Fire Monks (19 page)

In nature, adaptation is important; the plan is not.

—LAURENCE GONZALES,
Deep Survival

Standing at Lime Point, Colin couldn't see flames through the
smoke. But he could hear the fire roaring through the valley below. It sounded like wind whipping through pines or, oddly, like white water pitching through a canyon.

“Is that the fire?” he asked, pretty sure he knew the answer.

Stuart nodded.

Colin adjusted the brim of his baseball cap, boiling in his jumpsuit over jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Tufts of smoke rose from the ridge where the fire had run into the Church Creek drainage and headed east toward the road and south toward Tassajara. “It's taking off,” he said.

Neither David nor Stuart said anything. David worked his jaw back and forth as if chewing gum, a habit when concentrating. He rubbed his eyes, which were stinging from the smoke.

Stuart's radio squawked again. Colin recognized Jack Froggatt's voice, requesting a medevac on the fireline for a thirty-year-old firefighter suffering from heat exhaustion. He thought Froggatt said his location was Church Creek Ranch, a place every bit as isolated as Tassajara, and that surprised Colin. Was Froggatt or one of his firefighters all the way down there? But more surprising, and unsettling, was Stuart's uncharacteristic silence.

Ever since he'd arrived at Tassajara, Stuart had joked about lounging with his feet up on one of the pine room porches and dousing the creeping flames with a cold beer. Sometimes he joked that the stone office, stocked with oxygen, water, and MREs (meals, ready-to-eat) donated by the fire crews, would be their Alamo. Stuart had stopped using the phrase after the native Texan Colin set him straight: “Do you know everyone died at the Alamo?”

But on the ten-minute drive up to Lime Point, they'd heard a red flag warning over Stuart's radio. The forecast for the following day, July 10, predicted temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit and 25–30 mph fire-stoking, down-canyon winds.

Stuart hadn't exactly been upbeat when they'd started up the road to Lime Point, Colin noticed, but the red flag warning seemed to have pushed him over some edge. He looked stricken, and he wasn't saying much.

 

 

The air smelled scorched and his eyes burned, but David didn't think
the fire looked much different from Lime Point. He squinted toward the Wind Caves, a wall of rock scooped out and sculpted by wind and water and time. How could it already be July and he hadn't walked there yet?

Things were definitely heating up. The Indiana crew's hasty departure and the red flag warning were ample evidence of that. But David's experience with this fire had trained him not to immediately heed the dramatic pronouncements of people in uniform—and demonstrated the truth of the Buddha's teaching not to believe something simply because you have heard it. Rather, taught the Buddha, “after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason, and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

Still, David didn't know how to measure a fire's progress or anticipate its next move. He depended on Stuart for that. Standing at Lime Point, he could tell Stuart didn't like what he was seeing. He seemed agitated, which was understandable. But David felt ready. Tassajara was ready. If the fire was ready, then let it come.

In this moment, he didn't feel fear. Being first an orphan and then a gay man in a straight society had instilled in him a quiet resilience and steady determination before practice had taught him how to find it in any circumstance.

“Okay. Let's motor,” said Stuart, climbing into the Isuzu's front passenger seat. David took the seat behind him.

They didn't say much for the next few minutes. But halfway back to Tassajara, the matter-of-fact voice of branch director Jack Froggatt came over Stuart's radio: “The fire's making a run for the ridge.”

David's eyes met Colin's in the rearview mirror. If the fire climbed to the ridge, it would surely cross the road. For weeks, the USFS had pointed to the one route in and out of Tassajara—and thus the lack of evacuation alternatives—as the reason for their reluctance to risk a professional crew. The very feature that made Tassajara desirable as a place for a monastery—its remoteness—also made it a liability.

“If Zen Structure Group decides to evacuate, how long do we have before the fire reaches the road?” Stuart asked, using the official designation for the people still at Tassajara.

Why is Stuart asking about evacuation? David thought. Who said anything about leaving Tassajara?

“Two, maybe three hours,” said Froggatt. “Is Zen Structure evacuating?” He sounded as if he doubted what he had heard.

David checked the rearview mirror, hoping to catch Colin's eyes again, but he had them trained on the road. The struts on the Isuzu creaked and groaned on every rut. The engine whined in low gear.

Stuart paused before raising his radio to transmit his answer: “Affirmative.”

“Everyone's coming out?” Froggatt asked.

David felt suddenly breathless. He shook his head no, though no one had asked him a question.

“Affirmative.”

“Wait!” David cried. “Stuart, no one said we're evacuating!” His skin felt tight, his muscles locked around a rising swell of frustration and confusion, a feeling that time had just skipped forward and left him behind.

Stuart didn't respond. He kept his eyes forward on the road.

“Call when you're ready to exit,” said Froggatt. “I'll call air attack to hold the road.”

“Copy.” Stuart lowered his radio until it rested in his lap.

For a second, David considered clawing the radio from Stuart and calling Froggatt back himself to straighten out the misunderstanding, but instead he took a deep breath and noted the bottomless, dropping feeling in his belly. He had to find a way to slow time by being in it. He had to inject his voice where it was not wanted.

“We have
not
decided to evacuate,” David said again, enunciating each word, thinking, You are not in charge here! “We need to talk this over with everyone. Stuart? Are you listening?”

Stuart didn't turn around to face David. “Things have changed,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically flat. “We have to leave now. We just have to leave.”

In the weeks that fire had been chewing through the surrounding forest, David never really knew how the different agencies managing the blaze were related or whom he could trust. Though others on the core team, Mako and Graham in particular, felt Jack Froggatt gave them the straight story and that he genuinely liked Tassajara and what it was about, David wasn't sure whose interests Froggatt represented.

