The Star Talks to Ken Kindler
Champion of Trails
 Ken Kindler, founder of the Long Island Trail Lovers Coalition, has been hiking and working to preserve local trails for almost two decades.
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(8/06/2008) His words were deliberate, his voice calm, without the “ums,” “likes,” and “you knows” that scramble the sentences of many on-the-spot interviewees. Despite his eloquence, though, the truth is that Ken Kindler does not like to talk on the phone. It makes him nervous, he admitted. “But I’ve been practicing for 18 years,” he said — that is, ever since he became devoted to saving the trails of Long Island. His fight for preservation has changed his vocation, his health, his schedule, and his very sense of self.
“When I started this, I was terribly introverted,” Kindler said. “I was afraid of people and didn’t know how to relate. I hated writing and couldn’t write. All the things that I am doing now are just to help protect the natural open space. . . . This has been my mission. It’s my life.”
Before beginning a career in “trail-blazing,” Kindler was an electronics engineering technician. But his life turned upside down 18 years ago: “I was in a terrible car accident and I went through a divorce,” he said. “I found that walking in the woods helped me heal.”
His back was badly injured in the accident; his neurologist thought that he would be disabled for life. But despite the daunting diagnosis Kindler has more than rebounded. “Now I’m as strong as an ox,” he said. “I walk almost 100 miles of trails per week. Sometimes I’ll do 30 miles in a day,” he calculated.
For a dozen years now, Kindler has been working full time to save trails from eroding or disappearing altogether. He is not paid for his work, but is basically a self-appointed full-time volunteer.
The lack of income has been a burden. But Kindler is consumed by his quest; it would be a personal loss, he said, if he had to give up his life’s work. “I feel like it would be a betrayal to get work in electronics or whatever else I used to do,” he said.
Kindler believes in conservation agencies, clubs, and nonprofit organizations. “I go to about 20 meetings a month,” he said. Even though he lives UpIsland, in Sayville, he attends all of the meetings of the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society. Despite the high price of gas, he travels 106 miles round trip just to make sure he is there to fight for the trails’ best interests.
“I’m on a campaign to protect the natural beauty on the island,” he said. “I know that seems like an enormous challenge, but I can’t seem to help myself. . . . I’m amazed that so few people realize what we have here.”
He described the incredible biodiversity of Long Island, explaining how Northern flora and fauna converge here with those from the South.
Kindler said that walking on trails is better for one’s health than walking on pavement. The latter habituates us to flat surfaces, where we barely lift our feet; on trails, however, one can “hit the ground at different angles and walk on something that’s a lot softer than pavement.”
“It’s absolutely the best exercise for a bad back,” he said.
Not only do the trails exercise his body, they bring him closer to nature, replenishing his spirits. He recalled his first trail walk, almost two decades ago. It was at Calverton Ponds. He remembers every detail. “I was bedridden for nine months after the accident,” he said. But on that particular day he and his friend “just continued walking the entire day through the cranberry bogs and the Peconic River. All the things that I saw that day, it was like an epiphany. It was a turning point in my life.”
A few months ago, Kindler launched the Long Island Trail Lovers Coalition, which can be found at www.litlc.org. Membership costs only $10 because he wants people of many different backgrounds to be able to join. “I want to show elected and appointed officials just how many people care about Long Island’s trails,” he said.
Otherwise he feels that the trails will continue to be overlooked. “The markings of the trees are fading in a lot of places. [Plants] are closing in and need to be cut back. Trail tread, what you walk on, is eroding. There isn’t enough involvement in agencies and towns to make them accessible to the public,” he said.
To him, the value of a trail has as much to do with human pleasure as it does with conservation for conservation’s sake. “Living on an island, where there is so much development and unnatural things,” Kindler said, “I think we all need to escape occasionally, get back to nature.”
Furthermore, he said, preserving trails is crucial to saving the few wild refuges left to us. “Natural open space is in trouble because when we don’t invite gentle use, then you have . . . garbage and motor vehicles,” he said. Taking people into the woods and dunes and meadows is important because “you want people who care about the open space in the open space. That’s stewardship,” he explained.
Although trails may not be the number-one issue on people’s minds these days, Kindler said, he has devoted his life to drawing attention to these imperiled ancient byways, many of which were first walked by Native Americans before the arrival of the English settlers (and, perhaps, in some cases, by deer and other creatures before that). “It’s the first time in my life that I feel like I’m actually making a difference, like I’m doing something that really matters,” he said.
“You live your whole life riding in a car, going to malls and from one building to another, and you don’t realize what’s all around you. You pass right by it.”