Four decades after a motorcycle accident left him permanently blind, Jason Kindig has learned to see with his hands with such vision that the former 82nd Airborne Division veteran can build jewelry boxes, tables and miniature sailboats with a skill that can rival sighted wood carvers.

Try asking the 65-year-old Moyie Springs resident how he makes perfect cuts in pieces of red fir he cannot see, while mounting pencil-thin railings on hulls of model boats that take him months to complete.

"Lots of Elmer's Glue, some sore thumbs and inner vision," he'll tell you in the subdued darkness of his cabin on 12 acres of forested land, where he has lived with his wife Pam for 30 years. "I have to be a little careful when I swing the hammer - sometimes my hands get in the way."

Don't let Kindig kid you. Despite his blindness stemming from optic nerve damage in a motorcycle crash in which he lost hearing in one ear and his sense of smell, he's the real deal when it comes to woodworking.

Using only a rasp, a drill, hack saw, a wood chisel and a file, Kindig has crafted extraordinary jewelry cabinets, candle holders, miniature boats tooled with intricate nautical parts, along with curved knives patterned from those from the Knights of the Round Table.

He gives everything he makes away.

Still, trying to figure out how Kindig - who was cartoonist and an amateur oil paint artist before his accident - can line up the edges of a box or join sections of a boat he is working on with such precision is bewildering.

"Not really," he says. "It's all a sense of touch. I use feeling to see, sort of like an inner vision. I finger each piece, space it off proportionally with my hands like a tape measure and lock it in. I know where the knots on the wood are and where the curves should go. It's not so hard."

Neither was building flower boxes he planted flowers in around the cabin, belt-sanding the walls of his house, or building picnic and work tables around his yard he assembled with lag bolts.

"Cutting a straight line with a hand saw is a bit of challenge and working on smaller pieces gets me a little crazy, but the work table I built turned out as good as one that a sighted person could make," says Kindig. "Plus I only hit my thumb twice with a hammer."

Though he was in a two-month coma and had bouts of amnesia for a year following the motorcycle crash, Kindig has refused to allow blindness to become a handicap or rule his life.

A professional drummer most of his life — he received his first paycheck as a paid musician when he was 13 — Kindig played jazz clubs, juke joints and for dance troupes from Indiana to California after he lost his vision.

"I’ll never stop being playing music," he says. "I still beat on my drums a lot."

He also loves staying in tune with his land. When his wife built 22 walking paths years ago through their forest, he lined them with logs.

"I'm a pretty self-reliant guy, or at least I try to be," says Kindig. "Put a conga or a jambay drum in front of me, some woodworking tools and red fir, and I'll show you some very cool stuff."