Fire Monks

by Colleen Morton Busch

  During that first evening patrol, a flaming tree trunk rolled down below the Overlook Trail, directly across the creek from the guest dining room. David climbed onto the dining room roof to hose it down, but the fire never completely extinguished. It smoldered quietly for days. They’d all seen how persistent fire could be, equaled only by the persistence of water. Dharma Rain hissed steadily, reassuringly, on the rooftops. Above the tops of the mountains, the sky still glowed, reflecting fire in the distance, fire not yet burned out. But the high-vigilance atmosphere of the afternoon had waned. The worst, it seemed, was over.

  They wouldn’t know until the following morning, when the incident management team released its daily status report, that the Basin Complex fire had spread nine thousand acres on July 10—more than fourteen square miles—with Tassajara right in the middle. A few more days would drift by before an article ran in the Monterey Herald describing the fire on Tassajara Road, witnessed by a crew stationed there on July 10: “The unit was forced to pull back before noon . . . because the fire had kicked up substantially, expelling a plume so large that at one point it obscured the midday sun. As an airtanker flew toward the massive smoke, it looked as small as a sparrow flying toward Niagara Falls.”

  Friday, July 11, the day after the fire, felt to the five like the day after a marathon. “I was so dehydrated, I don’t think I peed for a couple of days,” Colin told me. The smoke gave them headaches. The by-products of exertion and adrenaline pooled in their muscles, sapping their energy. They were used to going without sleep and enduring pain during long stretches of meditation, but this was different. “It was something deeper in the bones than normal sleep deprivation that can be cured by a good night or two of rest,” Mako said later. But the road was closed. The mountains around them smoldered. Despite their exhaustion, they needed to stay active and alert.

  Abbot Steve’s dawn patrol shift doubled as a post-fire inspection. A few buildings would need to be entirely replaced: the pool bathroom, the woodshed at the flats, and the birdhouse cabin, probably the compost shed, too. Many structures and some of Tassajara’s infrastructure would need repairs: sections of fence at the bathhouse, front gate, and garden, some redwood decking at the pool, wooden steps at the yurt and the trail to the solar array, the lumber truck windshield, the radio phone, and the spring box—the source of Tassajara’s drinking water.

  He walked from one point to another, upcreek and then downcreek again, as if making his usual incense offerings at several altars before entering the zendo, but each place, each patch of ground, was now an altar.

  The center of Tassajara was untouched. The grass glistened a deep green on the stone office lawn. The wisteria-draped trellis shaded the gravel walkway, as it has for decades. A cluster of tall sycamores fanned the bocce ball court. The creek continued to flow down the length of Tassajara, continuous, selfless, ever-present. If you blocked out the periphery and the hoses strewn about, you could imagine there hadn’t been any fire. But lift your eyes a little and you saw the blackened hearth the fire had made of the mountains, the remains of the buildings the fire had consumed. Life and death, right next to each other, braided together, as they always are.

  That morning while Abbot Steve was on patrol, Mako ventured out with her camera again. Near the bathhouse, she found a dead Steller’s jay, eyeless, beak tucked in a wing, a shock of blue feathers against the dirt. Out past the flats, she discovered a dead buck, stiff on his side, twig-thin legs splayed, fur singed from the lower half of his belly. Its carcass lay just feet away from an old children’s playground, where a metal swing stood, untouched by the fire. Many of the animals, except these unfortunate ones, had fled before the fire. Shortly after, they reappeared. Foxes and rabbits—not commonly seen in the valley or just ordinarily hidden in the brush—trotted and hopped in plain view. Squirrels scurried across rocks. Lizards sunned themselves on the fire hoses.

  Abbot Steve continued his patrol past the yurt toward the Suzuki Roshi memorial, a pilgrimage he makes each time he arrives at Tassajara. How curious it was to see how the fire had touched some places and not others. They’d taken down and stored the wooden post that usually marked the place where some of Suzuki Roshi’s ashes rested, beneath a large white-veined stone from the creek, but they’d left the markers for Katagiri Roshi, who had helped guide the practice of Zen in the West, and Trudi Dixon, the student who had painstakingly edited the lectures for Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. In a field of ashes, the wooden markers stood upright, though Katagiri’s was charred at the base.