But Stuart didn't work for anyone on the fire. He always said what was on his mind—for better or for worse. He was a longtime friend of Tassajara. Now that trusted friend, the one with the expertise who'd told them repeatedly Tassajara was defensible, had determined it wasn't safe to stick around. Without consulting them, he'd set their evacuation in motion.

 

 

They all heard David's announcement over their radios—the acti
vation group at the flats, waiting for their next cue; Shundo and Devin, who had hiked over the hogback for a look at the fire up Tassajara Creek; a skeleton kitchen crew, preparing supper; Abbot Steve, on his way to the work circle to intercept the three returning from Lime Point: “Everyone on the core team please come to the stone office immediately.”

Abbot Steve ran into Stuart first, near the gatehouse across from the zendo.

“We're leaving,” the fire captain told the abbot. He lifted his gaze to the smoke-washed sky above the half-wrapped gatehouse.

“What?” Abbot Steve peered at Stuart through frameless eyeglasses, projecting a naturally confident, cool demeanor despite Stuart's urgency.

“You don't like this, do you?” Stuart shifted on his feet.

“No, I don't.” In the week since Abbot Steve had arrived at Tassajara, they'd been doing everything they could to stay there safely, not to leave it. The abbot knew the activation had not been exemplary. He was there and had witnessed the confusion of hoses and roles, the nervous lack of focus. But that alone couldn't have so drastically shifted Stuart's commitment to staying. “What did you see from Lime Point?”

“The fire's approaching the road,” Stuart explained. “They're sending air support to keep it clear. We have ten minutes to get out of here.”

The fire reaching the road might be a trigger point for the fire service, Abbot Steve thought, but it wasn't a trigger point for him. Just a few days prior, he'd talked with a reporter on the bridge just above where Cabarga Creek spills into Tassajara Creek in the rainy months. Summer guests and residents often relax on its benches made of long, smooth slabs of wood. “If the fire comes to visit us at our front steps,” the abbot had said as sunlight splashed the head student's cabin behind him, “we'll meet it.” The sun had set and the moon had risen several times since he'd made that assessment, but it had not changed.

“This isn't the agreement we had, Stuart,” he said. “It's not how we make decisions here.”

A lone Steller's jay squawked on the hill behind the gatehouse—one of the many that usually patrolled Tassajara looking for handouts and crumbs. Most of the wildlife seemed to have cleared out in advance of the fire.

Stuart sucked in a breath and turned his gaze in the direction of the hogback, the low ridge where earlier he'd seen fountains of flame spilling down the canyon toward Tassajara. He shifted his weight from side to side and blew out the intake of air, shaking his head. “We have to leave,” he repeated.

Stuart was all motion, but the abbot held his body still, his movements frugal, precise. “We have a designated safe retreat, Stuart. We have our sprinklers and pumps to take care of. You yourself said—”

“It's a different fire today than it was yesterday,” Stuart interrupted. The wind rattled the wrapping on the gatehouse. “They're calling for red flag conditions. We're alone here. I've got no backup. We don't have the capacity to do this by ourselves—not in these conditions—and I don't want to be responsible for what could happen. We have to leave.”

“We need to discuss this with the core team,” said Abbot Steve, reiterating what David had told Stuart on the road.

The abbot turned back toward the stone office, walking past the small altar where, ordinarily, incense is offered daily in the work circle. Stuart, incredulous, trailed a few steps behind as they passed the kitchen. On a typical summer day, sounds of pots banging and knives chopping—one meal's cleanup and another's preparation—would float from the windows. Now it was quiet. Only one or two people were needed to prepare a simple dinner for the twenty-two who remained.

The reassuring murmur of Tassajara Creek drifted through the windows of the open-air student eating area, where Abbot Steve had sat tangaryo his first practice period at Tassajara. That was before the zendo burned, and he remembered exactly where his seat had been, facing the creek, near the door. His legs had felt every kind of pain—throbbing, tingling, cramping, aching, even burning—but he'd sat through it all, watching how the mind tries again and again to refuse to feel what is unpleasant, unwanted.

Now, simply watching his own response was not an option. According to Stuart, this fire had become a different fire. That was entirely possible—every fire was different from one moment to the next, just like everything in the universe. Despite the less-than-perfect activation, Abbot Steve thought they were ready. The words he'd said earlier to the reporter were still true. He didn't feel a change within himself corresponding to Stuart's shift.

Stuart had said he didn't want to be responsible for what could happen, but in Abbot Steve's view that responsibility fell to the core team. If they left, as Stuart said they had to, the pumps drawing water into the standpipe system and pushing it through Dharma Rain would run out of fuel. The sprinklers would sputter and stop on the rooftops. The fire would pour into that vacuum. Even the stone kitchen would burn, as the old zendo had, the fire consuming the cookbooks and the wooden shelves that held them and warping the steel sinks and hanging steel racks used to cool freshly baked loaves of bread. Everything that could would burn.

Abbot Steve was relatively new to his position. At the ceremony installing him as abbot, he'd taken a vow: “Having entered this path, I cannot turn aside.” His first concern now was for everyone's safety. But his position gave him another responsibility, not lower or higher, but equally present: to tend to the practice and bring forth the teachings of the Buddha.

It was responsibility in its broadest sense. To take care of Tassajara included taking care of the creek and forest, the temple buildings, the bodies and minds of every resident and guest. The guardian of the temple—a foot-tall wooden figure with a furrowed brow and a stick balanced behind his bowing hands—had already been taken out to Jamesburg. The remaining residents and their embodiment of practice were the guardians of the temple now.