Fire Monks

by Colleen Morton Busch

  Colin dragged a hose up from the Cabarga Creek standpipe on the west side of the founder’s hall, across from the zendo. During the weeks they’d been clearing in preparation for fire, they’d dumped raked leaves and trimmed branches into the dry creekbed—too close to the buildings, he could see now, though there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

  Abbot Steve took his place on the east face of the hall, near the abbot’s cabin, where a stone basin in a rock garden built by Suzuki Roshi reflects the pre-dawn stars. For an hour or so, from their respective positions, they followed the crashing course of rocks and flaming branches down the slope and poured water on anything that had burned, was burning, or just might burn.

  Throughout this time, Mako stayed at the flats, repeatedly extinguishing fires she thought she’d taken care of. Every time she turned around, there was some new fire to tend to or an old fire that had resurrected.

  Around four thirty p.m., the woodshed fire took off. The three-sided structure with corrugated metal roofing was chock-full of kindling for the wood stoves in the stone and pine rooms and a handful of other cabins—much fuller now in summer than it would be in winter. As Mako sprayed the burning piles with the meager flow from her hose, she began to worry about the volume of available fuel. If it got hot enough and all of it went up, it would be a much bigger fire than she could handle alone. Already the smoke and heat were intense, and strangely, she smelled burning rubber.

  The center stack was burning the hottest, so she started toppling the pile with a McLeod, part hoe and part rake. She’d hook on to the wood with the hoe part, pull out the burning pieces, then water them down. Because the water pressure was weak, she had to get up close to the fire to work this way, within five feet. The woodpiles on either side of her were burning, too, and the smoke began to pierce her eyes and prick her throat.

  When she started to feel nauseated, she set down the hose and stepped out of the woodshed to get some relief. As soon as she felt better, she picked up her hose again. She moved in and out like that for a while, in a kind of waltz with the need to take care of herself and the need to put out the fire.

  Mako saw that the tires on the wood splitter, parked at the edge of the central woodpile, were on fire. That was why she’d smelled burning rubber. But as she sprayed down the machine, she instinctively took a big step back. Was there gasoline in the tank? What if it exploded? “For all I knew,” she told me later, “twisted hunks of metal shrapnel were about to come flying at me.”

  There was a time when female Zen students deliberately disfigured themselves—often with a hot iron—in order to renounce any attachment to their beauty and to demonstrate their fierce commitment to entering a monastic practice that was once exclusively male. But San Francisco Zen Center has had female abbesses. Many American Zen teachers are women. Neither Mako nor the generation of female Zen students before her required such extreme measures to earn a teacher’s respect or manifest their will. If the wood splitter exploded, much harm and no good would come of it. With her heart galloping in her chest, Mako called for help, making no attempt to disguise her fear.

  “This is Mako. Graham, Colin, is there gas in the wood splitter? Over.”

  Graham was still salvaging the oak tree. Standing on the Cabarga Creek bridge, Colin answered first: “Copy. Colin here. Uh, yeah.... Why? Over.” Of course there was gas in the wood splitter, but he had no idea how much.

  “It’s on fire! Is it going to explode?”

  Colin heard the fear in Mako’s voice, and it surprised him. He’d never heard her sound panicked.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her. “Just keep it wet. Graham and I will bring out the Mark 3.”

  “Hurry!”

  They’d moved the portable pump in from the flats earlier in the day, at Colin’s suggestion, because they didn’t want to get cut off from it. Now, Graham and Colin wheeled it back in a garden cart to set it up in the creek. Two-stroke Mark 3 engines are high-powered but notoriously difficult to start. This moment was no exception. Graham and Colin took turns yanking on the cord. While one of them tried, the other radioed Mako, who couldn’t see them down by the creek from where she stood, to tell her they were working on it.

  She had to back away. The side piles were burning intensely and it was too hot to stand in the middle of the shed, armed with the water pressure of a squirt gun. She could feel the heat searing her throat. She snugged her bandanna back up over her mouth and nose. It gave some relief, but not much. When a blast of smoke hit her in the face, she coughed so deeply she wretched.