  Later that morning, Abbot Steve and the others put on their priest robes. They held a service in the zendo to express their gratitude. There were just enough of them to fill the positions—one to ring the bronze bell and one to strike the hollow wooden drum shaped like a fish, one to lead the chanting, one to be the doshi, or lead priest, and one to be the doshi’s attendant. The Buddha was still buried in the bocce ball court. They bowed to an empty altar and dedicated their chanting to everyone and everything that had supported them and Tassajara, including fire.

  Around one o’clock that afternoon, Abbot Steve was walking back to the abbot’s cabin for a short nap after lunch when he heard a crackling sound coming from the shop area. A moment later, the air horn shrieked. The woodshed across from the shop had burst into flame. Colin had called it out on the radio first and reached for the air horn when he got no response. Abbot Steve ran to help on weary legs.

  They’d thought the fire was over. The standpipes weren’t charged. The pumps weren’t on. And the woodshed fire roared across from the shop, flames flickering twenty feet high. Several overhanging trees had caught a spark. Their burning branches swayed toward the shop and its flammable contents.

  They tried opening the hoses connected to the nearest standpipe, but gravity worked against them. The water pressure was half what it would be with the pumps running. Colin and Graham wrestled with the Mark 3 again so they could charge the hose lines directly from the creek, while David smothered spot fires just a few feet away from the propane tanks with fire extinguishers. But by the time Colin and Graham got the pump started, they could only soak the woodshed ruins.

  The fire wasn’t over, they were sharply reminded when the shop woodshed burned. It could flare up anywhere, when they least expected it, and would require a state of readiness for a while longer.

  Sitting with Fire reported the shop woodshed blaze a few hours later, and an intense debate stirred up in the comments section. The debate had actually started the day before, as the fire descended into Tassajara, when a blog reader threw out this firebrand: “Attachment . . . heroism . . . lobbying for help . . . magnificent drama . . . jaded . . . blah.”

  To read the comments in what came to be called “the woodshed post”—all 225 of them—is to experience Tassajara, and the people who relate to it, across a range of perspectives. Kindness and empathy are on display, as are cruelty, suspicion, and condemnation. The comments provide a perfect illustration of what happens when people forget that they are connected and what can happen when they remember. An anonymous neighbor on Tassajara Road who resented having to pay for a bath in the hot springs criticized the greed of “buddha boys and girls as they weep over stone and mortar . . . and feel triumphant in their practice.” An evacuated Tassajara resident responded. “Dear neighbor,” she wrote, “Thank you for inviting me to study my ignorance and greed . . . Anything I can do to help you with your fire preparations?” Later, she repeated her offer to lend a hand and posted the phone number at Jamesburg. Two days later, the neighbor revealed his identity and thanked the resident and other posters for their comments, “for having started such a conversation.”

  When Sitting with Fire launched, Zen Center president Robert Thomas had mixed feelings. He recognized that opinions expressed on the blog wouldn’t necessarily be shared by Zen Center leadership or be friendly to Zen Center. An organization with the size and profile of San Francisco Zen Center can’t be all things to all people. But Thom
as felt strongly that the blog needed to exist as a gathering place and open forum. He knew that if he could listen beneath the words for what was really being said, it just might be instructive.

  Still, it pained him to read some of the comments—to hear how Tassajara’s neighbors suffer from the impact of summer traffic on the road, how some people experience Zen Center as aloof, arrogant, and selfish: “i see fancy cars, i see much attachment to the possible loss of material stuff ... i see that the boss buddhists come down when the wood and sticks are in danger . . . and i see a growing detachment from neighbors and fellow carmel valley residents . . . i would have thought i would have seen the tassajara folks going door to door with shovels . . . or working at the displaced persons center at carmel valley middle school . . .,” wrote lifetraveler, a frequent poster.

