Fire Monks

by Colleen Morton Busch

  CHAPTER 4: IN THE SHADOW OF ESPERANZA

  60 He shot footage destined for YouTube: Sixty-year-old Kokaku Brian Blix. You can watch this footage and interviews with some of the fire monks in Blix’s online gallery at http://www.kofotofactory.me/.

  61 Leaving the crew nowhere to hide: Details on the Esperanza fire are taken from the Esperanza Fire Accident Investigation Factual Report, October 26, 2006, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Inspector General’s Report of Investigation dated November 30, 2009. That an arsonist started the Esperanza fire made the deaths of the firefighters even more tragic. When the arsonist was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in March 2009, the mother of one of the deceased firefighters made this remarkable statement to her son’s killer: “I harbor no anger, only hope that you understand the depth of pain you caused us and your family. More importantly, I forgive you for the act that took my son’s life.”

  62 Not mandated by their agency to provide structure protection: CAL FIRE unit chief Rick Hutchinson, who worked in unified command on the Indians and Basin Complex fire, said of the USFS, “It is actually laced throughout numerous guiding documents for their agency that they can do structure protection. What they can’t do is combat a structure fire. They can protect structures from the outside. They do in fact do that with a lot of their own infrastructure when fires are impacting them. There’s conflicting info coming down from the upper levels, all the way from Washington, D.C.”

  62 Memorial service for the Engine 57 firefighters: http://www.wildlandfire.com/docs/2006/eng57/dietrich-walker.htm.

  64 Fire Sermon: This translation from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu can be found at http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.028.than.html.

  66 A CALFIRE captain had arrived: David Nicolson, aka “Spanky,” King City station captain.

  66 “There is water in the world”: From the Mountains and Rivers Sutra in Moon in a Dewdrop, translated by Arnold Kotler and Kazuaki Tanahashi (Berkeley: North Point Press, 1985), p. 106.

  CHAPTER 5: GREAT FAITH, GREAT DOUBT, GREAT EFFORT

  73 “You should do it completely, like a good bonfire”: From Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (New York and Tokyo: John Weatherhill, Inc., 1994), p. 62.

  75 Most of the residents present at the meeting were senior staff: Fire marshal is not a senior staff position at Tassajara but was treated as one during the 2008 fire. At the time of the fire, Colin, as head of shop, was not technically on senior staff either. After the fire, he became plant manager and officially joined the senior staff.

  77 An overdose of adrenaline that stops the heart: The fallen firefighter was Robe rt Roland of the Anderson Valley Fire Department, Los Angeles Times, July 6, 2008.

  78 Wag Dodge’s quick, lifesaving thinking: See “The Eureka Hunt” by Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, July 28, 2008, p. 40, and How We Decide (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). While Fire Monks illustrates the art more than the science of decision making, Lehrer’s work offers a clear and fascinating peek into the neurobiology behind decisions.

  80 Firefighter Blog: Mike Morales’s blog can be found at http://firefighterblog.com/.

  80 Testified for a Senate oversight committee: Casey Judd’s June 18, 2008, testimony can be read on the United States Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources Web site at http://energy.senate.gov/public/.

  82 He’d walked into the bronze gong: Tim Kroll, a thirty-three-year-old resident.

  83 When the habit of disconnection is broken: For more on this subject, see A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit (New York: Viking, 2009).

  84 “There is nothing to pin down, nothing to say”: From You Have to Say Something: Manifesting Zen Insight, by Dainin Katagiri (Boston: Shambhala, 1998), p. 60.

  86 Lit several backfires to save redwood structures on his family’s fifty-five acres: Fortyeight-year-old Ross Curtis, Big Sur resident arrested on July Fourth.

  87 Heffner kicked off the meeting: Lacking an interview with Los Padres National Forest deputy supervisor Ken Heffner, I relied on the recollections of other participants to create his dialogue in this scene.

  88 In 2007, federal prosecutors charged an incident commander: Ellreese N. Daniels on the 2001 Thirtymile fire in Washington State. For more on the fire, see The Thirtymile Fire: A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal, by John Maclean (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2007).

  89 Rigged a temporary Internet connection: Thirty-one-year-old Aliyu Turaki enabled Internet access in the stone office during the fire preparations.

