Father Vabre tames something “grotesque, evil, wicked.”
Everyone needs a hobby.
Everyone needs a hobby.
Meet Father Cyprian Vabre (b. 1872) a French-born Catholic priest who served the Church in Flagstaff, Arizona from 1900 until his death in 1924.
Father Vabre spent many hours taming the grotesque and evil—not as an exorcist—he was working with a different prickly medium, purely for recreation.
I know nothing about cactus and rely here on the editor of The Coconino Sun of Flagstaff who, in 1920, described the cholla, or jumping cactus, as “a grotesque, evil desert plant.” I’ll take his word for it.
Not only grotesque and evil, and six feet tall, but it seems the thing gets mad and throws its thorns when struck or jarred, a quality leading the editor to call it a “most wicked plant.”
The threat of all those stinging projectiles did not discourage Father Vabre from tampering with the cholla.
To acquire his cholla, the only type of cactus useful for his hobby, Father Vabre would descend several thousand feet in altitude, traveling 150 miles to Kingman and the region where the jumping cactus flourished in rocky soil.
At Kingman he would harvest the plant. How he accomplished this is a mystery. Not only would the thorn-spitting cholla be unhappy with the uprooting, but its green, thick water-filled bark was a favorite shelter for snakes, tarantulas, and desert rats.
Once harvested, the cholla would be left to dry for several months, after which Vabre would remove the bark and pulp leaving only the skeleton, or “bones” of the trunk.
The bones, two or three inches in diameter, were the good padre’s delight. He would weave them into intricate patterns.
His creations included:
a five-foot-high reading lamp with a base of gnarled pine and standard of the woven bones topped with a shade of sections of the cactus.
small sitting stools.
tall hat racks.
and smoking stands with ashtrays.
The Sun reported that his creations “out rival anything in hand-carving that man can do.” All these he gifted to friends.
Vabre’s artistic talent, his gift giving, and his chosen medium—the angry cholla—echoes 1 Timothy 4:4: “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving.”
Very interesting. I often find that priests have great second vocations that are interesting and sometimes beneficial to society.
This is fantastic, Jim! I'm not sure that today the good Father would be allowed to dig up jumping cholla at random and cart them home, (desert lands perhaps protected), but no matter--living in Tucson as I do, I can attest to the fact that cacti of all kinds are unreservedly malicious when it comes to sinking their needle-like spines into your fingers, shins, thighs, shoulders, arms and any other unprotected part of your defeneseless body. Sometimes I feel I spend half my life sitting under a lamp with a pair of tweezers--and this is mostly just from walking around my yard observing, praising and watering! I've come to admire, though, their orneriness and general resilience. And I totally want a jumping cholla ashtray and stand.