SEQUIM — Mary Beth Beuke, beach wanderer, turned her time on the sand into a business.
She’s a well-traveled collector of sea glass, the salt-polished gem that washes up in shades of blue, green, pink and beyond.
And tonight, Beuke and her small company, West Coast Sea Glass, will receive exposure she’s hoped for — in the midst of a difficult time in her life.
“Evening Magazine,” KING-TV’s Northwest-lifestyle program, will air a feature about Beuke and the beach at 7:30 tonight.
The producers of the show recently learned of her new book, The Ultimate Guide to Sea Glass, published earlier this year on Skyhorse press, and “they called us,” Beuke said of the production crew who came out to Sequim last month.
“Myself and the gals who work with me have a dream list,” she added, “and an ‘Evening Magazine’-type show is on it.”
Beuke, 50, is known around Western Washington for her appearances at festivals and art shows.
She plans to watch the program while in Seattle at the University of Washington Medical Center, where she underwent surgery for colon cancer last Thursday.
She also went through radiation and chemotherapy in Seattle for most of the summer.
So when “Evening Magazine” contacted her in August, she asked for a few weeks to get back on her feet.
In early September, she got out there on the beach with the production crew, spending a day seeking sea glass, teaching her guests about its origins, showing them some of the museum-quality pieces in her Sequim studio and demonstrating her jewelry-making methods.
She took the producers to a Port Townsend-area beach, but neither Beuke nor the program will let on exactly which one.
She doesn’t want beachcombers flocking to a particular spot looking for the rare pieces seen on “Evening Magazine.”
And really, when it comes to sea glass, you never know what you will find on a given stretch of sand.
The September sun shone brightly on Beuke and her guests, so she figures they thought: This is the life, strolling by the shore, water lapping at your feet.
“It was a perfect day,” said Beuke, a former Oregonian who has lived in Sequim for 18 years.
“The best part of it was calling that a workday: getting to essentially spend hours on end on the beach and doing art in our studio.
“The funny thing was that the producer thought I could just take them to any beach,” she added, “and we would find gorgeous sea glass.”
But one has to do things like check the tide tables, Beuke said, to make sure the conditions are optimum and “we didn’t get skunked,” as she calls it.
Running a sea glass business also requires countless hours at the computer, of course, plus time in the car driving to the silversmithing studio in Tacoma.
Beuke works with two staff people, Lindsay Furber in Tacoma and Teresa Crecelius in Sequim, on jewelry production and marketing.
She’s also kept busy by her three children: 12-year-old twins Emma and Blaise and 17-year-old Elise — “my sunshine and my joy.”
Facing cancer, she said, has been “the hardest thing in my life.”
Publishing her book and having “Evening Magazine” call have been “really nice little slices of light,” she added, “in a really difficult journey.”
Beuke expects her recovery to take two months — so she plans to join Sequim’s First Friday Art Walk on Dec. 5.
“The Sunshine Cafe [135 W. Washington St.] is going to transform into an art studio” so she and her sea glass pieces can reappear.
Beuke was released from UW Medical Center’s intensive care unit Sunday. She moved into a private room, where she heard from “Evening Magazine” and was able to send text messages to a reporter late Tuesday afternoon about the feature to air tonight.
She has begun physical and occupational therapy and is doing well, according to her page on www.CaringBridge.org.
“Great things keep happening,” Beuke said the day before her surgery.
“It’s all good.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
