The Fruit Hunters Page 30

  Judgment Day never came. When Christmas morning rolled around, the group descended the mountain and bolted their doors, awaiting further instruction.

  Two earthquakes passed through the valley that week, rattling windows and dishes but causing no harm. Early in the New Year, word spread throughout the Okanagan Valley, and eventually to the news desks in Vancouver, that forty people, including schoolchildren, were holed up in a building waiting for the apocalypse.

  Journalists staked out the ranch, making much of the fact that the group wore red capes lined with gold satin and white shirts intended to repel atomic rays. The papers also ran photos of a metallic bread loaf, believed to be one of the sect’s devotional objects. If nothing else, the media concluded, congestion in the house constituted a danger to public health. As Philip walked us through the living room, he explained that even though they owned a television—which he called “hell-evision”— they used it only to watch Olympic skating videos or old Shirley Temple movies. “Everything’s so dirty in these latter days,” he sighed. “We try to watch things that are halfway clean.”

  In Keremeos, the media coverage led to unsuccessful raids by outraged locals. Townsfolk went on tirades about hypnotized youths having unnatural experiences with grown-ups. A week later, the Mounties came in and removed some preteens from the compound. The kids emerged, scowling at the surrounding press corps.

  On January 13, the group received a crucial sign: a cloud shaped like a human hand had changed from white to red to white again. That night, they tiptoed through the swirling snowfall, past dozing newsmen and photographers. Getting into their cars, they raced away, never to return. The blizzard caused an avalanche, which closed the pass off, so the media couldn’t follow.

  The Children of Light roamed around North America for the next twelve years, seeking their promised land. While in San Bernardino, they saw giant flaming letters in the sky spelling out “Agua Caliente, Arizona.” Soon after that, a green disk appeared in front of the sun inscribed with the date “May 21, 1963.”

  On that very day, they arrived at their new home in Agua Caliente, this patch of Arizona desert not far from Dateland. It isn’t quite clear how they came into possession of these eighty acres. Elect Star said, “We’d been told that God was going to put us on land of His ownership, and this was it: Agua Caliente.” Philip told me a convoluted story involving hallucinations, a wealthy patron and a land-owning Native American named Scout Gray Eagle who’d dreamed of their coming.

  However it happened, they’ve been here ever since. “Anyone is welcome to come and stay for as long as they want,” said Philip. As dinner was being prepared, we met two other elderly ladies who had moved in. They weren’t full members and didn’t wear the Children of Light uniform. One of them was convinced that she’d met me in a previous life. She told me that hippies used to travel here in the late 1960s, but didn’t stay long due to the sexless, drug-free atmosphere.

  As for rock ’n’ roll, the Children of Light write their own kindergarten-like hymns, which they sang before dinner. At the kitchen table, everybody’s name was written on folded cards indicating their place. Men sat opposite women, in keeping with the group’s celibacy. Elect Star plugged in a child-sized Yamaha keyboard and the group proceeded to serenade us with songs of praise. We joined in on a couple of choruses.

  They explained their belief system—eat fruits, abstain from flesh relations and live forever—over a dinner of six dates, a dozen pistachios and walnuts, a smear of tree sap and some sliced canned peaches, all doled on sectional trays. The main dish was a peeled banana, which we ate with a fork and knife.

  Although the group aspires to fruitarianism, they also eat homemade yogurt, popcorn and vegetables that grow on the farm. An angel, Philip said, once appeared to them and directed them to follow “the Garden of Eden diet,” which is what we seemed to be eating that night. The angel also told them that it’s a sin to be paid for work. “We haven’t earned a penny in fifty-six years,” said Philip. The group’s members do, however, collect Social Security checks and they file every year with the IRS.

  As I finished my last forkful of banana, I wondered what would happen when these virgins and eunuchs passed on. They were so old. Elect David, who ate with quivering hands, seemed to be on his last legs. They didn’t seem too concerned about their organization dying out. After all, the world itself was dying out. A piece of paper pinned to a bulletin board read, “This is the most serious hour in the entire history of the world, for the Signs all declare that this is the time of the end on God’s clock.” On it, capitalized and underlined, was their motto: “ONLY THOSE WHO ATTEMPT THE ABSURD … ARE CAPABLE OF ACHIEVING THE IMPOSSIBLE!”

