Some guys build train sets, some tinker with lawnmowers, some store classic cars under canvas covers.
But few, if any, can match what happens on Thursday nights in Chuck's garage.
They've carved everything from carousel horses to circus wagons and gargoyles, from flowers to flames.
Now, heading into their 20th year, they are carving totem poles, which is fitting in a way, because totem poles tell stories.
The smell of cedar wafts up from piles of shavings on the floor of Chuck's garage on Connell Avenue in Missoula's University District. The rhythmic pounding of mallets echoes like a woodpecker in the woods, while bursts of laughter and sinewy threads of conversation wend their way around the sights and sounds of four men carving their story into wood.
This story starts with a carousel.
Years ago, Chuck Kaparich saw the Looff Carousel in Spokane, which was built in 1909.
"I had no idea you could make stuff like that out of wood, and I'd worked in wood all my life," he said. "And you'd go, 'That can't be wood,' and you'd knock on it and you'd go, 'How the hell does somebody do that?' "
It wasn't long before Kaparich began reading books and learning everything he could about how to carve a carousel horse.
"My wife got me some carving tools," Kaparich said. "I tried carving my first horse.
"Once I got one, then I had another and another. Then I got an old mechanism. That's when the Missoula carousel started to take shape."
Kaparich's Connell Avenue shop is full of old tools and an old television, a sharpening strop, a framed Life Magazine cover depicting a carousel horse, Coca-Cola signs, circus paraphernalia, a carved angel, a telephone, a first aid kit, a picture
of a kid and an elephant sitting together and the residue of good conversations.
The four men carve through diverse political topics as easily as through basswood. No disdain is evident, even as they joke around about Kaparich's inability to visualize a beaver's ears for his totem pole.
In 1989, when Jerry Covault, then the U.S. Forest Service's Ninemile ranger, saw a carousel-carving class offered through adult education, he planned to sign up. But the class was so popular he wasn't able to get in the first one.
When another class was advertised several months later, Covault hurried to sign up.
"He said, 'Carve this flower,' " Covault said, remembering back to the words of Chuck Kaparich, an inexperienced but enthusiastic carving teacher. "But I'm carving a carousel."
When the five-year A Carousel for Missoula project came to an end, it had produced more than community pride and childhood amusement. It left a group of now experienced woodcarvers with a hobby and more time than they knew what to do with.
"(Chuck) had called Steve and a couple others and said let's get together on Thursday night and carve something," Covault said. "I had stopped by one day after class and (Chuck) said, 'Why don't you come on Thursday night?' "
Theirs is a perpetual motion sort of thing, a friendship like a carousel that never stops, and no one can quite put their finger on why it started in the first place. But as they stand there gouging out their lives in red-tinged cedar, they just fit like the joints on fine furniture - or the seamlessness of a carousel horse, the pieces of which are fit together from different blocks of wood.
Steve Weiler took one of Chuck Kaparich's carousel carving classes, too."There's a lot to be said about carving away everything that doesn't look like a horse, and then you're done," Weiler said about the faux simplicity of carving wood.
But everything has a foundation, and A Carousel for Missoula' s foundation sits on the mythical and beastly heads of gargoyles.
"Everybody started with carving one of those gargoyles," Weiler said of moving from something simple to the more complex, full carousel horse. "If you can carve a gargoyle, you can do a leg; if you can do a leg, you can do a body; do a body and you can do a head."
The heads on the totem poles the men are carving are rough, to match the symbols of the animals or figures they are cut to represent. And yet Alex McDonald's totem pole reflects something altogether different.
The quietest member of the Thursday night wood carvers, McDonald works on a majestic and severe-looking eagle. The kind that looks as if it is guarding something valuable, rather than the image of an eagle spreading its wings in flight. It sits on the tophat of an Uncle Sam-like character whose white beard and austere expression seem more like a self-portrait of the 74-year-old retired Missoula fireman-turned-woodcarver.
In two hours of carving, McDonald is just there, the only evidence of him being the rhythmic pounding of his mallet on the well-worn head of his gouge and a trip to the electric strop to sharpen his tools.
McDonald is another of the mysteries of Thursday nights in Chuck's garage. It might be easy to say that the group's longevity is because the individual members enjoy the conversation or the give-and-take or even the carving in and of itself, but McDonald's quiet and unassuming character is testament to something more.
