On the Overlook Trail at Tassajara, the only place the sky wasn’t full of the breath of fire was behind Mako and Colin, toward the Willow Creek area south of Tassajara.
“Mako, we should go—we don’t want to get caught out here,” said Colin.
“Okay.” Mako dodged the poison oak as they descended the trail and emerged in a meadow just downstream from Tassajara, anchored by a tall old oak.
To get back to Tassajara, they crossed the creek on several large boulders set there by students. Sometimes in the spring the creek was so high that the rocks were submerged and you needed a walking stick to cross safely. The sticks were stacked for the taking against a tree on the Tassajara side. But they didn’t need them anyway. The stepping-stones were well exposed, their tops dry, in the midsummer creek. They could step across them without even getting their feet wet. Their footsteps left prints in a fine layer of ash coating the stones.
Around eleven thirty a.m., when Colin and Mako were on the Overlook, Abbot Steve woke from his nap and decided to drive up the road again for a look. At the Church Creek trailhead, about a mile from Tassajara, he was startled by flames spotting among the Coulter pines and scrub oaks, not very far from the road itself. The fire was much closer than he’d estimated just a few hours before. Ground squirrels, wood rats, and other rodents were hightailing it across the road in a rapid exodus from the burning area. Not wanting to get cut off, Abbot Steve turned his car around without getting out and hurried back to Tassajara.
According to Graham’s watch, it was just before noon. He’d climbed up to the solar array after checking on the east end of Tassajara and observing the same wind patterns Mako and Colin had noted on the Overlook Trail: eerie reverses and ash drifting horizontally, sliding off the rooftops in sheets and eddying under the eaves. The wind was warm and weighted. From the hilltop where the solar panels slanted toward the sun, Graham saw black plumes behind the Overlook ridge. He got on his walkie-talkie. “Where is everyone?”
Mako responded first. “Colin and I are on our way to the stone office.”
Abbot Steve also answered and described what he’d seen. “The fire is at the Church Creek trailhead. Looks like it might come down the road. I’m coming back now.”
David said he was at his communications post in the stone office.
What a relief, everyone accounted for. But what Graham saw next, as he descended the steps from the solar array, stunned him. Where Mako and Colin had just been hiking, there was now a wall of fifty-foot flames dancing in every direction, cresting the ridge. Graham got back on his walkie-talkie and reported that they were surrounded, with the closest flames coming downhill behind the office, about three hundred feet from the creek.
It was twelve forty p.m., past lunchtime, though they hadn’t had lunch. They scattered to restart the sprinklers and pumps from one end of Tassajara to the other. To allow the pool to replenish and to conserve fuel, they’d turned off Dharma Rain that morning, planning to run it as they had been, twice a day, to saturate the grounds. “For all we knew, it could have been another few days before the fire came in,” Mako told me later. After returning to the central area, along with David and Colin, she started covering the wooden deck behind the stone office with leftover Firezat wrap. “I was thinking, This is our safe zone, and we better make it more safe. I’m there with the staple gun, chika chika chik.”
But Colin disagreed. “We don’t have time for this,” he said, and left the stone office to suit up and station himself at the shop to protect the lumber and other building supplies, the propane and gasoline tanks. They had four hundred gallons of gasoline stored at the shop, which is built around a live sycamore tree, and four propane tanks holding a thousand gallons each. If the fire reached these combustibles, he didn’t want to contemplate the consequences. After he’d left the Marines, he’d worked for a few years doing security at embassy construction sites, including in South Africa. It was during apartheid, and bombs were frequently detonated in shopping centers and restaurants. He had some sense of what it was like to feel an explosion rumble through the ground beneath your feet, and he didn’t want to know that particular sensation more intimately. “I just fell back on, The shop is our number one priority,” he told me later.