  After dinner, we were invited to spend the night, or, if we wanted, the rest of our lives. Shaking hands with the three elects and their two friends, we thanked them for their hospitality and their stories, got into our car and waved good-bye.

  By then, it was quite dark out. There were no streetlights, and the road was bumpier than we remembered. A minute or two later, when we reached the lollipop sign, Liane looked out her window and cried out: an enormous fire was raging near the compound. We considered turning around, but were too freaked out. Driving on, we called them on our cell phone to make sure they were safe. Elect Star picked up. I told her that a massive bonfire appeared to be burning right outside their building. She went out to look but came back to the line a moment later, claiming that she saw nothing. For miles, we kept catching glimpses of the fire glowing in the distance. Perhaps it was one of those mysterious wildfires that inexplicably burst to life in remote desert regions, or some sort of pyrotechnical ploy staged by the Children of Light to recruit us or maybe it was a sign from God. We didn’t stick around to find out.

  FRUITS HAVE PLAYED a role in other spiritual movements, from a Russian sect of berry-cultivating flagellants called the Krillovnas to John James Dufour’s grape-growing colonies in Kentucky and Indiana. In the early twentieth century, Southern California’s Societas Fraterna was led by a fruit Svengali named Thales. Also known as the Placentia Grass Eaters, the colony believed that spirits gathered in corners, so they built a mansion without any square rooms. Reports circulated of ghosts haunting the property, and balls of fire were sometimes seen shooting out of their chimney. The Societas Fraterna eventually disbanded after child-malnutrition lawsuits and the suicide of one of the group’s young female members.

  In the 1960s, nudist fruit-growing communes started popping up across America, as followers of the “back to the land” movement shed their clothes and inhibitions and banded together in utopian groups. In Paradise Fever, Ptolemy Tompkins writes of his own father’s clothing-optional orchard community: “A key aspect of getting the garden going turned around one’s being naked, or at least topless, while working inside its walls.” (In The Secret Life of Plants, his father also once wrote that, “Apples experience the equivalent of an orgasm when eaten with a loving and respectful attitude.”) Vestiges of those experiments can be found in biodynamic free-love farms and nudist gardens in hippie enclaves around the world. Mulberry grower and historian of naturalism Gordon Kennedy told me that in Nimbin, Australia, bush-and teepee-dwelling modern primitives called “ferals” still grow fruits in the nude.

  As we’ve seen, many religions use fruits to represent the possibility of attaining divine consciousness, of entering into a communion with the infinite. Beyond the symbolism, fruits can literally affect our molecular structures in opaque manners. Many stimulants, like coffee, start out as fruits. Africa’s kola nut is still used to make Coca-Cola and other colas. The areca nut, fruit of the betel palm, is a main ingredient in paan, the stimulant chewed in South Asia that stains streets crimson when spat out. Such energy-boosting fruits can become habit-forming.

  The taste of certain delicious fruits can instill in the eater an instinctual urge to bow down before the majesty of the sensation. It took me years to decode the impulse, but I came to think of it as a horizontal feelin
g. It’s so close to perfection that there’s something deathly about it. At the same time, that sense of surrender, I think, is a momentary acceptance of our oneness with nature.

  All over the world, fruits have been imbued with secret powers. Buddha, at the Great Miracle of Sravasti, made a mango tree grow instantly out of a seed. In India, rather than reading palms or tea leaves, fortunetellers decrypt the future by observing flies landing on mango seeds. The Nupe tribe of northern Nigeria use strings of berries for divination. The Yoruba use palm fruits, and the Yukun use calabash disks.

  In tribal societies, those who seemed capable of understanding the mystical nature of plants were anointed as shamans, messengers between this world and the other. For centuries, medicine men have used fruits to induce trancelike states. Any part of a plant can have entheogenic (god-releasing) aspects—roots, bark, resin, leaves, twigs, flowers or vines—but fruits seem particularly potent.