"He's an integral part of that," Jerry Covault said. "When he's not there, you feel like, 'Where the heck's Alex?' "
And there's something to be said about the quiet ones. McDonald, who makes violins in his Hamilton workshop, and whose skill in carving and tool sharpening is thought to be first among his friends, admits he is a man of few words.
"But I'm a good listener," he said.
And he's dedicated.
He's been driving up from Hamilton more Thursdays than not through the carving classes, the five-year Missoula carousel project, the 10-year circus wagon project, through countless personal projects, and now to finish his totem.
Though his joy in carving with friends on Thursday nights is evident in his impressive attendance record, it is, perhaps, his few, well-meaning words that best sum it up.
"Just getting together and visiting and carving," McDonald said. "It's nice to get together."
If you walked into Chuck's garage on any given Thursday, you might find nothing more remarkable than four guys carving through conversation and cedar. But if you stop to think about what it takes to do that for 19 years, through life's ups and downs, family, jobs and across political ideologies, you would be hard-pressed to find a simple answer.But one could certainly try.
Maybe it's because, as Chuck said, "Carving doesn't have the limitations that woodworking alone does." Or maybe it's because, as in carving, you rough out something before you ever get any idea of what it will look like, expectations tend to remain low.
Or maybe it's within their own understanding of each other.
"They're all interesting in their own part," Kaparich said. "They're all well read, they're all very handy, they're fascinating conversationalists. And you need all that if you're going to meet once a week for 20 years."
Kaparich is imaginatively unlimited, and he provides the shop, which thanks to his skills as an insulator, remains warm and comfortable through Missoula's long winters.
"There's a breadth of knowledge there that doesn't exist many places," Kaparich said. "These guys are all experienced in different areas. Jerry's been a forest guy forever. If we want to know anything about trees or species, he's the guy. If you want to know about tools, I'm the guy. If you want to know about products of any kind, Steve is your guy. And if you just generally want to know about quality, Alex will tell you about that."
A stained coffee Thermos sits out next to four cups and a package of cookies. This, too, is a tradition dating back to the Missoula carousel project. No one eats the cookies, but they are always there.
There is something in the seamlessness of a carousel horse that gives it fluidity and appearance of motion despite the fact that it was carved from chunks of basswood.
"There are no pregnant pauses in the conversation," Weiler said. "The conversation flows along, some barbs are thrown, jokes made. When that conversation runs out and nothing pops up, everyone is just working. You just carve until the next idea pops up."
As far as the world around them goes, they've missed a lot.
"I remember when the whole country was talking about 'Seinfeld,' " Kaparich said of the famous Thursday night television show. "None of us had any idea who the hell Seinfeld was. Nobody was missing 'Seinfeld,' but these four guys down on Connell."
But if you ask them, they haven't missed a thing unless they've missed a Thursday night in Chuck's garage.
And maybe it's not what it's about, but rather what it's not about.
"It's not about money and power," Covault said. There aren't many situations in today's world where it's not one of those two. If it's not the center forefront, it's at least underlying."
Kaparich gives the example of people playing golf together once a week or who meet for poker games on a regular basis.
"Without money and without power and with a foundation of respect," Covault said. "That's pretty unique."
And it's certainly not about the things they carve.
"I don't know that it's about totem poles, or circus wagons or carousels," Kaparich said. "They're byproducts of that. If none of them turned out, it'd be OK."
But maybe, just maybe, the totem poles being stories, offer a little glimpse into a long-lasting and satisfying friendship.
After all, in the symbology of the Northwest Indian art that they represent, Kaparich's beaver reflects someone who is determined, strong-willed, a builder, and a protector.
Or take Covault's totem, which is the only one of the four that tells a complete life story.
It's topped by a hummingbird, which reflects a messenger, timelessness, healing and a warrior.
Different though it is, McDonald's totem is topped by an eagle, which is symbolic for Divine spirit, sacrifice, connection to creator, intelligence, renewal and courage.
And Weiler's crow, which symbolizes a keeper of law, change, creativity, spiritual strength, energy and justice.
Perhaps it is in recognizing these qualities in one another without taking them for granted that has blessed them with a long and prosperous friendship.
Reporter Tim Akimoff can be reached at 523-5246 or at tim.akimoff@missoulian.com.
Photographer Tom Bauer can be reached at 423-5270 or at tbauer@missoulian.com.
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Rick Smith wrote on Oct 16, 2008 11:45 PM: