Fire Monks

by Colleen Morton Busch

  On the morning of June 25, the incident management team predicted that the fires in the Basin Complex would burn together in the next twelve-hour period and that the fire would spread northeast toward Tassajara Road in the next twenty-four to seventy-two hours.

  Governor Schwarzenegger visited the incident command post that morning in Monterey for a briefing with the team, made up of members from local, state, and federal agencies staffing various positions, from safety officers to fire behavior analysts, and logistics and finance specialists. Schwarzenegger had already mobilized the California National Guard a few days earlier. “We haven’t seen this kind of condition, this early in the year,” he observed at a press conference. “There is no fire season anymore. The fire season is really all year round.” More than seven thousand firefighters were working the fires, more than fifty helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, more than five hundred engines. Schwarzenegger said the state’s resources were “spread thin.” He advised California residents to take health precautions—to stay inside with windows and doors closed and curtail outdoor activities, especially people with respiratory conditions. “Stay home and stay inside.”

  As the governor spoke in Monterey, those still at Tassajara—about forty-five residents—sat around tables in the guest dining room beside the creek, listening to a rundown of priority tasks for the day, nearly all of which would require spending time outside in the smoky air, breathing heavily from exertion. Many were feeling the effects of the smoke: dizziness, headaches, a scratchy throat, fatigue. Their muscles throbbed; their bug bites itched. Blisters broke on their hands and feet.

  Just before nine a.m., in the middle of the meeting, David was called to the stone office to take a phone call. His voice trembled with emotion when he returned several minutes later and announced that a fire commander stationed at the observatory on Chews Ridge had ordered another evacuation. Fire had entered the Tassajara Creek watershed. “The Basin and Gallery fires are burning together and moving toward the road. Fire engines are staged and ready to leave for Tassajara. They need us out now to avoid a bottleneck on the road. Please go to your room, gather the bag you packed, and meet in the work circle in thirty minutes.”

  There was the slightest beat of stunned silence before the creek rushed in, filling the void with its coming and going.

  Jane had already walked from one end of Tassajara to the other and up to the Suzuki Roshi memorial site, saying wordless good-byes. In the work circle, people were beginning to gather, embrace, load into vehicles. She said good-bye to David, who was warm but visibly distracted. She hugged Mako and her partner, Graham, Tassajara’s thirty-five-year-old plant manager.

  She felt a deep fondness for the couple, an intimacy beyond their actual familiarity. Mako strongly resembled a friend from Jane’s time at Tassajara thirty years before, and the couple reminded her of her own partnership with Tassajara’s fire marshal during the 1977 fire. All of this tugged at her heart along with the plumes of smoke rising from the ridge.

  But she knew many were being asked to leave who would have stayed if they could, and she deliberately modeled, We go now. That’s what we do. We go.

  Eight was not enough. That was the number of residents David had been told could stay behind. Aware that three times that amount had stayed at Tassajara during previous fires, he had tried to negotiate for more. With more hands, they’d have a better chance of getting the remaining work done and making a stand against the fire if it came through Tassajara. Eight, the commander had said again.

  A convoy of vehicles stretched from the work circle past the shop and pointed up the road. A carload of four senior students, former residents whose presence David had requested after the guest evacuation because of their particular skills and knowledge of Tassajara, arrived from San Francisco just as the departing vehicles filled up. Those four plus five others—residents David thought had useful skills and the physical capacity to engage a wildfire—made nine, one more than they’d been granted permission to keep. But the fire commander who’d called with the evacuation order hadn’t been to Tassajara. David had never even heard his name before the morning’s urgent call. As students loaded into cars, David decided to up the number. If they kept five more, they’d have fourteen, and fourteen could fit in two evacuation vehicles if it became necessary for everyone to leave.

  David turned to Mako and Graham. “Who else should we keep?”

  He hadn’t made a list of candidates, maybe in defiance of this moment of inevitable, and inevitably unpleasant, picking and choosing. David knew well what it was like to lose your home, and here he was, in the position of deciding who could stay and who would go. That pained him, even if he intended to use his power responsibly, for the benefit of all. But he knew what mattered for Tassajara. Who was strong and physically capable? Who had a practical, useful skill, such as carpentry? Who knew the infrastructure? Who could handle the emotional stress and strain of being in the middle of a wildfire? Who would promote harmony in the group?

  It was a spontaneous, somewhat random process. They started going to vehicles, knocking on windows, asking certain individuals to stay. These individuals tended to be young and male. In many cases, they weren’t the most senior students or residents of Tassajara, but rather those who could dig ditches, fell trees, fix a malfunctioning pump—and maybe run from flames.

  Sonja Gardenswartz had lived at Tassajara for ten years. A former head cook in her late fifties, Gardenswartz had answered the phone in the stone office that morning. When the commander said that everyone had to leave Tassajara right away, she’d told him he had to speak with the director. She’d already told David she wanted to stay and cook for the fire crews, and David had said yes. But at the last minute, he decided instead to keep a younger female resident who was strong-bodied, emotionally resilient, and skilled in both the kitchen and the shop.

  “I’m sorry,” David told Gardenswartz. “I changed my mind. You need to leave with the others.”

