For the past few days, the core team had been trying to anticipate various scenarios. David had made a list of the thresholds and contingencies they’d discussed, mostly in the form of questions. What are the “trigger points”—a term firefighters used—at which we evacuate noncore team members? Evacuate everyone remaining in the valley? Take shelter in safety zones? If a CAL FIRE crew is here, who stays and under what circumstances? When do we evacuate: if they do? Or if they tell us to but they stay? When do we bury the Buddha?
They’d been trying to hammer out a system of tiered evacuations in which nonessential people would leave when the fire was close and a smaller group would stay for the fire to fuel the pumps Dharma Rain depended on. But by July Fourth, they’d abandoned that idea and decided to focus on ensuring that there were twenty people inside Tassajara willing to stay and defend it even if the road was cut off.
Counting the fourteen residents who’d initially stayed behind during the June 25 evacuation, plus students who’d returned to help after, residents then at Tassajara numbered around twenty already. Some of those individuals, however, hadn’t committed to staying for the duration, as the core team had. Bringing in more people would mean more reinforcements and more time to recover from the constant physical work of the last couple of weeks. One resident was so fatigued that he’d walked into the bronze gong outside the kitchen used to announce student meals and nearly knocked himself out.
After dinner, when the dishes were bused to the dish shack and the food put away, they gathered again around the table in the dining room. An upbeat mood lingered from the special holiday meal. It flattened when David made his announcement: Now is the time to choose. If you stay, you must be willing to meet the fire when it comes to Tassajara. Those concerned for their safety and unwilling to engage the fire should leave right away so others can come.
That Fourth of July evening, the skies were quiet over much of California. Some citizens had heeded the governor’s request to forgo fireworks. Normally, July Fourth is a festive night at Tassajara. Residents perform skits and parade down the main path, celebrating the anniversary of Tassajara’s official opening day in 1967 as much as the national holiday.
Zen students are more likely to affirm interdependence than independence. Part of Buddhist practice is learning to perceive the ways we are all connected to one another, just as each moment is tethered to the past and the future. Like a stand of aspens, all phenomena emerge aboveground from the same root. People forget this most of the time. They remember in times of crisis, when the habit of disconnection is broken.
This Independence Day at Tassajara, the residents were too tired to put together a celebration. They went to bed early as the forest put on its own display, bathing everything in a smoky orange glow.
The Three-Day-Away fire had been lurking in the Ventana Wilderness for two weeks. Though the fire wasn’t holding true to its name, it was still fitting. Many things come in threes in Zen. An old adage advises: Reflect three times before speaking. Monks make three bows (or nine, a multiple of three) during service. They eat from three bowls. They recognize three worlds or realms of existence: the realm of desire, the realm of form, and the realm of formlessness. They vow to abide by three pure precepts—to do no evil, to do good, and to save all beings—and to cherish the three treasures: Buddha (the teacher), Dharma (the teachings), and sangha (the community).
On the steamy afternoon of July 5, the standoff between Mako and Graham was three days old. When Mako left the kitchen after lunch, she ran into Graham inside their temporary lodgings in one of the stone rooms, where it was blissfully cool.
“Do you want a cookie?” she said. She’d brought some from the kitchen.
He answered no with a quick shake of his head.
“I wish you’d talk to me,” she said.
She took a bite. The cookie didn’t taste sweet, despite the sugar and chocolate chips in it. She closed her eyes and took a breath, reminding herself that she and her partner were still connected, even if she couldn’t feel it. Still, it hurt to feel separate. That day, Stuart had returned to Tassajara, bringing his girlfriend, Solange, as his guest. Introducing her at work circle, he was solicitous and sweet, protective, maybe overly so. Shundo, the acting work leader, had sent her to the kitchen. Her presence there made the dissonance with Graham all the more vivid for Mako.
One moment, you’re so close you feel you share the same skin, and the next, you’re a universe apart. But Mako knew better than to take Graham’s silence personally. Whatever was bothering him wasn’t really about her. His mood would shift eventually.
