sharing goals and dreams, but bringing their own skills and temperament to the life they were building together, they balanced each other perfectly. [...] There were no loose ends. The troopers wrapped up their investigation, and after a court proceeding, the Bealers were legally presumed dead. Still, the people who loved them were left to grapple with their choices. Even those who’d known about their intentions hadn’t expected the Bealers to leave so soon. At least one friend was angry; others were simply sad. Most people were broadly understanding of Pam’s situation but less sure about Eric’s decision. “He should have stayed around,” says one friend, who’d tried to talk Eric out of the idea years earlier. “But then again, I don’t really know what a soul mate is. I don’t have a soul mate.”