  He watched what looked like anger flash across Gardenswartz’s face, her fair skin already flushed pink from rushing to the lower barn for the bag she’d stuffed with her belongings. To be told yes and then no would be painful for anyone. In Gardenswartz’s case, David suspected, it might be worse that the denial came from him. As the current guest manager, Gardenswartz was also a member of the senior staff. But Gardenswartz had a history of feeling overlooked at Zen Center, while David had been fast-tracked to positions of responsibility.

  “Are you leaving?” she asked.

  The question, in David’s mind, implied that an old rotator cuff injury that limited his physical contribution to work at Tassajara ought to count against his staying as well. But it wasn’t really a question, and Gardenswartz didn’t wait for an answer before walking away.

  Later, she told me that several factors—closed communication and a lack of experience, coupled with the confusion and intensity of the moment—had perhaps obscured “a wider view of what might be needed in the circumstances, that maybe youth and physical strength were not the only qualifications to consider.” Had she known at the time what she later learned—“a mandatory evacuation does not mean they will haul you out”—she might have made a different choice herself that morning and refused to leave.

  Hard as it was to deny Gardenswartz—and to dismiss three other Tassajara senior staff members, also women—David was sure he’d made the right decision. He counted up those he had asked to stay—four women and ten men, a mix of senior staff and students who’d arrived at Tassajara for the first time only a few weeks before.

  He’d pared them down from forty-plus to fourteen. Fourteen wasn’t nearly enough, but it was better than eight.

  Around ten a.m., after the evacuation convoy left, the remaining fourteen regrouped and recalibrated their preparation efforts. An hour later, one green U.S. Forest Service (USFS) fire engine with a crew of eight arrived. David, Graham, and Tassajara’s resident fire marshal, Devin Patel, gave the crew a tour. The firefi
ghters helped residents clear brush and dig fireline, but shortly before four p.m., the engine captain told David they wouldn’t be staying the night. The crew left before dinner.

  David felt duped. Based on the urgency of that morning’s mandatory evacuation order, he had emptied out most of Tassajara, expecting that the firefighters would stay—and that there would be many engines, not one. The numbers in his head from the 1977 and 1999 fire logs—sixty firefighters, twenty engines lining the road—dwarfed this response.

  That evening, David and Graham drove up to Chews Ridge and the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy (MIRA) observatory, built to take advantage of the clear atmosphere above the Santa Lucia Mountains and lack of ambient light in the Ventana. During the Basin Complex fire, MIRA served as a safety zone, lookout, meeting site, and operations base for firefighters, as it had in the 1999 Kirk Complex fire. Ivan Eberle, MIRA’s caretaker, had invited David and Graham for a visit to get acquainted with the fire commanders who held briefings there and to view Google Earth maps of the fire’s progression.

  Eberle had stayed at MIRA throughout the 1999 fire. He was familiar with the lingo, tactics, and politics of firefighting. He had relationships with local firefighters. But for David and Graham, it was like being thrown into another world. When they first arrived, to David’s surprise, they encountered the USFS engine captain who had pulled his crew out of Tassajara just a few hours earlier.

  Inside Eberle’s living quarters, a group of firefighters in varying uniforms—including several members of the USFS engine crew—gathered around the dinette table. Some wore USFS uniforms. Others were from CAL FIRE, California’s state firefighting agency. As the firefighters ribbed one another like members of opposing sports teams, David and Graham glimpsed the complex and sometimes conflicted relationship between the agencies. “We learned that CAL FIRE was more proactive,” David told me later. “The Forest Service was in charge, but it seemed like CAL FIRE wanted to be.”

  Firefighters came and went from the room. Eberle played a YouTube video of a “fire tornado”—a spinning pillar of black smoke churning through a stand of oak trees in a grassy meadow on the Indians fire, southeast of Tassajara. He told David and Graham that the fire whirl had run three miles, burned over an engine crew, and ripped a fifteen-inch limb off an oak tree. Could that happen at Tassajara? David wondered. He wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that.

  At one point, Eberle told me later, a “consultant” on the fire joined the conversation, someone he had not met before who reported directly to the incident commander. As Eberle listened to the talk around his table, he heard that the incident management team for the Basin Complex fire, concerned about the rugged terrain and lack of resources, did not plan to provide structure protection within the fire area. Eberle felt he’d received assurances of protection from a commander previously assigned to the area who had consulted him for his local knowledge and experience. But now he heard that crews were pulling out, that they wouldn’t even wrap buildings before leaving them to the flames.

  Graham heard something slightly different. His impression was not that the fire service was abandoning the area completely but that incident command staff was shifting personnel around, trying to cover two huge fires. “They were bringing the fires together under one command structure and separating east from west.”

  It’s not unusual for Graham to have his own considered take. Sometimes he wears glasses, sometimes not, depending on whether he feels the need. His mind is disciplined yet curious; serious yet playful. He once continued to sit zazen all night long during a seven-day sesshin at Tassajara, inspired by old stories of monks who tested the marrow of their practice by sitting upright for years at a time. In conversation, Graham pauses as long as it takes for the words he seeks to arise. He can move from a look of intense concentration to a soft, high-pitched giggle and back all within one sentence.

