Fire Monks

by Colleen Morton Busch

  David found Jane. “Would you please stay for a while?” he asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  That Jane had been through a fire at Tassajara was deeply reassuring to David. She had already shared her thoughts with him about what to expect from authorities and what preparations to make. Though Tassajara had an infrastructure in place to respond to fires, with student crews trained to operate the pumps and lay hoses, the current summer residents hadn’t experienced a wildfire before. People would look to David, as director, for an answer to the question “What happens now?” He didn’t want the answer to be, “I have no idea.” He certainly didn’t want to have to ask the sheriff.

  He had a note in his pocket—a message from Jane’s old friend Leslie, who was in San Francisco at an abbots’ council meeting along with Zen Center’s two co-abbots. David had asked Leslie to attend the meeting in his place. For more than twenty years, Leslie had divided her weeks between Jamesburg and Tassajara, where she’d held nearly every staff position, including director—some several times. A slight woman with long white hair and brown eyes, Leslie floated easily between the monastery and the secular world up the road, sometimes in robes, sometimes in blue jeans.

  “Keep people who want to stay and are able-bodied and emotionally stable until at least six p.m. unless it becomes clear fire is close,” her note read. “Abbots are willing to come but realize what we need is people with expertise. Go slow sending residents away.”

  “Zen Center” is actually three centers: City Center, on Page Street in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco; Green Gulch Farm, in a fog-hemmed coastal valley across the Golden Gate Bridge; and Tassajara. They inhabit three different ecosystems: urban, coastal, and wilderness. They have discrete cultures, schedules, and ways of relating to the forms and traditions of Zen practice. But like a tree whose trunk forks in three directions, they share the same roots. They are separate even as they are deeply interconnected.

  All three centers depend on revenues from Tassajara’s guest season—for nearly half of all operating expenses. If Tassajara burned, much would be lost that could not be measured in dollars. But shutting down Tassajara for any amount of time in the summer could deal a blow to Zen Center’s material well-being. The abbots, meeting in San Francisco, knew this. David knew it, too.

  Two

  FIRES MERGE

  Numbers never lie, after all: they simply tell different stories depending on the math of the tellers.

  —LUIS ALBERTO URREA, The Devil’s Highway

  Monday, June 23, two days after the lightning strikes

  Around noon on Monday, after the guests had left, David called an urgent meeting in the screened-in student eating area for the forty-seven remaining residents. “Saturday’s lightning strikes started three new fires in the Ventana Wilderness, and they are growing rapidly. By order of the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, we’ve evacuated the guests. Actually, the sheriff requested that we evacuate Tassajara completely, but I explained that we need people here to prepare. It’s not clear yet what kind of help we might receive. The state’s resources are challenged right now, but hopefully they’ll send several crews as they did in ’99,” he said, thinking of the Kirk Complex fire, which threatened but ultimately missed Tassajara.

  “Our primary concern is everyone’s safety,” he continued. “We don’t know how long we have before the fire will arrive—or even whether it will arrive. It could be three days. It could be three weeks. But we are in regular contact with the fire service and we will keep you informed. Since things could change quickly, please pack a bag so that you are ready to go with short notice.”

  He took a breath and tried to keep his tone informative, neutral. “The sergeant who ordered the mandatory evacuation has asked each of us to provide the names of our dentists and emergency contacts.” He left out the sergeant’s words—“so we can identify bodies.”

  Silence. Startled looks back and forth. A few muffled, nervous laughs. No one said anything, but questions hung in the air. You’re telling me I’m safe, but you want the name of my dentist? Wasn’t I just making strawberry pie?

  “I know it sounds alarming,” David continued, “but it’s just a precautionary measure.”

  A sheriff’s deputy had arrived to collect residents’ identifying information as the guests were being taken out. David had explained that many of the students would need to make phone calls to get the requested information, sharing three phone lines. The deputy had declined an offer to join the community for lunch. He waited nearby while they held their meeting.

  David paused to gather his thoughts. Was he forgetting something important? “No one will be asked to stay who does not wish to. We have a lot of work to do. We’ll be identifying those priorities just as soon as we can. We are lucky to have Jane Hirshfield here with us, who defended Tassajara during the 1977 fire, and maybe she can guide us in our efforts.”

  Jane bowed. David asked her if she’d like to add anything. Around the room, there were not a lot of familiar faces. Many of the students were new to Tassajara—having arrived only in May. Many were young, she noted, in their twenties—energetic, fit, tattoos hidden under their clothes. A few were old Tassajara hands, people she’d seen year after year, priests and senior staff who’d held many practice positions. Everyone was in work clothes—shorts or jeans and T-shirts, or samues, two-piece informal outfits worn by monks during periods of temple work—mostly dark fabrics to hide the dirt.

  She’d seen the same array of expressions around the circle of the poetry workshop the prior evening—a mix of apprehension and excitement. Writing a poem could be frightening if you thought you already needed to know how to do it. So it was with a wildfire. You just had to start somewhere and be willing to get dirty.

