THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2019 // 3
SCRATCHPAD
A healer and harp builder
Duane Bolster found
musical success
through medicine
By ERICK BENGEL
COAST WEEKEND
F
or decades, Duane Bolster, a
harp builder from Portland,
tried to learn one instrument
after another — piano, clarinet,
coronet, accordion — but reading
music remained mysteriously diffi -
cult for him. He couldn’t compre-
hend how musicians sight-read so
fl uidly.
Then, about seven years ago,
an ophthalmologist discovered
coast
growths on the focal points of Bol-
ster’s retinas. His center of vision
is gone in both eyes. He couldn’t
notice the disorder; his brain fi lls
in the missing visual informa-
tion automatically. For example, a
word with six letters might, to him,
appear to have four. He can read
text in his peripheral vision, but
tracking sheet music, it turns out,
is nearly impossible for him to do.
He told me this story in the
presence of a Celtic harp he built,
now displayed in the window of
Fairweather’s House & Gallery,
during the year’s fi rst Seaside Art
Walk, held earlier this month. The
instrument, fashioned out of rib-
bon mahogany, stands near his
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
weekend
arts & entertainment
4
7
8
THE ARTS
Celtic concert
wife Carol’s handmade baskets, for
which Bolster created the wooden
bases.
Bolster, 70, hails from a family
of engineers and inventors, and can
fi gure out the physics of a thing
just by looking at it. He has been
making harps for about 15 years.
The harp at Fairweather’s took him
about 60 hours to complete.
The harp that took longest to
make — an elaborate, circular
work of Bubinga, a hard, heavy
African wood — was made for
the Children’s Cancer Association
in Portland and required 200 to
250 hours. He crafted it so that the
inside opens outward to project the
sound — a design that led apprais-
ers to remark, “You don’t build
harps like that,” he recalled.
“I could never stand doing
COAST WEEKEND EDITOR
ERICK BENGEL
CONTRIBUTORS
NICOLE BALES
RYAN HUME
KATHERINE LACAZE
BARBARA LLOYD McMICHAEL
PATRICK WEBB
An ‘armchair’ pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s world
COASTAL LIFE
Pouring at the Coast
Brewer’s festival takes over St. Patrick’s Day weekend
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something like somebody else
did,” Bolster said. “You don’t get
progress unless you improvise.”
Bolster could probably have
foregone the fi nal 50 hours of
detailing — the sanding, polishing
and perfecting of the roundness —
without really changing the look.
But it was only his second harp,
and everything had to be just right.
Bolster spent his career work-
ing as a registered nurse at Pacifi c
Northwest hospitals, doing dial-
ysis and aphaeresis, specializing
in children and newborns — kids
who were critically ill and those
suffering from chronic conditions.
He remembers harpists who
would visit the children and play
for them, a ritual that at times
eased the distress in the room bet-
ter than pain meds and physical
therapy. “The children just loved
it,” he said. “And that was one of
the things that inspired me to make
a lot of harps.”
When he retired from the medi-
cal fi eld seven years ago, he did so
knowing his harps would be used
in medical ministry, to sooth sick
children and other patients in hos-
pitals and care centers.
“They just do magic stuff,” he
said. “Kids in pain … you’d just
see them relax,” he said. “It was
amazing. I watched that for many
years.”
He hasn’t taken up harp lessons;
he’s been so busy making them
and can’t stop. But he can tune
them by ear. If he were to start all
over with music, “I’d learn how to
play by ear, and that would have
solved it all,” he laughed. CW