  Ucuba fruits, called semen of the sun, cause tryptamine freakouts. Half a dozen Hawaiian wood rose seeds induce a state similar to an LSD trip. The potent datura fruit has been used in sacred rites since prehistoric times. The chilito is an acidic, edible fruit that grows on a Mexican cactus called Hikuli mulatto. It allows go-betweens to communicate with the beyond and is said to cause insanity in evil people, some of whom throw themselves from cliffs to escape the madness. The fresh fruits of the latúe facilitate dream work by Chile’s Mapuche witch doctors. Mexicans crush ololiuqui fruits into a beverage drunk on quiet nights to create a potent hallucinogen. The red testicle-like fruits of the sanango, which grow in West Africa, cause visual hallucinations. The fruits and seeds of mandrake and henbane contain mind-bending alkaloids that were used in medieval witch brews. The fruit capsules of Sryian rue cause the same effects as ayahuasca. Cabalonga blanca fruits protect ayahuasca users from supernatural menace. Cebíl, the “seeds of civilization,” are used to access another level of reality. Smoking banana peels, said to be hallucinogenic, is a rite of passage that usually ends in a headache. The Waiká of Venezuela use the beans of yopo fruits in a bizarre ritual where one man blows the fruit snuff through a long pipe into another man’s nose. When he snorts it up, pandemonium ensues.

  The psychotropic quality that many fruits possess is actually a form of toxicity. Plants contain poisons intended to deter small animals from messing with them. When humans ingest these plants, their neuro-chemicals have effects ranging from relaxation and inebriation to paralysis and death.

  Cashew nuts are highly toxic until roasted. The seeds are surrounded by double shells that contain a skin irritant similar to poison ivy. This caustic liquid, called Cashew Nut Shell Liquid (CNSL), must be removed in order to eat the nut. Ackee, the national fruit of Jamaica, is tricky: when underripe, it contains hypoglycin, a violent purgative that can make you vomit until you die. Its seeds are always poisonous. Cyanide and cyanogens are found in citrus and pome fruit seeds. Star-fruits contain oxalic acid. White sapotes are called “kill-health” (matasano) in Guatemala because of their narcotic seeds. Eating unripe monstera deliciosas is like biting into glass. Gambians dip their arrows into Strophansus fruits, which contain such virulent poison that it can kill a human in fifteen minutes. Buah keluak (“the fruit which nauseates”), used on spears, is eaten in Singapore after being buried underground for a month or more, and then soaked in water for weeks before being boiled. Orangutans eat and disperse the Strychnos ignatii, a fruit full of strychnine. Somehow immune to the poison, it just makes them salivate excessively.

  “How I Almost Gave My Life in the Pursuit of Fruit” is the title of an article in Fruit Gardener magazine about an encounter with toxicity. The author, “Boobus Anonymous,” starts by explaining her fantasy to become the discoverer of a delicious new fruit. She recounts how she noticed a sausage fruit tree growing on the campus of UCLA. Plucking one of the fruit, which look like large, dangling Hungarian salami, the author gave it a nibble, noting that it tasted like damp cornstarch. Realizing it wasn’t the fruit that would earn her renown, she forgot about it, until, half an hour later, she noticed a tingling in her face.

  Her mouth, she became convinced, had turned into a snout. Soon enough, she was fully hallucinating: “Reality had become an enormous transparent rubber band, stretched and encompassing the entire range of my vision, indeed my entire consciousness stretched out and distended, and I was inside it with no immediate options for getting out.”

  She put on nice clothes in case she died. Trying not to panic, she called some other fruit connoisseurs who helped her calm down, and informed her that she wouldn’t die from the toxins. “Nowadays, when I walk past that tree and look at its hard, fat brown fruits,” she concludes, “I feel a kinship—a link with that tree. Mentally I whisper, ‘I know you … I’ve experienced you, probably as no one else has. And it’s our secret. No one else suspects what you’re really like.’”

  WE DIE FOR THEM, we make love to them and we use them to contact the divine. We can be so entranced by fruits that we end up needing them to the point of self-destruction. Winos are addicted to fermented grapes, and heroin addicts are addicted to sap of the poppy fruit. In Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, the narrator believes himself to be addicted to bananas, and in one of his recordings vehemently admonishes himself to “Cut ’em out!”

  History’s most excessive pomophile was Emperor Claudius Albinus, who ate ten melons a day, alongside five hundred figs, one hundred peaches and mounds of grapes. Emperor Diocletian abdicated his reign in order to dedicate himself to his beloved fruit trees. Antoine-Girard de Saint-Amant was a baroque poet who really loved melons: “Ha! Hold me up, I swoon! This delicious morsel tickles my very soul. It oozes a sweet juice which will steep my heart in ecstasy … O far better than gold, O Apollo’s masterpiece! O flower of all fruits! O ravishing MELON!”