  David had also responded to Mako’s distress call. He too tried to sort out the maze of hoses left over from the activation, his old rotator cuff injury acting up as he lifted the waterlogged hoses. Finally, Graham got the Mark 3 going. Colin had rolled out a new hose that hooked directly into the Mark 3. The line was too long, and it kept kinking, but once he’d smoothed it out and the pump was running, water blasted through the nozzle.

  It was the first time that Colin had left the central area, the first time Mako had glimpsed him or Graham in hours, the first time they were all together since the fire arrived—except for Abbot Steve, who had stayed to keep an eye on the shop when Colin left. The four of them tried to lift the metal roof to soak the wood burning hottest directly underneath it, dodging gusts of smoke. The wind tipped the clouds rising from the woodpiles into Colin’s face at one point, and he thought he might puke on his boots.

  When the woodshed fire was mostly under control, Mako wandered off—she couldn’t remember later where she’d gone or why she’d left; maybe she’d just needed to use the bathroom. Eventually, David and Graham left as well. Colin looked up and found himself alone. Hey, where did everyone go?

  The woodshed looked like a huge, abandoned campfire. It had been transformed from neat stacks of cured firewood to ashes and cinder, a mix of scorched and unburned wood. “Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again,” Eihei Dōgen wrote. “Yet, do not suppose that the ash is future and the firewood past. You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood, which fully includes past and future and is independent of past and future. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes future and past. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death.”

  Tassajara residents knew this passage well, having chanted it many times. It awakened a changed relationship to time, to reality itself, in those able to enter its meaning. But Colin wasn’t thinking about Dōgen or about returning to anything but a state of rest. He was so done in that he could barely hold the hose, too tired even to get on the radio and tease the others for abandoning him. He propped a couple of hoses on a stump, pointed them at the smoldering woodpile, and left the flats.

  After leaving the woodshed, David returned to the stone office and listened to the messages on the answering machine. There were at least three from Leslie. She wasn’t the type to make a fuss, but he could hear the immense relief in her voice when he finally called back, around five p.m. Relaying a message from City Center, she gave David the name and number of an information officer to call. “Something about air support. It might be a private thing, somebody with a helicopter. I don’t really know.”

  Things were cooling and quieting down, but David radioed the others anyway to tell them about the potential water drop. “Where do you think we could we use it?”

  After a long pause with no answer, Mako responded: “Ummmm, they want to drop water now?” It was like someone sauntering into the kitchen as dinner was coming out of the oven and asking, What can I chop?

  David never reached the information officer. He left a voice mail saying that yes, they would welcome a water drop at Tassajara. The pool bathroom and birdhouse were beyond saving, but more water couldn’t hurt. He didn’t say, Where were you when we needed you?

  When Walter and Joanne Ross checked Sitting with Fire on the morning of July 10, they were ce
rtain Graham had turned around during the evacuation and Mako, too, but it was just a hunch. There’s a three-hour time difference between California and Ontario, so the names of those who’d gone back hadn’t yet been posted. Joanne sent an e-mail inquiring about her son and received a reply that the identities of the remaining residents weren’t being released until the individuals had given their consent.

  The Rosses spent the next few hours wrestling with their frustrated need to know whether Graham and Mako were still in Tassajara and a stubborn intuition that they were. “I just knew that whatever fear Graham experienced, he wouldn’t shy away from it,” Joanne told me when I talked to her and Walter together after the fire. She’d watched her young son guard the net on the hockey rink, ready to face whatever came flying at him. She’d be gritting her teeth in the stands, but he wouldn’t flinch.

  Throughout the morning of July 10, she tried to busy herself with errands. Walter Ross stayed home, glued to the blog. By the time Joanne returned home around lunchtime, Sitting with Fire had confirmed her suspicion, listing Graham and Mako as two of the five now at Tassajara. The post noted that Jamesburg was in regular phone contact with them. Joanne resisted the urge to call and see if she could get more information, figuring it was better to keep the phone lines open. “We just had to trust and wait to hear,” she told me.

  If you weren’t inside Tassajara, you didn’t have much choice but to sit with fire—to pass the time as best you could with uncertainty, without letting worry carry you away.

  The origin of the word worry—it comes from the Old English wyrgan, for “strangle”—accurately depicts the state of breathless torment that anxiety can bring. The Rosses could have picked up the phone and spread their anxiety or aired their frustration on Sitting with Fire. Other distressed family members did, understandably. When there’s a pair of hands clutching your throat, your instinct is to pry them off.

  But the Rosses, who are not Buddhists, chose to let go. They didn’t know where their son was, and once they did, they couldn’t be sure he was safe. “I was agitated at first,” said Joanne later. Then she added, “But really, what would it have changed to know?”

  Finally, after they’d knocked back the woodshed fire at the flats, there was a palpable shift, like the moment the sun dips below the horizon, an atmosphere of finality and transition.

  “We knew it was over when the fire bell finally sounded,” David joked when I met with the five all together for the first time after the fire. The others laughed, knowing intimately the desperation that can set in after hours of zazen, when your legs are on fire and you’re perched on the edge of your cushion, waiting for the period’s end, pleading silently with the person watching the clock, seated at the bells.

  “It was pretty clear,” said Abbot Steve, recalling what they could plainly see. “Everything on the perimeter is burned. It’s not going to burn again.”

  Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again.

  It had been nearly a month since the first threat of fire when David called Zen Center president Robert Thomas from the stone office to report, surprised and somewhat awed: “I think we saved Tassajara!”

  Twelve

  UNBURYING BUDDHA

  Disaster could be called a crash course in Buddhist principles ...

  —REBECCA SOLNIT, A Paradise Built in Hell

  Thursday, July 10, six p.m.

  There were cheers in San Francisco and Jamesburg. Within minutes, the good news traveled to the dining room at City Center and caused an eruption of applause and whistles. A similar scene unfolded across the Golden Gate Bridge at Green Gulch Farm. But it wasn’t all jubilation. Evacuated priest Judith Randall wept when she saw the photo of the five in their fire gear, simultaneously realizing and releasing the depth of her concern.

  Once her own tears stopped, Jane Hirshfield posted an e-mail from a friend whose construction crew had built many of Tassajara’s newer buildings, announcing that Steve Stücky “and the boys” had stood their ground. She didn’t think to point out that there was a woman among those boys. In the moment, who hardly mattered.

  When leaving Tassajara with most of the students at the end of June, Jane had tried to quietly convey to Mako and Graham that they were about to be blessed with the kind of experience that sears itself into one’s bones, and also, that it would be fun. Months later, when I interviewed Jane, the mention of Mako’s name stirred up emotion. “There’s something about seeing another person do, thirty years later, what I once did,” Jane said. “It made very real the cyclical nature of time. It’s a nonrepeatable universe, as Baker Roshi used to say, yet every thirty years the mountains will burn.”

  When the 1977 fire was over, Jane told me, it was like “sitting in the middle of a dying-down bonfire. Everywhere you look there’s a heart of a tree glowing red, especially at night.” It was a landscape humans didn’t usually get to see.

  A tangle of blackened, rust-red-barked manzanitas grew out of an ash beach. An upturned, forgotten broom hung on the side of the compost shed, bristles singed off, a scorched halo on the wall behind it. Around six p.m., leaving the flats, Mako spotted a helicopter flying low over Tassajara—the first she’d seen all day. The aircraft flashed a spotlight at her. She couldn’t see the faces of the pilot or passengers or read the markings, but she had the impression that whoever was up there, hovering overhead, was relieved to see her alive and walking around. She wondered if maybe it was branch director Jack Froggatt and gave a reassuring wave.

  In the stone office, Mako took off her fire suit, carefully extracted her throbbing feet from her boots, and put on tennis shoes. She left on her hard hat and the bandanna around her neck. Her clothes were soaked, as if she’d been walking through a light rain for hours. Dōgen compared enlightenment to walking through fog: You could get wet without even realizing it. She’d gotten wet without realizing it under the fire gear. The dampness had kept her cool. As she set out walking downcreek, she actually felt chilled.