  94 “Moment after moment, you should say, ‘Yes, I will,’”: From an August 4, 1970, talk at San Francisco Zen Center, available at the Suzuki Roshi digital archives Web site, referenced above.

  CHAPTER 6: FIRE IN THE CONFLUENCE

  99 “When we know something and rest in that knowing”: From a talk, “Not Knowing Is Most Intimate,” May 21, 2006, www.everydayzen.org.

  103 “Simple answers to difficult questions”: From Japan: A Short Cultural History, by G. B. Sansom (New York: Prentice Hall, 2000), p. 372.

  103 “If the mind is clear, fire itself is cool”: Accessed at http://global.sotozen-net.or.jp/.

  103 Temple fires created opportunities: Details and discussion of temple fires in Japan and the idea that architectural fires can function similarly to forest fires, from Professor Alexander Vesey, Meiji University, Tokyo.

  106 A reporter and photographer from the San Francisco Chronicle: Matthai Kuruvila and Lance Iversen. Kuruvila’s July 10, 2008, article, “Tassajara Monks Practice Zen of Firefighting,” can be found at www.sfgate.com.

  112 “An icicle forming in fire”: From You Have to Say Something: Manifesting Zen Insight, p. 161. Interestingly, Katagiri’s student and editor, Steve Hagen, uses the word “reality” instead of “Buddha” when quoting this Dōgen phrase in his own book, Buddhism Is Not What You Think: Finding Freedom Beyond Beliefs (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 222.

  CHAPTER 7: BUDDHA IN THE BOCCE BALL COURT

  119 “In nature, adaptation is important; the plan is not”: In Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why (New York: Norton, 2003), Laurence Gonzales investigates what it takes to survive being stranded at sea or lost in the wilderness. One key, he finds, is the ability to accept reality and admit when you are in dire circumstances or lost, because only then can you begin to rescue yourself. Accepting reality requires a hard heart, writes Gonzales. “But it is a strange kind of hardness, for it has empathy at its center. . .. Gratitude, humility, wonder, imagination, and cold, logical determination: those are the survivor’s tools of mind.” They are the Zen student’s tools of mind, too, tools for anyone who wants to live fully amid life’s many upheavals.

  120 “After observation and analysis”: Buddha quote is from the Kalama Sutta, accessed at http://www.urbandharma.org/pdf/dhammapadatxt1.pdf.

  128 “Skillful means”: A famous parable in the Lotus Sutra illustrates the concept of skillful means—recognizable to parents the world over. A rich man’s house is on fire. His young children, absorbed in play inside the house, ignore his pleas to leave it. Eventually the man entices his children out of the burning house by convincing them that better toys await them there. Is the man guilty of falsehood? Some may say yes, but as a disciple of the Buddha explains, “This rich man simply made it possible for his sons to escape the peril of fire and preserve their lives. He did not commit a falsehood. Why do I say this? Because if they were able to preserve their lives, then they had already obtained a plaything of sorts. And how much more so when, through an expedient means, they are rescued from that burning house!” The father is often understood to represent a Buddha, while the sons symbolize humans, born into “a burning house, rotten and old.” Quotes from The Lotus Sutra, translated by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 58.

  129 A summer student: Twenty-five-year-old Joseph Schommer helped to carry the Buddha statue fro
m the zendo and bury it in the bocce ball court.

  132 “I don’t know myself”: This “don’t know” had a different quality from the “don’t-know mind” cultivated by Zen practitioners—a sense of openness to all the possibilities. David’s father had often called anyone who didn’t understand him stupid or a “dummkopf”—including his young sons—though he himself had learning disabilities and had dropped out of school in the ninth grade. David’s discomfort with his father’s lack of both education and self-awareness had spurred in him a desire not to be “ignorant”—literally through lack of learning, but also through blindness to his own self-delusion. “I didn’t want to be ignorant at a much deeper level, to who I really was as a human being,” David told me. “This was one of the pivotal factors that encouraged me to come out—to not lie to myself and fall victim to other people’s ignorance by hiding who I was.”

  CHAPTER 8: THE LAST EVACUATION

  137 “Human life is messy”: From a talk given at Tassajara, April 28, 2009.