From the shop, Colin saw flames charging downslope behind the stone office. Over and over, they’d heard that fire ran uphill and crept down. But this fire wasn’t doing what the firefighters had said it would. It was moving as if the best fuel were down in the canyon. He tried to warn the others over the radio, but the bandanna over his mouth muffled his words and no one understood him.
When Colin’s transmission came through, Abbot Steve and Graham were out at the flats. They’d decided to walk out to the area to wet it down, but by the time they got there, balls of flame rolled downslope from the hogback. Flames chewed through the trees and spit out branches, which tumbled downhill in a daisy chain of fire.
Graham stood by the standpipe as Abbot Steve tried to sort out a confusion of hoses from the called-off activation. “I could see a quick-moving, rolling smoke ball, glowing orange, coming our way,” Graham recalled later as we stood at the edge of the flats. “I started seeing flame through the branches, hearing the fire.”
Residents had been told repeatedly by firefighters not to get too spread out or let themselves get isolated. Graham was well aware of the distance between the flats area, since he and Mako lived there together, and central Tassajara—a brisk five-minute walk he made several times a day. “We should get out of here,” he said calmly but firmly.
Abbot Steve agreed. The two walked back toward the stone office as the skies clenched into fists of flame around them. Then Mako’s voice broke over the radio, high and breathless—flames were blazing down both Hawk Mountain and Flag Rock.
She’d come around from the backside of the office just in time to see the fire reaching the two peaks opposite the office and to grab her camera.
In the video, dark clouds swim through an orange sky. Wind ruffles the shadows of trees. Flames swat at the cliffs surrounding Tassajara. From Hawk Mountain, where the radio tower and satellite antenna are, across the slope above the hill cabins to Flag Rock, all is fringed with a dragon spine of flame. “Wow, this is totally incredible,” Mako breathed as she panned the camera. Her recorded voice is not so much fearful as full of wonder.
She didn’t turn around to film the flames lapping down the hill toward the creek from the Overlook ridge where she and Colin had stood less than an hour earlier. Hervideo is only sixteen seconds long. Long enough to think: I should probably be doing something else.
The summer’s elusive guest had finally arrived. They’d been waiting for this moment for almost three weeks, imagining scenarios, educating themselves, guessing which direction it would come from. But they’d never imagined there would be only five of them to meet it. And they hadn’t imagined it would arrive on three sides simultaneously, plowing downhill as if trying to make up for lost time.
The surprise in Mako’s voice, seeing the fire come so fiercely and from every direction, is clearly audible. But she had the presence of mind to pick up her camera to document the moment of the fire’s arrival—and the presence of mind to put it down.
Inside the cocoon of the wrapped stone office, David’s head ached from the smoke and a restless night spent sleeping on the floor in the office, to be near the phone. The two aspirin he’d taken hadn’t kicked in yet. He’d spent the morning on patrol, making sure that nothing had been left vulnerable to floating embers during the previous day’s rushed evacuation. Then he’d helped to wrap the office windows and moved flammable back porch furniture away from the walls. With images of the fire whirl video he’d watched at MIRA still fresh in his mind, he wanted their safe zone to be absolutely safe.
Every thirty minutes he’d checked the phone inside the office for new fire information. As flames crested the ridges surrounding Tassajara, David had called Jamesburg with an update. Stepping outside now, he saw
himself that the fire was arriving not in one discrete front, but in a ring of flame. Like an enso—a circle drawn in one brushstroke that symbolizes enlightenment—inked with fire. Fire wasn’t just “descending” on Tassajara, he wrote later, it was “converging” on it.
But the five people at Tassajara did not converge, circle up, or even talk about what they should do next. There wasn’t a moment when they all stood together as they had in the emergency meeting in the stone office or huddled on the road, to collectively make a decision. Yet they had to make a decision, to either bunker in their safe zone as the fire passed through the valley or make a stand to try to defend Tassajara.