  Outside of the intact, unlikely green of the central area, everywhere she looked was shorn down to bare skin. Brown, withered leaves clung to the surviving trees, their black bark blistered and serrated. Some wore burn skirts at the base of their trunks. Some had shed large branches or snapped and fallen over completely. Foot trails, suddenly exposed, meandered forlornly across the bare earth. Rocks lay everywhere in the road, loose dirt heaped at the base of ravines. Smoke trails emanated from smoldering piles of leaf and wood debris. Water spurted from burned pipes. Whatever didn’t glow with embers was gray, brown, black, marbled with ash.

  Deck chairs, dusted gray, were still arranged around the pool, a number of them twisted by flames, surrounded by a confetti of rocks. Tables had been crushed, their plastic tops misshapen by the fire’s heat. The vertical posts of the pool bathroom still stood, pitted and charred, framing the air, but the birdhouse cabin on the hill had completely collapsed, a heap of still-warm rubble. The Cabarga Creek bed seemed to have widened, scraped clean of grasses and ferns. The hillsides, stripped of vegetation, seemed even more vertical. In the fire’s twilight, a dusky haze hung over Tassajara.

  Mako wanted to wander farther but asked everyone over the radio to meet in the central area at seven o’clock. The five gathered at the work circle below the burned husk of the birdhouse. Mako focused her camera on her firefighting companions, propped the Panasonic on the zendo steps, set the camera’s timer, then jogged over to stand between Graham and David. She threw one arm around David’s shoulder and tucked the other around her partner’s waist.

  In the photo, Graham appears to be saying something or breathing out an exhausted sigh. His jumpsuit is smeared with soot. A hose threads across the grass in front of the group and trails through Colin’s boots, out of the frame. They’re all wearing bandannas in the same triangular configuration around their necks. Every bandanna is a slightly different color, just as each of the five experienced the fire from a slightly different perspective. Each one of them would te
ll a different story.

  The photo was eventually posted on Flickr with a caption: “The Five Tassajara Fire Monks.” Later, the phrase would be abbreviated to the “Tassajara Five,” but not by the five themselves. “We were just a group of people in a situation,” Colin told me months later. Countless beings had contributed to this moment’s unfolding, too many to enumerate or even to see. There are five monks in the picture, but so much that supported them is outside the frame. As with any story, there’s always something cropped out of our perception, some side we can’t see.

  At seven thirty p.m., the five finally ate a celebratory meal of leftovers: baba ghanoush, pita bread, tabouleh, and Gatorade. They reviewed the events of the day, filling one another in and trading stories.

  Later that evening, Mako went to the bathhouse and had the women’s side to herself, a first. The quarter moon, normally suspended over the Overlook ridge on a lattice of stars, was rubbed out by smoke. The valley seemed uncommonly still—as if, as Jane described it, every living thing held its breath.

  Graham called his parents in Toronto to report that he was fine and that they’d lost only a few structures. “Just to hear that he was there and alive, I was a babbling nutcase at that point,” said Joanne later, recalling her relief. The abbot made some calls, too, then he lay down in his cabin and, within moments, fell asleep.

  David and Colin had volunteered for the first patrol shift, from eight p.m. until midnight, to watch for flare-ups and refuel the pumps. “Various spot fires continue to burn or reignite throughout the night, and burning logs, branches, and pinecones tumble down the mountainsides, often casting sparks in their wake,” wrote David later in his public account of the day of the fire. When we talked, he described wandering the devastated landscape at night, dousing the glowing remains of spot fires with water until he was alone again in the darkness, then stumbling upon yet another smoldering pile or tree stump, smoke rising in the beam of his headlamp. “It was nothing compared to the sight of fire rolling down the mountainsides from all directions,” David told me, “but it was eerie. The night was filled with the sound of crackling, creeping, stillgasping fires and falling rocks”—and the steadfast murmur of the creek.