  138 “Form does not differ from emptiness”: From the Heart of Great Perfect Wisdom Sutra translation used at San Francisco Zen Center, accessed at http://www.sfzc.org/sp–download/liturgy/08–Heart–of–Great–Perfect–Wisdom–Sutra.pdf.

  144 Releasing the energy of an atomic bomb every fifteen minutes: From Fire Wars.

  145 Didn’t think he’d be able to look them in the eye again: Colin recognized his own motivations later, after the fire, reading how the threat of shame can drive a company of soldiers into battle in a book called On Killing, by David A. Grossman (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2009). “There’s no queen or country,” Colin said. “You’re fighting for each other. More than death itself, you fear letting the others down.”

  146 Asked Abbot Steve if they could go back, too: Aliyu Turaki (see note, chapter 5). Other residents who conveyed a wish to return at Ashes Corner included sixty-one-year-old Glenn Bradley and thirty-year-old Johan Östlund.

  CHAPTER 9: NO LEAVING, NO GOING BACK

  151 The edge of your bodhisattva vow: From “Taking Care of Fire,” a talk given at Green Gulch Farm on August 17, 2008, mp3 available at www.sfzc.org.

  158 Sojun Mel Weitsman, then an abbot of Zen Center: Weitsman is now abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center (BZC), originally established as an affiliate of San Francisco Zen Center. The eighty-one-year-old Weitsman—from whom I received lay ordination in 2006—founded BZC in 1967 but became abbot officially only in 1985.

  159 News of the evacuation on Sitting with Fire: The Sitting with Fire blog served as a gathering ground for the Tassajara community at large as the fire closed in. But Sitting with Fire wasn’t the only place where people were talking about Tassajara. On Life in the Fire Lane (thefirelane. blogspot.com), a report on the community meeting that locked Jamesburg residents out of their homes temporarily because of a misplaced roadblock included a perspective on the July 9 evacuation of Tassajara from a local volunteer fire department chief: “a bit of a headscratcher from his point of view, since he believes that Tassajara is quite defensible.” A fuels expert from the Los Padres National Forest had a similar reaction: “They were fine down there . . . they did a lot of good work. I heard on the radio they decided they were going to come out of there, which I was surprised at. . .. Because that’s in a very defensible spot. It’s usually better to stick around.” Of course, five of the residents had stuck around—not everyone blogging had the latest information.

  159 An attempt to allay fears: Tim O’Connor Fraser posted this summary of the meeting. He also provided technical assistance with the www.sfzc.org Web site and was, in Zen Center secretary Dana Velden’s words, “a calm voice of reason” on the blog throughout the fire.

  162 “I felt a hot wind and thought I had better turn around”: From a talk by Abbot Steve at Green Gulch Farm, July 16, 2008.

  CHAPTER 10: RING OF FLAME

  163 “A patch-robed monk is like a snowf lake in a red-hot furnace”: This translation of a line from the Blue Cliff Record is from You Have to Say Something, p. 144.

  167 The red flag warning: Ryan Walbrun, one of the incident meteorologists who spotted the June lightning strikes off the coast, told me that the warning was issued in part because of the preexisting fire threat and activity in the region. Forecasters were being extra-vigilant.

  181 “One continuous mistake”: From Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, p. 39.

  CHAPTER 11: MEETING FIRE

  184 The Ten Standard Orders: In an e-mail, Putnam noted that since they can’t be followed to the letter as currently worded, the orders are often used “to blame individual firefighters for whatever goes wrong on a fire.” Putnam brings human factors into consideration on fatality and accident investigations—including a study of the burnover incident during the fire whirl on the 2008 Indians fire near Tassajara. In recent years, he has taught mindfulness meditation to hotshot crews. For Putnam’s work in collaboration with Professor Karl Weick, an organizational expert, see “Organizing for Mindfulness,” Journal of Management Inquiry 15, no. 3 (September 2006), pp. 1–13, in which the authors propose “the necessity for continuous organizing to produce wise action.”

  184 “‘Ideally possible but practically unattainable’”: From On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters, by Matthew Desmond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 167.