“I’ll leave this here,” she said, setting a cookie on the table.
She petted Monkeybat, asleep on a chair. The cat lifted her head into Mako’s palm and purred. Four weeks out from surgery for an intestinal tumor, she seemed to be slowly healing. Mako had sent Monkeybat to Jamesburg during the June 25 evacuation, but as fire preparations dragged on at Tassajara, Monkeybat was brought back in so Mako could take care of her personally.
“See you,” said Mako. Graham gave no reply. She opened the door and stepped back out into the smoke and heat.
“There is nothing to pin down, nothing to say,” said Dainin Katagiri, a Japanese Zen teacher who helped Suzuki Roshi establish the practice in San Francisco. “The voiceless voice, which comes from the depths of the human life, can’t be measured. Yet it is always there. It is what you actually experience. Somehow—in a word, through your body, with your mind—you must express it.” Katagiri often lamented the difficulty of giving talks, because words were just as good at creating distance as intimacy. They ultimately couldn’t touch the essence of things. Often misheard, mistaken, misquoted, and misused, words could wake us, but they could also entangle us and stir up trouble. Katagiri’s first book of lectures was called Returning to Silence. The second: You Have to Say Something.
Sonja Gardenswartz, who’d been at Jamesburg since the June resident evacuation, wanted to say something. She sat at the computer, a tickle of smoke at her throat. As a member of the senior staff, she’d been part of the communications loop after the fires started until, abruptly, she wasn’t. Being cut off from decision making and asked to evacuate against her wishes had activated a familiar pain, a sense she had of falling through the cracks in a place where there weren’t supposed to be any cracks. It hurt, yet she knew others were hurting, too. Her suffering was one burning leaf in a forest on fire.
From her place in Jamesburg, she wanted to do what she could to help keep the scattered community together. She couldn’t pick up a shovel, so she reached for words, slowly typing up an e-mail to a Google group for evacuated residents. “Well, there are some of us outside the box,” she wrote, “but we can draw closer in our own way—the heart of understanding the body mind of the many displaced beings in the world.”
The fire wasn’t creeping. It was gaining ground at a sprint. To manage the ever-expanding Basin Complex—now covering nearly seventy thousand acres—the incident management team had divided the complex into two zones of operation. In the west zone, near Big Sur, the fire exhibited extreme behavior on July 5, leaping from treetop to treetop in what’s called a crown fire. Reports for the east zone, where Tassajara is, noted similar activity, with groups of trees torching simultaneously and “active runs.” The incident map of the fire for that day showed the red fingers of fire perimeter lines pointing toward Tassajara from the Tassajara Creek drainage to the northwest and Willow Creek to the southwest.
Yet fire managers on the incident continued to predict that the fire was three days away. They still expected it to creep down Tassajara Creek or over the ridge behind Tassajara, from the west, and that residents would be able to ride out the fire safely. According to branch director Jack Froggatt, who debriefed the crew at Jamesburg that day, the problem wasn’t really the fire. The problem was the road. The incident management team wouldn’t send crews into Tassajara when the only road in and out of the valley could be cut off for da
ys by the fire.
By then, Tassajara Road had been in a state of “soft” closure since June 25, when a notice from the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office went up in Jamesburg. The closure point wasn’t manned, however, and the sign didn’t deter a tour group from driving down the road on July 5 to visit Tassajara. The carload of four Korean Buddhist tourists and their guide arrived unannounced in the late morning and wandered into the work circle area. David offered them a bath and an invitation to stay for lunch.
“Did you know the road is closed?” Abbot Steve asked the priest from the Carmel Valley temple that hosted the group.
“Yes,” the priest replied, smiling. “Road closed. But also open!”
That evening after dinner, Abbot Steve, David, Graham, and Stuart drove to Jamesburg for a meeting with Ken Heffner, deputy supervisor of the Los Padres National Forest. Heffner’s secretary had called to arrange it. The sky was neither night nor day above Tassajara Road—a patchwork of ashcolored clouds, scrolls of smoke, and streaks of blue. A weak sun pulsed on the horizon. The gate to MIRA observatory stood open so that engines stationed there could come and go.
