Fire Monks

by Colleen Morton Busch

  Having covered close to five miles of trail that day already, Shundo returned to Tassajara and jumped in the creek again. On his way back to his cabin for a fresh set of clothes, he met up with Colin, returning from Lime Point. He and Colin had a running joke that they traded places—usually, whenever one was back at City Center in San Francisco, the other lived down at Tassajara.

  “It’s taking off,” Colin said, standing at the foot of the steps to the hill cabins.

  “I couldn’t really see much,” said Shundo. “Just a lot of smoke.”

  “How was it over the hogback?”

  “Smoky,” said Shundo, his eyes tearing up, irritated by sweat and sunscreen. “And bloody hot. I think your shoes are melting,” he said, lifting a foot to show Colin the treadless sole.

  Colin laughed, but the brief levity didn’t fully penetrate his features or linger on his face. He looked across from where they stood in the work circle area, where eighty steps led up to the hill cabins and the trail to the solar panels, radio phone antenna, and satellite dish, and above that Hawk Mountain, where Shundo had hiked earlier that morning. “That satellite guy still here?”

  “Don’t know,” said Shundo. “I’ve only just got back.”

  Colin drank some water, then pulled his bandanna back up over his mouth for protection from the smoke. “I’m gonna go out there,” he said, gesturing in the direction of the hogback with his chin. “Then I’ll check in with Stuart.”

  “Right,” said Shundo. Sweat trickled down his brow as it sometimes did when the zendo was hot and he was in robes. The urge to wipe it would arise, and he’d have a choice. Brush it away or simply do nothing? The choice for how to respond was always there, and there wasn’t a right or wrong answer. When he simply had to move, he moved. Other times, he let a droplet of sweat, or a tear, simply follow its own course.

  “I’m going to rest up,” he told Colin. “I’m knackered.” First, he washed out two sets of sweaty clothes in the laundry area. Then he went to his cabin, lay down, and promptly fell asleep.

  Up on the hill with the satellite technician, Graham answered a call from David on his walkie-talkie, asking about the status of the satellite switch.

  “Umm, still in progress,” Graham said. He looked up at the sky, a constantly changing canvas of smoke and sunlight and helicopters with water buckets swinging beneath them.

  “Jack wants to drive up to Lime Point so he can keep an eye on the fire. Any idea how much longer the switch will take?” David asked.

  Graham looked at his watch: It was after three p.m. “Not really,” he said, regulating the amount of frustration he allowed to surface in his voice.

  When the Indiana crew had pulled out after lunch, the technician had wanted to go out with them, but Graham had persuaded him to stay. If he left Tassajara without implementing the switch, they’d be down to just the unreliable radio phone. But the satellite switch, which was supposed to be straightforward, had gone curvy. For the past hour, they’d been adjusting the position of the dish and testing the connection, unsuccessfully. Now the technician wiped his damp brow with his sleeve. He punched some numbers into a handheld device and muttered in frustration.

  Neither of them wanted to be up here on this hill under the intense sun, breathing the smoky air. There were any number of places Graham would have preferred to be. But Tassajara needed the phone. It wasn’t the technician’s fault his company had sent him into a burning forest on a job. Playing goalie on a hockey team as a kid, Graham had to stop whatever came flying at him from going in the net. He didn’t get to pick the shots. Now, as Tassajara’s plant manager, he needed to see the repair through.

  “Tell Jack I’ll take the tech out when we’re done,” Graham radioed David. “I’ll make sure he gets safely over the ridge.”

  Shortly after this radio contact, David picked up a message from Jamesburg on the answering machine in the stone office. Los Padres National Forest deputy supervisor Ken Heffner had called, with his boss, supervisor Peggy Hernandez, at his side. They reiterated that they would not provide the support of professional firefighters on the ground and requested again that everyone evacuate Tassajara immediately.

  David transcribed the message in his slanted handwriting and left it on the desk instead of putting it in his pocket with his notebook containing important phone numbers and whatever else he needed to remember. There was nothing new or surprising in it and therefore no need to carry it around.