  As plant manager, Graham had intimate knowledge of Tassajara’s hidden places, the systems below the surface and out of sight that keep the place running. Twice a day he checked the potable water supply, running tests for the county. He maintained the pumps that fed the irrigation system. He monitored the energy supply from solar panels installed high on the hill above the work circle and tracked power usage—in 2008, about half of the electricity used to light the kitchen, staff offices, student housing, and zendo came from the sun. Graham also ensured that Tassajara’s phone lines were in working order. He came to the position with some background in carpentry, but he learned the job more by observation, in his words, by “seeing clearly what’s happening and responding,” by “attuning to plumbing as attuning to zazen.” Ever since the fires had started, Graham had spent more time than usual thinking about water—running beneath the earth, down the creekbed, through the pipes at Tassajara—and about how to ensure that they would have a constant supply when they needed it.

  When they returned from MIRA, Graham and David said good night below the birdhouse, a resident cabin perched on a cliff above the work circle. The darkness around them was alive with the rush of the creek and the rustlings of the Ventana’s animal inhabitants—crickets, wood rats, rattlesnakes, raccoons, deer, the occasional cougar. Normally Graham would have to walk down to the flats at the far end of Tassajara to return to the cabin he shared with Mako. That night he walked only as far as stone three, one of Tassajara’s most desirable guest rooms, along the creek. David had requested that the fourteen remaining residents move into the central area, where they would be easy to reach in an emergency.

  Back at his cabin, David looked longingly at the stack of books on his night table. Normally summer afforded him time to read. He could work through several novels reading a bit each night before bed. Not now. All he wanted to do was sleep at day’s end. It was exhausting integrating new information on the fire each day, making decisions that powerfully affected others, and then, on top of that, dealing with people’s reactions.

  He set his notebook on the table. It was full of names. The official fire command structure seemed to be in constant flux. The day’s events and the meeting at MIRA had reinforced David’s mounting confusion about who had authority on the fire and who could be trusted. From now on, he decided, he wouldn’t take what anyone said as the unshakable truth or assume that the people in uniform were keeping Tassajara’s best interests in mind. He would rely on his own authority, even if it made him uncomfortable to do so.

  After about six months at the children’s home, David was sent to live with a foster family. Once, while spanking him for something he no longer remembers, his foster mother felt faint and demanded that he bring her a glass of water. When he did, she spit it out and said, “This isn’t cold enough!” He brought her another and she spit it out again: “Can’t you do anything right? I’m in pain and you’re not helping me!” Knowing that his actions could cause others to suffer caused an old anxious feeling to stir in David, only now he knew that trying to make it right would only make it worse. At any moment, despite good intentions, he might misstep. A novice in fire, he could only be willing to learn and to make his best effort.

  Find out for yourself, Suzuki Roshi had told his students at Tassajara when they were trying to figure out what an American Zen monastery would look like—a messy, confusing, yet exciting process. The mind of a beginner is as open and receptive as a tilled field in spring. The mind of a beginner doesn’t know. It assumes nothing; it tests everything. It asks of all it encounters: Is that so? In this business of wildfire, all of Tassajara’s residents were novices, feeling their way in the dark.

  Three

  THE THREE-DAY-AWAY FIRE

  To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion.

  That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.

  —EIHEI DŌGEN, Genjo Koan

  Thursday, June 26, five days after the lightning strikes

  Midday on June 26, Chris Slymon sat down at the computer in Jamesburg to post an update on S
itting with Fire, the blog he’d started the prior afternoon when a few dozen Tassajara evacuees had arrived in Jamesburg.

  Stunned and ravenous, they had unloaded boxes of fruit, cheese, loaves of bread, and various spreads for lunch, having raided the walk-in refrigerator and dry goods storage at Tassajara before leaving. (There were plenty of extra supplies since the Tassajara kitchen had been prepared to feed close to fifty that night.) After lunch, Jane Hirshfield had hugged Leslie good-bye and slipped away before the start of a four-hour meeting in which the evacuees sorted out the complicated logistics of where each and every person would go—and the animals. The evacuation caravan had included the monastery dog and a couple of cats.

  Residents accustomed to greeting one another with a bow embraced when the meeting ended, uncertain whether they’d meet again. Then they reshuffled themselves into cars, preparing to scatter in all directions. Some were relieved to leave the fire zone, while others felt profound disorientation and distress, a state of shock at the quick turn of events.

  They had spent thirty-six extraordinary hours together, engaged in the task of preparing for the fire, yet individual responses to the sudden upheaval of the evacuation varied. While Zen holds that the construct of a “self” is actually empty, because like everything else it is always changing, people inevitably bring their own perspectives to the circumstances they encounter. As 1977 Tassajara fire marshal Ted Marshall told me: “You show up with your own life experience.”

  One summer resident’s friends had thrown her a “monkette” party when she left behind a lucrative career in video production in Austin, Texas, to dive into practice at Tassajara. Heading out of the smoky valley only three weeks after she’d arrived there, she had no idea what she’d do next. “I’d just left my whole life,” she told me.