“They’ll get us out and then tell us we can’t go back,” David half joked on the drive up. Mostly he was thinking of the way he’d felt tricked by fire officials in prior weeks, but clearly the authorities were capable of drastic measures. News of a citizen’s arrest in Big Sur had already made its way down to Tassajara that morning. A resident of an area under mandatory evacuation had taken matters into his own hands when he’d received no help from professional firefighters and lit several backfires to save redwood structures on his family’s fifty-five acres on Apple Pie Ridge. When law enforcement officers came to make arrests—on Independence Day—he had turned himself in so that his brother could continue defending the property.
“It’s legal,” a surprised Stuart had said. “They can’t arrest you for that. Maybe the guy didn’t know what he was doing.” An out-of-control backfire could be worse than no backfire at all. But firefighters in Big Sur privately praised the man’s efforts. As a firefighter himself, Stuart knew it could be extremely useful to have locals around to tell you where water sources were or where the roads went, people who knew a place inside out, not just from a flyover or a map. But a home owner watching a fire race toward his house could be hijacked by emotion and act rashly, risking his life and endangering the lives of the firefighters who would feel duty-bound to rescue him. Before the deadly Black Sunday fires in Australia in February 2009, many in the firefighting world were already skeptical about whether that country’s “Leave early or stay and defend” policy could be applicable in the United States. When I asked Stuart about the policy after Australia’s fires, he did not equivocate. People who successfully stay and defend, he said, are mindful, year-round stewards of the land. But citizen defense should never take the place of trained professionals.
In the living room at the Jamesburg house, Heffner kicked off the meeting, spreading out maps of the fire zone that showed Tassajara Road, with the wilderness boundary scooping around it and Tassajara at the very bottom of the dip. His message was clear and brief, as David and Abbot Steve later recalled: We will not come to your aid if you choose to stay. “The Forest” doesn’t do structure protection. The safest thing would be for everyone to leave.
“We appreciate your concern,” said the abbot. He shrugged his shoulders slightly, adjusting, settling into the right position for the moment. “But we’ve made a lot of preparations. We have a sprinkler system installed on the rooftops, and five pumps. We’ve retained a small staff of twenty able-bodied people who have been training with Stuart here, doing drills and monitoring our water delivery systems to make sure everything is operational. We feel that Tassajara is in a good position.” He paused, drumming his fingers lightly on his knees. “Have you been to Tassajara?”
Heffner shook his head. “The safety officers keep us well informed.”
“Why don’t you come down and have a look? We can give you a tour, show you what we’ve accomplished. You can see that Tassajara is defensible.” It couldn’t hurt to ask.
“I won’t be coming down,” said Heffner. “If you’re down there, and something happens, any kind of medical emergency, crews won’t be able to get to you if the road is compromised. You could be cut off for days. Your staying risks not only your own safety but also the safety of the firefighters. All I can do is ask you once again to leave.”
George Haines, CAL FIRE unit chief for the San Benito–Monterey Unit, also attended the meeting. As his agency’s representative on the Basin Complex, Haines operated mostly out of his office in Monterey, but he made frequent visits to the incident command post. After Heffner left the Jamesburg house, the abbot asked Haines whether he would come see Tassajara.
“I’ll try,” Haines said. “It may take a couple of days, but I’ll see what I can do.” Haines also told Stuart that he’d attempt to get him officially assigned to Tassajara.
On the ride back, they compared notes.
“Well, what did you think?” Abbot Steve asked no one in particular.
“I don’t understand,” said David. “They did it in ’77 and ’99. The road hasn’t changed. What’s so different now?”
“Ach”—Stuart swatted the air with his hand—“they’re just talking tough. You’ll see. George will get us help, even if it’s just one engine crew. Good guy. He’s a man of his word.”