  Jane didn’t say anything about the evacuation she’d already correctly predicted or the one she still believed was on its way. She tried to underscore the message that hung on the wooden board outside the zendo called a han, struck each morning and evening to call the community to meditation: Listen, everyone. Birth and death is given once. This moment now is gone. Awake each one awake. Don’t waste this life. The mallet had worn a deep groove into the faded word now.

  They need not panic, she assured them, thinking of the effect of the sheriff’s request. It would be days, maybe weeks, before the fire actually arrived. The important thing was just to do what they could in each moment to make Tassajara safe. Look around you, she encouraged the few dozen residents who remained, students and staff included. That broom you see leaning up against a building? Don’t wait for someone else to move it. Make it your responsibility. A single spark can change everything.

  Don’t worry, she said again. “We are safe at Tassajara. They’ll throw most of us out long before there’s any chance of danger, and if they think there’s any real danger to life, they’ll make everyone leave.” Specific tasks could be figured out later, as well as who might stay for the duration. But first, people needed to know that they were not in immediate danger.

  David asked the residents to return to the student eating area after packing a bag and gathering their emergency contact numbers. The work leader would wait there to collect the information for the sheriff’s deputy.

  “Does anyone have questions?” he asked.

  There were more than he had answers for. If it’s a mandatory evacuation, then why are we allowed to stay? When will we know if fire crews are coming down here? What if I stay now but decide to leave later? Will the stage be running? Someone from the kitchen crew was worried about getting lunch out, even though the guests were gone. What about the schedule?

  Each new student is given a copy of the monastic regulations when they arrive at Tassajara—rules that help the monks live together “in mutual respect, peace, and harmony.” The first item listed is a “commitment to completely follow the zendo schedule.” This means be on time for morning meditation. In fact, be early. Be in your seat five minutes before the final roll-down on th
e han signaling the start of the officiating priest’s morning offering rounds. Be on time for work. Be on time. Be in time.

  It may sound confining, but the schedule is not intended to restrict. It’s meant to release. Without a schedule, you have to wonder what you should be doing from one moment to the next. Should you wake up now or roll over and go back to sleep? Preferences must be weighed, decisions constantly confronted. And since reality does not align itself with personal preferences, organizing yourself to support them is usually an invitation to suffering.

  Zen has a solution to this problem: “The great way is not difficult, just avoid picking and choosing.” Just follow the schedule. Take up the tasks of whatever position you’ve been assigned, without being tugged around by likes and dislikes, and stop when the bell rings. Cook. Clean. Serve meals. Turn compost. Trim candles. Scrub toilets. Sit meditation. One is not higher than the other. A Zen student undertakes work as a practice—this is in the rules, too—“by entering deeply and wholeheartedly into the work given us to do.”

  That afternoon at the work circle, David told the residents, “We have a lot of hard, physical labor ahead of us. We’re going to need as much help as we can get. But it’s important that you understand: If you choose to stay, you’re choosing to defend Tassajara if the fire comes while you’re here.”

  At that meeting, some residents decided to leave. One student who stayed noted how still and in-between Tassajara felt then. “It was as if the set for a play had suddenly been stripped from the stage,” she told me. Her head ached and her lungs felt heavy. She knew that the smoke was only likely to worsen and that she should probably leave, too, but she wanted to stay. She went to the kitchen, where she’d spent many hours as a guest cook, and collected the recipe box and binders containing the lineage of Tassajara’s kitchen to be taken to Jamesburg. That afternoon, the regular evening service at five forty-five in the zendo, often not fully attended, was packed. “Everyone was in there,” she recalled. “Suddenly we all needed to show up to the one thing that was still known amid all that was so uncertain.”

  After supper there was yet another meeting, this time in the creekside guest dining room. The tables inside were set for the next meal, the napkin table outside sprinkled with a fine sifting of ash.

  From her seat, Jane could see the bloodred orb of the sun, orange shadows on the hillsides. She listened as residents started to discuss the schedule. Should they alter the usual summer routine, a student asked, maintaining morning and evening meditation, doing fire preparations during the working hours, when people would normally be at their regular crew jobs? But there were problems with that approach, another resident pointed out. Every crew’s schedule was slightly different. Some crews worked three days on, one day off. Some worked four days on, one off. Would they still have days off?

  Jane had been keeping a quiet profile, making suggestions gently to David or other senior staff members and only when her opinion was requested. But listening to this discussion, she realized she had to speak up. This fire just might find Tassajara unprotected and empty by default, she feared, if they didn’t stop talking and get to work.

  She’d stopped by the office earlier and asked for a sheet of paper—a whole sheet, not one of the recycled quarters from a cut-up page, used for messages—to start a list of everything they needed to do. They needed to dig fireline, removing even roots from cleared bands of earth. They needed to get crews organized, trim overhanging branches, clear brush, and rake leaves. Anything that might be extra flammable had to be moved to where it could not catch a building on fire. You can’t know what is the thing that will make a difference, she told them, you just do everything you can think to do.

  “What about the zendo schedule?” a resident asked. “What about zazen?”

  “This is a work sesshin,” said Jane. “It’s not not practice.”