  Browsing Sitting with Fire on the stone office computer, Mako read some bits aloud to Colin, like this post from lifetraveler: “If a cash register catches fire in the woods, can they hear it in San Francisco?” Colin left the room. “I didn’t want to hear that kind of mean-spiritedness,” he told me later. His choice to defend Tassajara had nothing to do with money. He lived on a stipend of a few hundred dollars a month.

  Throughout the week after the fire, clashes cropped up periodically on Sitting with Fire, debates about selfless action versus self-interest, questions about whether the proper Buddhist response to a burning building is to save it or to accept reality and let it burn. Is it hypocritical to speak of meeting the fire and then to shoo it away?

  “Turning away and touching are both wrong,” Abbot Steve told a student afterward, adapting a line from a sutra chanted regularly in Zen temples: “For it is a massive fire.” (Normally the line reads, “It is like a massive fire.”) You can’t turn away from fire. You can’t hold it, either. You have to turn toward it, not knowing what it will bring, with your shovel or fire hose or simply with your attention.

  Zen is not a passive path. It’s a practice of complete engagement. A zendo is profoundly still and quiet during zazen. But then the bell rings. There’s work to do, relationships to navigate, dishes to wash. And there’s no dividing experience into what matters and what doesn’t. It all matters. “Zen practice is very straightforward and direct,” Abbot Steve told me. “You take care of what is in front of you. You do what you can, and when you can’t, well, okay, then you can’t.”

  In the end, the five at Tassajara didn’t need to pull out fire shelters and jump in the creek. They had what Abbot Steve called “concerning moments.” Certainly their lives were in harm’s way. But they felt more focus than fear. As part of the body of Tassajara, they worked to save Tassajara. With bodies that know the element of fire from within, they tamed the element of fire from without. They concentrated on the task at hand, ready to drop what they were doing at any moment if necessary but determined to make an effort for Tassajara.

  They would no more let Tassajara burn knowing they might save it than they would let their own bodies waste away without food or water.

  For CAL FIRE captain Stuart Carlson, there’s no question. Of course you make an effort to save a building—whether home, church, school, or doghouse—when you safely can. That’s his job as a firefighter.

  After the evacuation on July 9, Stuart had returned home long enough to get an eye-rolling look from his unit chief hinting that Stuart had stepped on some toes in pushing for resources for Tassajara. He was quickly assigned to another fire, but he checked in with Leslie James by phone as soon as he could, reaching her on July 10, after the fire had passed through Tassajara.

  “They were lucky,” Stuart said when Leslie told him that fire had descended from all sides and they’d lost only a few minor buildings. “Really lucky. I’m just so happy it all turned out okay.”

  He paused, then added, “I never would have left if I’d had some support.”

  “I know.” He’d told Leslie as much, several times, before he left Jamesburg. “Well, they couldn’t have done it without your help, Stuart. Thank you for everything.”

  Stuart batted away the compliment with a sharp exhalation. “I just wish I could have been there with them. There’s no way to know, you know? You just never know how it’s going to go.”

  Now that he knew they were okay, Stuart could move on. For a firefighter, the only fire that really matters is the one right in front of you. His job required him to make quick transitions, and he’d gotten good at it over the years.

  “Did people stick around?” Stuart asked Leslie, referring to the resident evacuees who’d followed his lead up the road the prior evening.

  “There’s just a few of us here now,” she said.

  Kim Leigh, who had stood on the hogback ridge with Stuart and seen a fire he didn’t want to fight, had left Jamesburg on the morning of July 10, in a car headed toward San Francisco. He lived in Sonoma, a good hour from the city. “I had no clue how I was going to get home from that point,” Leigh told me later. “It was kind of like a leaf detaching itself from the tree. There was no ride headed my direction. I just started catching buses. It gave me time to reflect before I got home and realize what a wild ride it had been.”