  Prominent historical figures were believed to have perished due to their yearnings for edible fruit flesh, particularly for melons. Pope Paul II died in 1471, alone in his room in a melon-induced apoplexy. In 1534, a surfeit of melons took the life of Clement VII. Both Frederick III of Germany and his son Maximilian II died of melon overdoses. Others who fell victim to the assassinating melon include Guy de la Brosse, Louis XIII’s doctor; the Baron de Rougemont in 1840; and Albert II of Germany. King John died in 1216 after overdoing it with peaches.

  Artists, always intense, have taken fruit appreciation to maddening lengths. Alexandre Dumas ate an apple every morning at dawn beneath the Arc de Triomphe. He offered his life’s work to the town of Cavaillon in exchange for an annuity of melons. The Dadaist George Grosz said that his friends and he used to eat “gooseberries until our bellies swelled up like zeppelins and we lay there like the wanderers in the land of Cockaigne after they had eaten their way through the great cake mountain.” Andy Warhol has written about a side effect to gorging on cherries: “You have all the pits to tell you exactly how many you ate. Not more or less. Exactly. One-seed fruits really bother me for that reason. That’s why I’d always rather eat raisins than prunes. Prune pits are even more imposing than cherry pits.” Hitchcock ate gooseberries, seeds and all, every morning. Coleridge liked to bite fruits straight off trees, without using his hands. Agatha Christie wrote in the bathtub, surrounded by green apples. Friedrich Schiller kept rotten apples inside his desk and would breathe in their decaying perfume for inspiration. D. H. Lawrence climbed nude into mulberry trees to write. Henri Michaux claims that he spent twenty years learning how to project himself into fruits: “I put an apple on my table. Then I put myself into the apple. How peaceful!”

  I too went off the deep end trying to get to the core of fruits. Wanting to understand these fruit votaries’ passion, I spent months combing through any book that contained the word “fruit” in index searches. I fell into a vortex of ancient fruit books at the library of the New York botanical garden, at the Royal Botanical Garden’s library in Niagara and at the Los Angeles Central Library.

  There are more than 3,500 books exclusive
ly about fruits, and over 8,000 books mainly about fruits. While sifting through pomological treatises, I’d think of Sylvia Plath’s description of reading about a man and a nun who would meet at a fig tree to collect fruits, until their hands accidentally brushed one day, and the nun never returned: “I wanted to crawl in between the black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig tree.” I started daydreaming that Julia F. Morton, author of the legendary Fruits of Warm Climates, had an extramarital affair with the fruit hunter Wilson Popenoe, author of Manual of Tropical and Subtropical Fruits.

  I took out dozens of books in an attempt to find the angel at the center of the rind, as Wallace Stevens once put it. I tried to figure out what variety of lemons were held in the hands of self-immolating Indian widows as they transformed themselves into embers on the banks of the Ganges. When Litvinenko, the former KGB spy, was poisoned in London, I wondered why nobody had thought of giving him cornellian cherries, which can leach radioactivity from our bloodstream. I tried to find out precisely which fruits were eaten by the fabled lotus eaters, torn between speculation over whether it was the Libyan coast’s lotus jujube (Zizyphus lotus) or the carob, whose fruit is sweeter.

  I pored through the esoteric works of Jakob Lorber, a nineteenth-century German mystic who spent the last twenty-four years of his life in, as Jorge Luis Borges describes it, “a series of protracted revelations.” Starting in 1840, the voice of God commanded Lorber to put pen to paper and transcribe what he heard. From that moment on, until he died in 1864, he wrote all day almost every day, filling twenty-five volumes of over five hundred pages each (not including his minor works). Lorber wrote about many of the fruits found in outer space. Saturn, I was overjoyed to learn, produces pyramid fruits, fire fruits and rainbow-colored ship fruits used as boats. Ubra fruits, Lorber said, are nine-foot-high mercury pouches that grow on branchless trees whose square trunks of green glass shine like mirrors, allowing passersby to check out their reflections.