They didn’t talk about it then, but much had changed in wildland firefighting since Stuart first picked up a Pulaski in the late 1970s. Firefighter fatalities had heightened awareness for safety. Incident managers had become less willing to put firefighters at extreme risk and more likely to pull crews off firelines in explosive conditions. In 2007, federal prosecutors charged an incident commander with four counts of involuntary manslaughter after four firefighters suffered fatal burns on a fire he supervised. His case wound its way through the court system as incident commanders across the country watched—and purchased liability insurance. The old “can do” attitude of firefighters had been tempered by a fresh concern for safety.
In the driver’s seat, Graham kept his thoughts to himself. The meeting had left him feeling as though he’d been slugged by what he later called “the blunt edge of bureaucracy.” Deputy Supervisor Heffner wasn’t a firefighter—he was an administrator. He had tried to assert his authority. His intention seemed to have been to impress upon them that they weren’t going to get any help, and since the road could be cut off by fire, they should leave immediately.
But it hadn’t had the desired effect on Tassajara’s plant manager. If anything, Graham’s own resolve to stay was reinforced by seeing how ready “the Forest” was to abandon Tassajara.
David gave a weather report at the morning meeting on July 6, fifteen days after the lightning strikes. Predictions continued to move in an undesirable direction. Temperatures would top 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the week, with winds sweeping the fire due east, toward Tassajara. “Fire is actively moving down the Tassajara Creek drainage and north from Willow Creek. We still don’t know which direction it’s going to come from,” he told the residents.
By then, one of the residents who’d driven down from the city on June 25 had rigged a temporary Internet connection on the stone office computer so they could view Google Earth maps of the fire. The latest one showed the fire advancing from the south-southwest to within a mile of Tassajara, having spread a startling three miles in the past twelve hours.
David recapped the encounter with Los Padres National Forest deputy supervisor Ken Heffner. “The official word is that we shouldn’t expect any help. The Forest has changed its policy on structure protection.”
“What’s their policy now?” a resident asked.
David glanced at Stuart, hoping he might jump in and explain, but he didn’t. “My understanding is that they don’t do structure protection anymore. They don’t want to put their firefighters at risk.”
Thos
e who weren’t at the meeting the night before exchanged concerned glances. If the USFS wasn’t willing to put their professionally trained firefighters at risk, then did it make sense for them to stay there, a bunch of novices?
Having swapped his hippari, a traditional Zen jacket held closed by fabric ties, for a brown Tassajara sweatshirt, Abbot Steve spoke up: “We told Mr. Heffner that we didn’t feel we were putting people at risk. We’ve made preparations. We’ve been training. Our assessment and the assessment of the firefighters who’ve been here, including Stuart, is that Tassajara is safe. It is defensible.”
“Stuart’s colleague, CAL FIRE unit chief George Haines, is lobbying for backup for us, and we’re hopeful we’ll get another crew in here to help when the fire comes through,” added David.
“Yeah, even if the Forest Service won’t send a crew, that shouldn’t stop CAL FIRE from coming down, right?” asked another student.
David looked to Stuart. This time he took the cue. “George is going to do everything he can,” Stuart said. “I have complete confidence in that. He’s a good man. A man of his word. Don’t worry. They know we’re down here. They know we’re not going to leave. They won’t leave us high and dry.”
The July 6 morning meeting felt “airless” to Shundo, the constant deliberations over scenarios for the fire’s arrival abstract and tedious. As he and Bryan Clark headed up to the solar panels afterward, he was glad to be moving, using his body, letting his mind wander. One particularly memorable image stepped forward: the abbot on his way to the zendo in the predawn haze, wearing his robes, with a blue bandanna over his mouth to filter the smoke.
Clark cursed when they arrived at the solar array around eleven a.m. “We missed it!” That morning, Graham had spotted flames for the first time from Tassajara, looking toward the Tony Trail. But the flames had died down by the time Shundo and Clark arrived. There was only a great, cloudlike plume of smoke bearing down on the ridges to the west. This was the one day they hadn’t gone up the Tony Trail. Shundo didn’t know whether they would have had a clearer view of the fire from there anyway, but it was disappointing to see only more smoke.
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