  “Fire sesshin,” someone added, and the mood in the room shifted. They decided they would work earlier in the mornings and later into the evenings, when it was cooler and less smoky. They would begin right then, at eight o’clock in the evening. Those who were able and wanted to would work. The zazen schedule would continue but would be optional.

  With the day’s last light, they hiked up to the hill cabins above the work circle to start clearing. The guest cook who’d gathered up the recipes cleared oak leaves from around cabins with a small brush. Of this experience, she wrote in her journal, “I couldn’t tell if we were preparing Tassajara for its death or its rebirth.” For the next thirty-six hours, the community worked together removing fuels, limbing trees, and digging fireline around the perimeter of Tassajara. They started at five thirty a.m. and continued until darkness fell, taking individual breaks as needed and meeting several times a day for work circle or a meal in the guest dining room. They worked mostly in silence, but occasionally someone started singing or told a story for respite from the heat, smoke, mosquito bites, poison oak, and blisters. At the end of the day, they washed away the sweat and grime and weariness at the baths and walked back to their cabins in darkness—the flammable kerosene lanterns had been removed from the paths.

  The feeling of shared presence that normally abides in the zendo had drifted outdoors, to all of Tassajara. But even as they relished the camaraderie of their collective efforts and the rare privilege of having Tassajara to themselves in the summer, some also had their doubts: We’re Zen students, not firefighters! One student’s apartment building in San Francisco had burned down less than a year before. His neighbor had died. Had he offended some god of fire? Another lived in New Orleans when Katrina hit. First flood, now fire, threatened her home. Some voiced their concerns, either out in the open or privately, to roommates and friends: They took out all the guests. What are we still doing here?

  Jane walked around, reassuring even as she encouraged an attitude of not delaying until later what could be done now. She moved at least fifteen brooms, propped against the outer walls of wooden buildings. Mostly she looked: What else? What haven’t I seen? Everywhere she looked was something: a wicker chair, a box of firewood outside a cabin door, a pile of dead branches in the dry creekbed just below the shop and its store of lumber and fuel. When she discovered a knee-deep cache of dried, fallen leaves behind the courtyard cabins, she rallied most of the remaining residents to rake them. They used garden carts and trash cans to haul the leaves onto big tarps, then lifted the tarps into trucks and drove them out to the flats. “A leaf is light,” Jane said later, “but moved in that quantity, it was heavy labor.”

  This is what sangha looks like: a chain of bodies clearing leaves or passing thirty-pound sacks of flour hand to hand from the town truck to the kitchen—built by Tassajara’s first Zen students. But it’s not just about manpower. Sangha is also a mirror. It’s what Colin sensed when he arrived that first time at Tassajara and thought, There’s no hiding here. It’s the connection Mako craved, the nourishment David remembered from the children’s home. What better way to learn your habits of mind than to place yourself among a group of other beings with their own habits of mind, deep in a canyon? Sometimes it’s like pinball, personalities bouncing off one another, making a racket. Sometimes it’s as sweet as a soft rain. Living in sangha, you learn to make harmony, to see harmony in difference, to accept change. At Tassajara in particular, the sangha is always in flux. People come and go.

  On the afternoon of June 24, a day after the summer guests had gone and three days after the lightning strikes, the southern perimeter of the group of fires now known as the “Basin Complex”—the Gallery fire, the Basin fire, and a single lightning-struck tree—was six miles northwest of Tassajara. A team of field observers came to inspect the grounds. David and a few others showed them the standpipe system, a set of dedicated high-flow water pipes and outlets designed for firefighting. They showed them the pump that could draw water from the fifty-thousand-gallon swimming pool and the creekside pump that fed the standpipe and irrigation systems. They pointed out the clearing they�
��d accomplished thus far. They toured the shed stocked with fire gear: boots, fire-resistant jumpsuits, leather gloves, goggles, and headlamps; McLeods and Pulaskis (combination tools used to dig fireline) and shovels; fire shelters—individual heat-reflective tents deployed as a last resort by firefighters trapped by flames or caught in a burnover; and a well-worn copy of Essentials of Fire Fighting, 4th edition. Everywhere they went in Tassajara, the creek-song followed them.

  Jane joined the tour. She had cued the staff beforehand: “You have to speak their language. We have to let them see that you are prepared, and willing and capable of staying, or they will throw you out.” She jumped into the conversation often, telling the scouts how residents had stood their ground in 1977 and succeeded. She felt that she could serve as living proof that however unlikely it looked, Zen practitioners could help, not hinder, in fighting the fire.

  When the field observers left, David felt good about the encounter. No one had encouraged them to stay, but no one had demanded that they leave, either. It seemed they’d overcome the strikes against them—the main one being the narrow road through a deep canyon full of brush that dead-ends at Tassajara. If fire closed the road, the only way to access Tassajara, there would be no escape from the valley, no way to move people in or out in an emergency.

  Before they’d left, the firefighters fingered the protective clothing in the fire shed, nodding approvingly, saying, “Oh, yeah. You’ve got the good stuff.”