Here was another pivotal moment, from which so many possible outcomes could spin, the kind of moment that might be held up to the light afterward. If all goes well, it might inspire and amaze. But if something goes badly, it would be the precise moment people point to, saying, Here’s where they made the wrong choice. Here’s where if they hadn’t done X, then Y would never have happened. A moment like the one five firefighters faced in the Esperanza fire.
The five Zen priests at Tassajara weren’t in the habit of dividing choices into right or wrong, good or bad. They’d practiced seeing everything that happens as part of a continuous and always completely unified stream of events. Each moment flowing like the creek, from what came before into what comes next, all of time moving together.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that you cannot step in the same river twice. A Zen master might add cheerfully: You cannot step in the same river because there is no river, there is no actual you. The river and you and your stepping are in a dynamic and interrelated state of constant change. Maybe it is the river that steps into you. Maybe there is only stepping, no one to step or thing to step into.
In Zen, you can’t really make a “wrong” decision. But you can’t make a “right” decision, either. You can only respond moment to moment in a way that feels the least harmful and deluded, the most compassionate and true.
Suzuki Roshi liked to quote a passage from Eihei Dōgen about shoshaku jushaku, Japanese for “one continuous mistake.” In a talk from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Suzuki Roshi explained that the words were meant to encourage: “According to Dōgen, one continuous mistake can also be Zen. A Zen master’s life could be said to be so many years of shoshaku jushaku. This means so many years of one single-minded effort.”
It’s the effort that counts, Suzuki Roshi told whoever came to listen, the sincere commitment to wake up, wherever you are, moment by moment. No one can ask more of you.
As a ring of flame looped around Tassajara, David felt a palpable beat of hesitation, a flickering thought that maybe they’d gotten themselves in over their heads. But then, as individuals, and as a small sangha within the sangha, they acted. They made an effort. They moved toward a river of fire.
They didn’t so much make a decision as manifest, collectively and without words, a mind already decided. They didn’t need a decision tree or costbenefit analysis or even a plan. They just got to work, doing something extraordinary with the mind they cultivated in their daily practices and activities. On another day, it might have been a bell that needed ringing, a soup that required stirring, a broom that needed picking up. At one o’clock on the afternoon of July 10, it happened to be a fire hose.
Eleven
MEETING FIRE
Fire is simply fire. It has no sense of morality, has no persona, does not wish to do good or bad, is neither deliberately enemy nor friend.
—DOUGLAS GANTENBEIN, A Season of Fire
Thursday, July 10, one p.m.
Nothing Mako had read when she was fire marshal prepared her for the actual experience of witnessing an advancing fire front. “It had this feeling of being ferocious and unrelenting and aggressive and just, you know, consuming,” she told me later, making explosive gestures with her hands. The entire sky boiled above her head, a canopy of fire. Thirty-foot flames tore down the mountains into Tassajara. Holy crap, she thought, I’m going to die.
A wildfire has a head, a tail, and flanks. The fire blasting over Flag Rock, Hawk Mountain, and the Overlook ridge seemed to have two or three heads, maybe more. But then this head of fire met the moisture hanging in the air from Dharma Rain and transformed into fingers of flame before their eyes. Maybe they didn’t have to hunker down in the stone office after all. Maybe all of Tassajara wasn’t going to burst into flame at once, so that only the Buddha would be left, buried in a moonscape of blackened tree trunks and soot-smudged rocks.
Maybe they could do something.
The five remaining at Tassajara didn’t have the experience of trained firefighters and were in violation of some of the established guidelines for staying safe in the field—what are known as the Ten Standard Orders and Eighteen Watch-Out Situations, or more simply, “the Ten and Eighteen.” They didn’t post a lookout. They didn’t have a plan or clear assignments. No one was in charge. But they’d mastered one order: “Be alert. Keep calm. Think clearly. Act decisively.” And they had two essential safety tools in abundance—readiness and attention. “We didn’t set up a command structure,” Abbot Steve told me later. “We set up a communications structure.”
