PORT ANGELES — Two of the builders are long gone — yet they’re not.
Standing beneath a 13-foot Western red cedar tree adorned with copper sea life, friends and family shared memories of Will Wirt and Art Feiro.
The occasion for this gathering Friday afternoon was “Kindred Spirits,” the cedar monument freshly installed at the Arthur D. Feiro Marine Life Center on City Pier.
Port Angeles sculptor Clark Mundy created it “in memory of Art Feiro & Will Wirt, kindred spirits who shared a dream,” according to the copper plates affixed to the trunk.
“The amount of passion that still exists here is phenomenal,” said Mark Feiro, the late Art Feiro’s son.
He remembers sitting on the pier with his dad back in the 1970s while Art Feiro dreamed out loud about building a marine life center there.
Fellow visionary
Feiro found a fellow visionary in Wirt; the men were teachers at Peninsula College and close friends.
They worked with a small army of volunteers, a state grant and local donations to open the Arthur D. Feiro Marine Laboratory, as it was first called, in November 1981.
Since then, Mark Feiro said, there have been many threats to the Feiro Marine Life Center’s survival.
But each time, its local supporters have stepped up to keep it from going under, he said.
“I am overwhelmed by this . . . our new tree,” said Feiro board member Betsy Wharton.
“Kindred Spirits,” with its sculpted copper hands, fish, kelp, crustaceans and a shining sun at the top, highlights the connections across the natural world.
Wharton read a passage from John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez: “It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”
Art Feiro died in 1982, not long after the marine lab opened. Wirt became director and served for many years before his death in 2008.
As their twin grandsons, Dylan and Ethan Chiang, 9, sat on “Kindred Spirits’” benches, Wirt’s widow, Lillie Wirt, thanked Mundy and the Feiro’s supporters.
Of the cedar, Lillie Wirt said: “It’s yours; it’s mine; it belongs to this wonderful community.”
The Feiro Marine Life Center is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.
To find out more, visit www.FeiroMarineLifeCenter.org or phone 360-417-6254.
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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.