  186 The right to light a backfire: California Public Resources Code section 4426 states that “a person shall not set a backfire, or cause a backfire to be set, except under the direct supervision or permission of a state or federal forest officer, unless it can be established that the setting of such backfire was necessary for the purpose of saving life or valuable property.” According to Kelly Andersson, who has worked in the fire world as a public information officer, writer, and editor, and who proofed my fire details in this book, backfire and backburn refer to slightly different actions. Backfiring eliminates fuels along the inner edge of the fireline and is usually done by hotshots. Backburning refers more generally to the burning of fuels ahead of a fire so the advancing fire dies down when it reaches the burned area. “Backburning is what they are doing here,” Andersson told me. But “backfire” was the word used in the exchange between Chief Haines and David and is the terminology used in the California Public Resources Code that Haines consulted. For simplicity’s sake, and since the term is commonly understood to mean any fire lit to create a safe, burned area, I have stuck with “backfire” here and throughout the book.

  189 Smoke inhalation causes more deaths from fires than burns do: From www.emedicinehealth.com and www.firesmoke.org.

  193 Tassajara planned to dismantle it: A new retreat center is under construction at the time of this book’s writing. The canvas tent yurt will remain as the primary workshop space until the center is completed.

  194 Harmony of Difference and Equality Sutra: By Sekitō Kisen (700–790). From the collaborative translation used at San Francisco Zen Center, http://www.sfzc.org/sp–download/liturgy/12–Harmony–of–Difference–and–Equality-cc.pdf

  203 “An ancient Buddha said”: These lines are from Dōgen’s Yuibutsu Yobutsu, “Only a Buddha and Buddha.” Former resident Meiya Wender made the plaque. Kazuaki Tanahashi’s translation can be found in Moon in a Dewdrop, p. 161.

  205 A time when female Zen students deliberately disfigured themselves: See Zen Women: Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters (Boston: Wisdom, 2009) by Grace Schireson, a Dharma-transmitted priest in the Suzuki Roshi lineage.

  207 “Firewood becomes ash”: From the Genjo Koan. See chapter 3 note on the translation.

  CHAPTER 12 : UNBURYING BUDDHA

  219 “It is like a massive fire”: From the Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, or Hōkyō Zammai, by Tōzan Ryōkai (807–869). Accessible at http://www.sfzc.org/sp–download/liturgy/16–Song–of–the–Jewel–Mirror–Samadhi.pdf.

  222 Defended the tanks and the observatory structure himself: According to MIRA caretaker Ivan Eberle, a contracted h
otshot crew stood by taking souvenir photos and refused to help him during the fire’s July 12 run at the observatory. “I did cajole one hotshot into helping me untangle and unkink the hose and hold the nozzle end for a moment while I sprinted 30 yards to turn the electric fire pump on,” Eberle wrote in an e-mail to me. “He thrust the nozzle back into my hands after I did so and that was the sum of the help they gave me.” In an April 17, 2009, article in the Pine Cone, a local newspaper, Eberle conceded that he may have brushed up against one of the firefighters while unrolling hose, but he was shocked when six deputies from the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office showed up the following day to warn him that if he so much as spoke with another firefighter, he’d be arrested for interfering with operations. Eberle was eventually charged with two misdemeanors, battery on an individual and interfering with the duties of a firefighter. He told me that surely he’d have “gone down the hill in bracelets” on Sunday, July 13, had the charges already been “cooked up.” He spent thousands on legal fees and hours assembling photos to assist in his defense and was fired from his caretaker job at MIRA, a position he had held for twelve years. The charges were dropped, but the fact that crews stood by and watched while Eberle attempted to knock down the flames alone rattles him still. “Asked to stay and help with the firefight by every division supervisor and branch director I encountered, and assured of structure protection and safe passage if I did, I nevertheless found myself with no engine crews nearby on the morning of July 12. . .. There was an imminent danger to the community of Jamesburg being rolled by fire within hours that was never publicly acknowledged.”

  227 Sixteen helicopters and six fixed-wing aircraft: Morales based his numbers mostly on the daily ICS 209 report for July 10. There were actually nineteen helicopters assigned to the incident that day, sixteen of which belonged to the USFS. Of the six aircraft, three were USFS planes. “I pointed my criticism at the USFS because they were in charge of the fire,” Morales told me later.