2/2/98

From Flower Child to Cactus King

If only we'd take Eric Davis seriously, this country wouldn't need barbed wire along the borders. He's got something better: cactus.
    It's prettier, and deadlier.
    Eric, the cactus king of Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael, should know. He once got a little behind in his work, if you get the, uh, point.
    “I fell.”
    Ouch.
    “On the way down, I grabbed a cactus to break the fall, but that only made things worse. I was covered in thorns.”
    How bad, Eric?
    “Well, I fell into one of these” -- he points to a barrel cactus -- “and took
about 40 huge spikes. I needed pliers to get them out. Did it myself.”
    There's no hard feelings, though. Davis still loves each and every one of 'em. He's got thousands of cactuses, covering six dunams of land facing the Tel Aviv-Haifa highway.
    In more ways than one, he has a special feeling for the barrel cactus, which is known in Israel more piquantly as a “Mother-in-Law's Chair.” (Sit on it, and you'll see the similarity.)
    He has a 75-year-old Mother-in-Law's Chair that was brought from Austria by a woman who, in her old age, got Eric's interest started. He's not the only one with a soft spot for the genus.
    Somebody's been stealing them.
    A cactus thief?!
    “They're worth at least $1,000 in the US, and I lost two of them this past summer. Of course, it's gotta be someone who knows how to steal a cactus.”
    Eric holds out little hope the varmint will be caught. “With all the problems in this country, can you imagine the cops running around looking for a cactus?”
    Eric loves cactuses because “they're hardy. Tough. They're independent and they thrive in harsh conditions.” Not unlike Eric Davis when he was young.

THE 50-YEAR-OLD immigrant -- or more correctly, political refugee -- from Johannesburg reveled in muckracking in his native country, from a young age. “I was expelled from school. I was expelled from high school. I was expelled from college and I was expelled from heder.”
    Overtly political, he calls himself a “socialist democrat capitalist, which in South Africa meant I was a communist. I wasn't a communist, I was pro-Mandela, and that made me a radical.” He demonstrated against the government, did time in prison, and fled in '69. He's been back since Mandela's election, and naturally, took part in a demonstration against that government too.
“When I came to Israel, I was wild. I joined the army, and I just wanted to kill. Kill the sonofabitches! Kill 'em all! Now, I'm a pacifist.”
Why the change, Eric?
“The Yom Kippur War. I was stationed on the Suez Canal. I saw bodies. Lots of bodies. I realized I couldn't kill anymore. I just couldn't kill anymore.”
He suffered shell-shock, and hasn't been the same since. He was a photographer then, but when he saw what he saw, how could he hope to find expression through a lens again?
He's been nurturing cactuses ever since.
When he's not in Ericland, he spends his time running the kibbutz cemetery. He helps the bereaved with arrangements, sometimes digs the graves, and tends to the grounds, invariably accompanied by music of the Stones, John Lee Hooker, Ravi Shankar, or other '60s favorites. He has created what must be one of the country's most beautiful cemeteries, a veritable botanical garden, with a Holocaust monument in the middle and flora all around.
    He's already got a reserved spot there. “I told the kibbutz, 'Look, the guys who work in bananas eat bananas, in the fishponds, fish; I think I should get my own plot.' They agreed.”
    His cemetery earned kudos from Rabin and Weizman, who attended funerals there, and made front-page news as the staging ground for one of Israel's grimmest events. It was here, in 1978, that American photographer Gail Rubin was asked by a group of 11 men for directions to the highway. The Fatah terrorists killed her, then hijacked two buses in what became known as the Coastal Road Massacre. Thirty-seven Israelis were killed, 76 wounded.
    “I have to create a world of my own,” Eric says of Ericland. He calls himself a “flower child who wouldn't grow up,” and still espouses legalizing marijuana, still adores sitar music.
The world he has created, barbed though it may be, is filled with wonderment. His cactuses range from thumbnail-sized miniatures to 12-meter skyscrapers. The mesmerizing agave ends its life by suddenly sprouting flowers, grows 50 centimeters a day for a couple of months, and then croaks.
He has elephantine pachypodium from Madagascar, the cliched saguaro made famous by Westerns, cute little fuzzballs with green or pink swirls, phallic-shaped growths, and one that looks like an old man.
Eric has mutations he has grafted himself, hybrids and cross-pollinations; 20-year-old stone-like lithops from the Kalahari, and peyote, which produces the hallucinatory drug mescaline.
   Got any children, Eric?
“Yeah. You see this cactus? I was once offered $25,000 for it. I said no....”