  So this is spotting, Colin thought. He climbed over the hogback, looked up Tassajara Creek, and saw the fire advancing downstream, throwing embers with the wind behind it. On big crown fires or fires driven by warm winds, flames can drift for miles. This wasn’t miles, but the way wind and flame cooperated to move the fire astonished him. Above the bandanna he wore to mask the smoke, the exposed skin of Colin’s face prickled in the heat.

  Asked what a Buddha is, Dōgen said, “An icicle forming in fire.” He evoked the metaphor of fire for the urgency of the endeavor to wake up, instructing his disciples to practice as if their heads were enveloped in flames. The way it looked to Colin from the hogback, Tassajara’s head was about to catch fire.

  He called Stuart on his walkie-talkie. “I’m at the hogback. It’s spotting down Tassajara Creek. It’s coming.”

  Finally, sitting with fire was about to become meeting fire.

  “Okay, everybody, let’s suit up and meet down at the flats.” Stuart’s voice over the radio woke Shundo from his nap around three thirty p.m. “I thought it looked like death,” Shundo wrote later in his journal, of the view looking toward the hogback from the front of his cabin. Five minutes later, he was at the fire shed below the zendo with the rest of the residents, pulling on their fire suits, hard hats, goggles, packs.

  There were too many people in the narrow shed. Shundo grabbed his gear quickly and moved outside to get dressed. His feet, still tired from the morning’s hike, protested as he shoved them into the heavy leather fire boots.

  “Is this a drill?” someone asked.

  “I think it’s an activation,” replied another. This was the real deal, and its energy was palpable as they tried to move quickly and efficiently but without haste.

  A spike of adrenaline made it challenging. You hear “Fire!” and you instinctively want to run. But running is the last thing you ought to do. Running means you’re either already in a bad situation or you’re about to be. Walk, Stuart had told them, and always know what’s behind you.

  Above the hogback, thick, swirling plumes of smoke spun through the sky. Smoke-saturated sunlight cast a crimson glow down to the valley floor. Stuart stood in the middle of the activation, disbelieving what he was seeing—not in the sky, but on the ground: a tangle of hoses, some swollen with water before the hose crew had them under control. Charged with water, the hoses were difficult or even impossible to lift. Some lacked nozzles. People bumped into one another, worked at cross-purposes, wandered around in confusion. One hose even broke.

  Stuart had instructed them to get on the hoses and wet everything down. If the fire came over the hogback, they could obstruct its path by saturating the entry to the rest of Tassajara. He didn’t expect Zen students to be as polished as his own seasoned fire crew. But what the fire captain saw now made him cringe. He decided to hike up past the Suzuki Roshi memorial to the hogback to look at the fire himself. If this fire was coming quickly, they couldn’t afford to be clumsy.

  “Stuart, I have George Haines on the phone,” said David over his walkie-talkie, calling from the stone office.

  Stuart watched as one resident backed another up on an open hose, but with her legs in an unstable, wide stance. If her hose partner lost his balance, they’d both topple over, and the hose would whip and writhe.

  “Okay,” Stuart said. He didn’t like the sound of David’s voice. It was not a voice about to bear good news.

  “He says he personally met with the IC and his deputy. They won’t budge. They won’t send a crew,” said David, r
elaying Haines’s message.

  “Not one engine?” Stuart asked.

  “Copy. Not one engine.”

  If this were CAL FIRE’s operation, Stuart thought, a whole strike team would be on the way. He wouldn’t have the sinking feeling he had in his stomach right now, like the time he was seventeen, surfing Moss Landing near the Monterey Peninsula in February, looking over his shoulder at waves with eighteen-foot faces. After throwing him off his board and running him like a rag doll through the washer, the ocean had spit him out on the beach, semiconscious. He didn’t ride big water anymore. Now, if the surf looked great but the locals were on the cliffs drinking coffee, he joined them for a cup.

  “Tell Chief Haines I said thank you for trying,” Stuart told David.

  After a long pause, David’s voice came over the walkie-talkie again. “He says he is sorry he couldn’t deliver. He asked how many people we have here now. I told him twenty two.” David had a list in front of him of the residents and volunteers at Tassajara on July 9, with names and numbers of next of kin.

