PORT ANGELES — There’s the pretty award. And then there is a long-lasting reward.
Both came to Bill Kindler this year. The midwesterner-turned-Pacific Northwesterner has been and done a lot in his 69 years, but there are two activities that continue to fill his life with beauty: flyfishing and wooden boat building.
Kindler, who shares his home near the Elwha River with Trudy, his wife of 48 years, waited a long time for this part of his life. A native of Columbus, Ohio, he came out to Bellingham and Western Washington State College in the early 1960s to study chemistry. Next, it was a graduate degree at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis.; where one night, he found the right book.
“I was supposed to be in the lab,” he remembers. Instead, “I was in the recreation library, where I picked up a book on fly fishing. I don’t know why.”
Kindler fell in love with the pastime, but he didn’t get to give himself over to it. From 1970 on, he worked in research and sales in the pulp and paper industry, with Crown Zellerbach and then Rayonier in Washington, California, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Louisiana and Georgia.
He and Trudy, a high school home economics teacher, raised two children: Tom and Kim, who each have three children of their own now.
And Kindler dreamed of the day when he would retire. He dreamed of building wooden boats, fishing crystalline lakes and streams, of hiking the high mountains.
A little more than a decade ago, Kindler finished working. He put in his final years in Jesup, Ga., departing from that humid place in 2001, after Trudy had already moved to the Olympic Peninsula. They had already come out here to find a piece of land together; Trudy had overseen the building of not just their home, but also the workshop where boats would be born.
“People say that when you retire, you go through a period of adjustment. I did: for about 20 minutes,” Kindler quipped.
In Port Angeles, Kindler soon met — and reconnected with — kindred spirits. He joined the Olympic Peninsula Fly Fishers, a club involved in Project Healing Waters, an organization that reaches out to wounded war veterans at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Pierce County.
Fishing outings, fly-tying sessions and gifts of handmade tool kits are among the ways the Project Healing Waters volunteers connect with the soldiers, some of whom learn to fish with prosthetic hands. Others who suffer from post-traumatic stress have also come out to the North Olympic Peninsula for peaceful days on the water.
Kindler, for his part, has long found inspiration from another fly-fisherman: the late Roderick Haig-Brown.
He was a colorful character, born in England and expelled from school for drinking and carousing. As a young man Haig-Brown joined the army, but found it too constricting and lit out for Canada. There and in Washington state, he worked as a logger and commercial fisherman. In 1931, he went back to London and a faster-paced life — but realized that the Pacific Northwest was his right place and returned here at the end of that year.
Haig-Brown married, had four children and spent the rest of his life on Vancouver Island. Over those many years, he became an advocate for protecting the region’s ecosystem; he was a trustee for the Nature Conservancy of Canada, served as chancellor of the University of Victoria and authored 28 books, including Starbuck Valley Winter, A River Never Sleeps and The Whale People.
“He was a conservationist before we used the term,” said Kindler, who made a pilgrimage to Haig-Brown’s Campbell River place in the mid-1970s.
Trudy gave him a six-volume set of Haig-Brown’s books — and he made the mistake of not asking him to sign them. Not long after Kindler’s visit, Haig-Brown died of a heart attack.
One of the many honors Haig-Brown received was the first Letcher Lambuth Angling Craftsman Award, back when the Washington Flyfishing Club established it in 1975.
This year, Bill T. Kindler became the 2012 Letcher Lambuth honoree. This fact, he said, still chokes him up.
Kindler’s fellow fly fishers penned the nomination letters, detailing the gifts Kindler gives to those around him. He volunteered in early 2010, for example, to lead 37 wounded soldiers and Olympic Fly Fishers club members in building a Rangeley cedar-strip boat. Nearly every day for six months, Kindler drove nearly 50 miles round trip from his home out to Sequim, to Fly Fishers president Dean Childs’ workshop.
He arrived at 7 a.m. to outline his work plan for the day; welcomed the first crew at 8 a.m. and worked with them till noon. After a lunch break, the second crew joined him in the shop till 4 p.m.; after they left, Kindler swept the shop floor.
In September, after 800 hours of labor, the Rangeley was finished. Kindler and his fellow builders presented the sleek craft to the Project Healing Waters outfit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
As a token of thanks to each worker, Kindler and a couple of helpers built 60 boxes from wood scraps, each with the inscription “healing those who serve.”
Kindler could easily have built that Rangeley himself, wrote Childs. But that’s not his way.
“His strongest attribute,” said Childs, is that “he is an unselfish teacher.”
Bill McMillan, another fisherman, first met Kindler nearly 40 years ago when he lived in Camas. The two formed the Clark-Skamania Fly Fishers club in the 1970s; then Kindler moved away, but they reconnected in the early 2000s when McMillan heard about Kindler’s Project Healing Waters work.
Working with novice fishers and boat builders, Kindler is a master, McMillan said, “who asks nothing in return, but their own joy in accomplishment.”
Kindler finds deep satisfaction in the process of turning a pile of lumber into a graceful vessel. He loves to work with hand tools, loves the cedar wood with its shades of brown, red and gold. And each time he brings together a boat kit and a crew of novices, Kindler is newly inspired by how quickly their skills develop.
He recalls one woman who wanted to join a crew but said she knew nothing about construction, so she offered to simply do cleanup. Kindler wouldn’t have it. He encouraged her to get in there with the construction crew. Now, he said, she’s one of the most skillful builders he’s worked with.
Kindler has built boats for charitable organizations on the Olympic Peninsula, and he’s built them for his family, including one for his grandchildren, whom he’s taught to fish. They provide the highlight of the summer when both sets — his son’s kids from Stevens Point, Wis., and his daughter’s family from Minneapolis — each come for two-week visits.
Also this summer, Kindler is helping four teams build boats: two in Port Angeles and two in Bellingham, including one with a father and son and another with a couple who work at NatureBridge on Lake Crescent. That lake is one of Kindler’s favorite places to go and be soothed by the many shades of blue.
Wooden boats, clear water: These are healers, Kindler believes.
“Much of our life is so complicated. Boat building and fly fishing are two activities that are simple,” simple as stroke-and-response of paddle and water.
Kindler is a careful craftsman — with the heart of an artist. His motto: “Perfection is driven by fear, but beauty is inspired by love. We want beautiful boats, so let’s aim for love.”
In boating and in life, “the search for beauty opens us up.”