Strange love

Valentine’s Day is a consumer-driven holiday perpetuated by greedy corporate retailers, right? Isn’t that how we counterculture types are supposed to feel about the day of hearts, flowers and that little naked child shooting arrows? We hate feeling forced to buy stuff for our significant others just as much as the rest of you: That’s why we’ve focused this Valentine’s Day issue on a few people whose hearts are ruled by things other than romantic, rose-adorned love.

To my love,
Your lines, your curves, your texture:
Wood, you are my one true love.

With his white beard and green apron, William Chappelow looks a little like Santa Claus. The fact that he has a workshop out back does nothing to thwart the illusion.

But Chappelow doesn’t make toys; he makes wooden utensils—spoons, mainly—and sells the pieces of cut and crafted wood for around $50 a pop.

The pricey utensils are works of art, though, and Chappelow’s collectors know how many hours, how much thought and how much love he puts into every hunk of wood.

“I’ve been at this now for 35 years,” the craftsman says, leading the way from his Tryyn Gallery, where he showcases his wood works, to his Hissing Camel Gallery, where he shows others’ arts and crafts, then back again to his workshop, where he and his assistants spend hours cutting, buffing and waxing each piece. Chappelow’s plot of land (on the winding Old Highway 80 in Guatay) isn’t big, but the old guy’s managed to put every inch of land to use, building what’s become a cultural refuge in an area known more as a refuge for wildlife.

“It doesn’t seem like I’ve been doing this for that long,” Chappelow says. “It seems like maybe four or five or six years, but even after that fairly protracted period of time, I still look forward to every day, and it’s still an exciting experience to step up to the band saw with a limb or a log and kind of study it a little bit to see what it might have to offer, then dive in.”

The band saw is Chappelow’s sketchpad. He rarely draws lines directly onto the wood because he’d rather let the natural grains and curves of each piece guide the blade.

“The first cut often can reveal new direction that a piece of wood might like to go in,” Chappelow explains. “I don’t want an artificial line that pulls my eye away from what that piece of wood has to say. It’s sort of a metaphorical dialogue, I guess you might say. I let the wood have a voice in the process.”

After the process is complete, and Chappelow has his spoon, he picks up the scraps of wood he’s cut away and puts them to use, too. Bigger pieces become knives or paddles, smaller pieces become pendants for the jewelry he makes, splinters become kindling for the fire that heats his home, and the sawdust becomes mulch for friends or ash-glaze for his pottery.

Chappelow tries to use only certified wood (responsibly chopped), recycled wood or wood brought in by customers who want an old tree of theirs to have a new life as a utensil.

“Trees are special to lots of people,” he says, pointing to a box of logs his neighbor brought in after one of their fruit trees died.

And just to add a little personality to his utensils, Chappelow adds funny little tags to each piece.

“People seem to enjoy that a lot, and it kind of gets your imagination started,” he says. “So, instead of just being a knife or a peanut-butter knife, it’s a ‘Stick-to-the-Roof-of-Your-Mouth Knife’ or a ‘Glue-in-Your-Dentures Knife.’”

Chappelow chuckles, kind of Santa-like, then shows off his impressive “Beef Stalk Tomato Soup W/ Jump Lima Beans and Ham-Hawk Stirrer” made out of a beautiful Birdseye Maple.
—Kinsee Morlan

 Dear beloved model trains,
We heart your choo-choos and
everything about you.

 
Their eyes widen when they hear the wheezy chooo-chooo, even before they’ve spotted the Lilliputian locomotive coming around the bend. Little kids, grown-ups, it doesn’t matter—the reaction is usually the same at San Diego’s Model Railroad Museum, the largest of its kind in the world.

Bruce Deck pays scant attention to the visitors watching trains zip along the tracks of the various exhibits. Unless, that is, they’re looking at the Tehachapi Pass. Then he might speak up.