  On an engine crew, Stuart’s “span of control” was limited to five firefighters. Twenty-two? he thought. Did they really have that many?

  Sometimes you don’t know how much you are depending on something until all possibility of its attainment vanishes. After signing off on the walkie-talkie, Stuart shouted to the crew at the flats, “That’s it! We’re done here! Basta!”

  They looked around at one another, confused. Weren’t they activating? Wasn’t the fire coming? Why stop?

  “I’m going up to the hogback to get a look,” Stuart told resident fire marshal Devin Patel. Then he headed for the ridge.

  Standing next to Shundo, her partner on the hose crew, Mako shook her head, dismayed. If Stuart had lost confidence in them, she couldn’t blame him. There were people there who shouldn’t be, she’d thought to herself as the activation unfolded—or rather, unraveled. “It wasn’t hysteria,” she said later, “but it definitely felt like people weren’t doing what they were trained to do.” And a couple of people were new and not fully trained yet—they’d just arrived to replace the two residents who’d decided to leave on July 8.

  But what had just happened wasn’t a real demonstration of their preparation or abilities. Sometimes even when you followed a recipe to the letter, Mako knew, it didn’t turn out. Ingredients varied, as did the number of stirs with a spoon, the mood of the cook, the moisture in the air. She’d seen days when the kitchen crew just couldn’t harmonize, no matter how they tried. Dishes broke. Bread failed to rise. Sugar was measured out instead of salt.

  Their drills had never been perfect. According to Shundo, though they had lots of new gear, there was always something “a bit homemade” about the resident fire crew’s execution. The portable pumps wouldn’t work—Mark 3’s are notoriously cranky, even in the hands of trained professional firefighters—or they struggled to hear each other on the radio. But they’d steadily improved. “It was never superhoned,” Shundo admitted later, “but we were doing our best.”

  But if their best looked this bad, and the fire was just over the ridge, heading for Tassajara, he hated to think what their worst might look like.

  Just below the hogback ridge, Colin looked up creek with former firefighter Kim Leigh, his partner on patrol. They made a natural, complementary pair. One had joined the Marine Corps straight out of high school and later become a Zen priest. The other, drawn to Buddhism through an interest in its art, went into firefighting in his early twenties to avoid becoming a soldier.

  As a conscientious objector, Leigh had found some irony in the militaristic nature of professional firefighting—it evoked much of what he’d been trying to avoid. He remembered being helicoptered into remote lightning-ignited fires on a CDF Ecology Corps crew. “They’d drop us off, and then they couldn’t find us,” he told me in October 2009. “We’d flag them down with whatever colorful thing we had.” Eventually the Ecology Corps became the California Conservation Corps and program staffing switched from mostly conscientious objectors to volunteers without much wildland fire training. “People would come in fresh and go to a fire. We needed bodies, so we’d bring them. It was an on-site training situation, challenging at times, and dangerous.”

  Now a working artist, Leigh often went to Tassajara during the transitional period between monastic practice and guest season to help with painting projects. He’d had to think about it when David had asked him to come help the residents prepare. His wife had had a car accident. She was fine, but the car wasn’t. He was in the middle of preparing for an art exhibition. And it had been many years since he’d worked a wildfire. But he said yes. “If your neighbors call you and say their barn is on fire, do you say, ‘Sorry, I’m busy’?”

  From the moment he’d arrived he’d felt welcomed into the circle, impressed with the presence of mind of the residents. Back when Leigh was a firefighter, there weren’t any women on the crew, so he was particularly struck by how inspiring it was to work alongside them. “They bring something the male energy doesn’t seem to arrive at,” Leigh told me.

  Standing on the steep trail that cuts across the slope below the hogback and looking up Tassajara Creek, Leigh saw what looked like a series of small volcanoes erupting. As fire crept up ravines, trees torched into columns of flame.

  “Stuart should see this,” said Colin.

  Leigh nodded.

  Colin raised Stuart on his radio.

  “I’m already on my way,” came the reply.