  The wild ride had ended unexpectedly, with Leigh taking a bus across the Golden Gate Bridge instead of fighting fire at Tassajara. But Leigh had seen the difficulty of the conditions and Stuart’s position, his legitimate concern for the safety of the community. “We were the only ones with wildfire experience,” said Leigh. “I had to align myself with his decision.”

  Tassajara fire marshal Devin Patel had also aligned himself with Stuart, relying on the fire captain’s expertise. On July 10, Devin and his girlfriend—not knowing flames were pouring into Tassajara—rode roller coasters on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. When Devin heard about the fire’s arrival later, he was surprised to find himself feeling regret that he hadn’t been there. “I took on that role of fire marshal, did all the training, envisioned how we’d protect Tassajara, had drills, then didn’t get to do it. That really got to me: I missed it.” When he returned to Tassajara for the first time after the fire and saw the scorched and denuded landscape, he felt for a moment as though he’d somehow failed the mountains, failed to express his deep love for the land and the practice.

  It took that practice to hold his feelings of regret yet not second-guess himself. “The decision was still so sure and clear and fresh in my mind. Both things were there: Yeah, I left, and yeah, it would have been nice to be there. I told myself, This is natural. You’re going to feel this way for a while.”

  Interviewed eighteen months after the fire, in the dining room at Green Gulch Farm, where he now lives, Devin said he still felt solid in his decision to leave. And he still wished he’d been there.

  On Saturday, July 12, the guest named the Basin Complex fire dropped in on the neighbors before leaving the area. Fire crews were working near MIRA observatory, “firing out” to burn fuels ahead of the main fire. When the wind shifted, that “contained” fire found a gap in the fireline and sprinted through it toward MIRA. Eighty-foot flames crowned through the surrounding pines, heading for two five-hundred-gallon propane tanks. Caretaker Ivan Eberle defended the tanks and the observatory structure himself, using MIRA’s own pump and fire hose.

  For the following two weeks, the escaped fire threatened the communities of Jamesburg, Cachagua, and Carmel Valley. A “hard” road closure went into effect on Tassajara Road on July 12—no one, not even residents, could travel on the road. Branch director Jack Froggatt stopped in at the Jamesburg house—behind the hard closure demarcation—to tell the residents there that firefighters were waiting for air attack to dampen the area first before attempting to contain the escaped fire on the ground.

  Things had been relatively quiet down at Tassajara. But that Saturday morning, two days after the fire’s main run through the monastery, a large plume emerged behind the Overlook ridge, possibly from fire at the conf luence of Tassajara and Willow creeks to the south. From the solar panels, Co
lin spotted smoke and fire downcreek—the one direction fire hadn’t come from on July 10. The five briefly suited up again, started Dharma Rain, and stepped up patrols. “Graham went up to the solar panels,” Colin said later, “and after a while it was pretty clear that it wasn’t going to move upstream and into Tassajara.”

  That afternoon, they unburied the Buddha. After carefully lifting the statue from the hole, they were too fatigued to carry it to the zendo. They left the Buddha sitting on the bocce ball court, still wrapped in blankets. “We were too tired,” Abbot Steve told me later, “to do more than eat our MREs.” Colin said they were too tired even for that: “You have to tear them open, heat them up.” It was easier to grab leftovers from the walk-in and eat them cold.

  They patrolled, slept, patrolled, and slept, trying to take care of basics and recover from post-fire fatigue, dehydration, and the toll of the smoke. They walked around with a tape recorder while the memories were still fresh, reviewing the events of July 10 and inventorying damage. Somehow, they found the energy to do some non-fire-related improvements. Colin and Graham repaired the spring box and installed a wooden floor in the bin where compost buckets are stored outside the kitchen, to discourage ground squirrels. Taking advantage of the fact that he could dig a huge hole and not worry about vehicles needing to drive through, Colin built a housing compartment around some buried water valves at the base of the zendo steps. Mako cleaned out rotting food from the walk-in. With input from them all, David worked on putting together a public account of the fire.