Each of the five carried a small two-way Motorola walkie-talkie. They used them throughout the day to check in with one another, to announce their whereabouts, and to ask for help when they needed it. But during the next few hours, they had no direct contact with Stuart or Jack Froggatt or anyone else working the Basin Complex fire. This meant, according to firefighting guidelines, that they were in a “Watch-Out Situation”—they couldn’t see the main fire and weren’t in contact with someone who could.
Some fire managers insist that the Ten Standard Orders are fundamentally non-negotiable, never to be broken. Ted Putnam, wildland fire investigator and longtime meditator, disagrees: “You only think you can follow them if you have never observed your own mind in meditation.” In On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters, one former seasonal firefighter wrote that the Ten and Eighteen “are too much to ask of ground-pounding crewmembers engaged in the controlled chaos that is firefighting. These rules are ‘ideally possible but practically unattainable.’”
Ideally possible but practically unattainable sounds a lot like the vow to save all beings that residents at Tassajara (and Buddhists everywhere) make on a daily basis. That the vow cannot be upheld does not mean it’s not worth making. The five at Tassajara may not have been trained in the Ten and Eighteen, but they knew intimately the importance of having signs on the path that point the way toward what is often called “right effort.” And they also knew that you shouldn’t hold on to any rule too tightly. Reality doesn’t follow directions. The fire you want or expect will not be the fire you get.
On the pine room rooftops, the sprinkler heads sputtered and hissed; they weren’t moving much water. So while Mako wet down the deck and trees behind the stone office to protect their safe zone, David opened a hose line on the stone and pine rooms, some of Tassajara’s oldest structures, which sit creekside, just upstream of the office.
It had bolstered his confidence to watch the fire reach the moist valley slopes and slow down—as if the Buddha’s hand, sometimes depicted touching the earth in a simple gesture of steadfastness, had halted the flames. The fire now moving down the steep hillside below the Overlook Trail in isolated clumps wasn’t directly threatening the stone and pine rooms, but what if it hopped the creek on a floating ember, started the rooms on fire, and spread to the office?
Lashing the rooftops with water, David felt intensely alive. The necessary actions at last were clear: The fire’s here. Put water on it. In fact, put water ahead of it. Far better to wet the buildings down now and prevent their catching fire than to try to put them out once they were ablaze. The fire hoses were heavy and difficult to move, especially when handling them alone, without a backup partner. His throat felt scratchy, his lungs tight from the smoke. In the zip-up, fire-resistant, pale
yellow jumpsuit, he felt as if he were wearing several pairs of baggy jeans at once. But David barely noticed these discomforts, so focused was the feeling that doubt had dropped away and now there was merely effort, meeting the moment entirely, with nothing held back and nothing extra.
Eventually David put down his hose, left the buildings dripping as if from a summer shower, and returned to their communications hub in the stone office, hoping that the fire hadn’t taken out the radio phone or their one remaining satellite line.
Inside the office, he needed a light to see—all of the windows and the door were now sealed with the fire-resistant wrapping. The Firezat dampened the sounds outside, but he heard rocks dislodging and crashing downslope into the creek, and he heard the sound of the fire: the whoosh of ignition, the roar when it had wind beneath it, the crackling sound when it found fuel.
David called Jamesburg to say that they’d geared up. “The fire’s here! It’s coming down behind the stone office, by the hill cabins, behind the zendo—,” he began. Then Graham’s voice came over his radio, something about lighting a backfire at the hill cabins.
“I’ve got to go!” said David, and hung up the phone, noting the fleeting question: Would this be the last time anyone would hear from them?
He recalled that a Big Sur resident who’d lit a backfire on his property had been arrested, so David called George Haines, the CAL FIRE unit chief who’d tried to get backup at Tassajara, to make sure they were within their legal rights to do it and to get some direction. He told Haines that the fire had surrounded Tassajara and begun its descent into the valley, slow enough that they thought they could respond. “It’s near the cabins on the hill. Can we light a backfire?”
Fire Monks Page 20