  One hundred thirteen degrees Fahrenheit: That was the predicted high Stuart had heard for the following day. He could feel the atmosphere working its way up to that troubling number. Stuart was used to being uncomfortably hot inside his fire gear. But as he climbed above the Suzuki Roshi memorial site and crossed onto the backside of the ridge facing Tassajara Creek, he felt the distinct additional heat of the fire, like a blast of warm air from an open oven door.

  He joined Colin and Leigh at their post. Leigh was sitting down, resting his legs. Colin stood beside him, looking through his binoculars. But Stuart didn’t need binoculars to see what he estimated to be sixty-foot-high flames in the Tassajara Creek drainage, about a mile upstream. He looked at Leigh and saw confirmation on the former firefighter’s face: This was no creeping fire. This fire was exploding, with only the hogback to cross before it entered Tassajara.

  “Is everyone still out at the flats?” asked Colin, unscrewing the cap on his water bottle and taking a drink. He hadn’t seen the activation, nor had Leigh.

  Stuart nodded and left it at that. “I want to look at this from Lime Point.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Colin volunteered. “I’ve already been twice today. Do you mind, Kim?”

  “Not at all, Buddha buddy,” said Leigh. “Buddha buddy” was his nickname for his patrol partner, whom he later described to me as “the kind of person you’d want around if your plumbing broke, house caught on fire, and dog ran away all at the same time.”

  As Colin headed back toward the memorial and the trail down to the flats, Stuart hung back a moment.

  “They won’t do it,” he told Leigh. “They won’t send a single engine crew.”

  Leigh sighed. Back in his firefighting days, the feds and the state tangled over fire management. Clearly that hadn’t changed. The USFS had the home team advantage in the Los Padres. It didn’t matter whether CAL FIRE wanted to send in resources or not. The final say wasn’t theirs.

  “I don’t want any of these young people getting hurt.” Stuart gestured toward the other side of the ridge. “They’re not prepared for this,” he said, glancing back at the fireworks up Tassajara Creek.

  The two had often consulted with each other in days prior, as the only people with professional firefighting experience at Tassajara. Though both were volunteers, Leigh’s role was clearly subordinate to Stuart’s—a few years on a ground crew a long time ago didn’t match the breadth and depth of a veteran fire captain’s experience. But he was
the closest Stuart had to a colleague at Tassajara.

  “Does this look like a fire you want to fight?” Stuart asked.

  Leigh shook his head and sucked in a breath.

  A fire captain—or anyone in a management position on a wildland fire—is constantly assessing and reassessing, making plans and changing strategies according to the realities on the ground and in the air. Risk moves. “Before I go into a questionable situation where I’m going to take a calculated risk,” Stuart told me in our first interview, “I turn around and look at who I have with me. I know what their capabilities are, their strengths and weaknesses. I think, Do I want to do this? Generally I’ve got young people in their twenties with me on an engine. Do I want to explain to their spouses and families why they’re in the burn center, or they’re dead? And for what?” he asked, then answered his own question. “For trying to save a frickin’ house that can be rebuilt.” He had a simple motto: When in doubt, chicken out. They were words he’d learned from an old World War II vet when he’d first signed up with CAL FIRE, and they’d served him well.

  Stuart had been genuinely confident in their readiness to meet the fire. His confidence had drained away with the coastal fog, as temperatures had spiked, further drying out the fuels in the fire’s path, and winds had kicked up, creating potentially explosive conditions. Now, as Stuart saw flames the length of a hook-and-ladder truck turned on its end, the fire captain looked over his shoulder and asked himself, Can they do this? Do I want to?

  “I’ll make this run to Lime Point,” he told Leigh. “You’ll be my eyes?”

  “You got it.”

  Colin had waited at the point where the trail rounds the ridge, as if intuiting that Stuart might want a word alone with Leigh, firefighter to firefighter. When he saw Stuart coming, he started moving again, so they descended the trail without conversation. A few minutes later, they followed the fork in the trail that passed behind the yurt. At the flats, the Tassajara fire crew bided time after the called-off activation. Some were standing, some sitting. Most had pulled off their hard hats.