Father Vabre Tames Something "Grotesque, Evil, Wicked"

Flagstaff, Arizona, 1920

Meet Father Cyprian Vabre, a French-born Catholic priest who served the Church in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Early in the twentieth century Father Vabre spent many hours among the grotesque and evil – not as an exorcist – he was working with a different prickly medium, purely for recreation.

The present writer knows little about cactus and relies on the editor of The Coconino Sun of Flagstaff who, in 1920, described the cholla, or jumping cactus, as “a grotesque, evil desert plant.”

Not only grotesque and evil, and six feet tall, but the thing gets mad and throws its thorns when struck or jarred, a quality leading the editor of the Sun to call it a “most wicked plant.”

The threat of those stinging projectiles did not deter 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 semi-desert region where the jumping cactus flourished in rocky soil.

At Kingman he would harvest the tall 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 dry for several months, after which Father Vabre would remove the bark and pulp leaving only the skeleton, or “bones” of the trunk.

These bones, two or three inches in diameter, were the padre’s delight. These he would weave into intricate patterns. Among Father Vabre’s creations we find: 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 of these he gifted to friends.

Father Vabre’s artistic talent 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.”