The exhibit is the pride and joy of the La Mesa Model Railroad Club, which counts about 100 members on its official roster—including Deck—though only about 40 are active and in the area. The La Mesa club is one of four nonprofit exhibitors that operate the 27,000-square-foot Balboa Park museum, which opened in 1982.

Deck can tell you about every inch of the Tehachapi model, an extensive and rather awe-inspiring HO-scale re-creation of the railroad connecting the south end of the San Joaquin Valley to Southern California, circa 1952. The club’s members research old photographs and planning documents to get it exactly right. And not just tunnels and freight yards. The houses, farms and general scenery are spot-on, too. Members will debate the minutest details for years—they don’t call themselves rivet counters for nothing.

But how did these model railroaders—mostly men in their 50s and older—become so obsessed with the tiny trains in the first place? Deck has a job (and a doctorate degree, for that matter) but still spends at least two days a week volunteering at the museum. Some retired members contribute a full workweek. And while grants and club dues cover many of the major expenses, these guys fork over a lot of their own cash keeping the project on track.

“When I was a kid, I had a three-rail tinplate train,” Deck recalls fondly. “Growing up in Schenectady, I could see the real trains being built when I’d get my father to drive me by the yard.”

Though his interest in railroads waned, it was rekindled when he discovered the La Mesa club a dozen years ago. By their standards, that makes him a relative newbie.

David Willoughby is a charter member. He and a handful of other teenagers formed the club in 1962, because they were too young to join the San Diego Model Railroad Club (also at the museum). He spends about 20 hours a week tinkering with Tehachapi.

“I’m the sort of geek that, when I get interested in something, I just burrow in,” he laughs. “Sometimes I wonder why the hell I’m spending my time doing this, other times it’s a lot of fun.”

Paul Voss joined in 2003, after three decades in the San Diego club. Like Deck and Willoughby, he attributes the onset of his obsession to a childhood train set. “Back in our generation, that’s what boys played with.” Now retired, Voss clocks 40 hours a week at the museum.

Many of the members have backgrounds in engineering and other technical fields, but some, like John Cathcart, actually worked for the railroad. He held just about every job there was before retiring. Now he lends his considerable expertise to the La Mesans.

“I’m trying to cut back,” Cathcart offers with a mischievous grin. “There is life outside the railroad. I’m trying to do more of that.”
—AnnaMaria Stephens

To the stars,
You light my life, 

Mike Leigh does what he loves. His perfectly trimmed mustache and impeccable clothes are the only remnants of his former life as a reserve police officer and businessman. For the last 14 years, Leigh’s been able to turn his longtime astronomy hobby into a profession.

With the help of his wife, Caroline, Leigh runs Observer’s Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in Julian that offers a one-hour guided tour of the night sky along with warm beds and buttered toast.

“When I take people down to the observatory,” Leigh says, crunching along a gravel path toward what looks like a large gray shed with a retractable roof, “to begin with, I use a green laser, which looks like a Star Wars light saber, and I point out the brighter stars and constellations and I try to give a little bit of trivia so people can remember it. And then, after about 10 minutes of showing them the night sky, I take them inside the observatory, give them a quick talk on the different types of telescopes and how they work, and then we start looking through the telescopes. We treat it a little like sipping wine—we go slow, we talk about who discovered the objects, what they are, the dynamics behind the objects, how far away the are, and give them a little personality so that people find it interesting.”

To describe astronomy as “interesting” is understating how Leigh feels about the night sky.

“At 8 years old,” he says as he grabs a two-by-four piece of wood and manually pushes back the roof, “I became infatuated with astronomy by finding Saturn on my own and thinking, Wow, why isn’t everyone fascinated with this? Because if you’ve ever seen Saturn live in a telescope, it’s just awe-inspiring—it looks three-dimensional and it’s just a fantastic site.”

After Leigh shows off his three gargantuan telescopes, he steps outside and looks up into the clear afternoon sky.

“You should see it on a starry night,” he says, a twinkle in his eye. “It’s horizon-to-horizon, just a spectacular sky, so many stars.”
—Kinsee Morlan