Fire Monks (23 page)

Things can change quickly on a fire, in either direction. “I've been
on fires where one day we were in dire straits and the next day it snowed on us. The only fire out there was the campfire keeping us warm,” Stuart told me in one interview.

On July 9, the moisture-starved air and soaring temperatures had transformed the fire threatening Tassajara from a creeper into a fierce and unpredictable force. For Stuart, the dots had aligned into the profile of a treacherous situation, prompting him to call for the evacuation. Now, as the group huddled around the abbot on the road, he watched a plume of smoke drifting toward the ridge with the northwest wind and mentally traced the footprints of his decision.

First there was the botched drill—hoses unrolled and pumps primed without nozzles, people running around as if on a scavenger hunt. Then he'd seen fire shooting upward sixty feet, reverse waterfalls of flame over the hogback, after learning that Chief Haines couldn't hustle up an engine crew for Tassajara. Haines had relationships with the people managing the Los Padres National Forest. But the USFS was in charge, and the agency had said, Not on our turf.

“It was their fire,” Stuart lamented later. “If it was ours, things would have been different. I used to be a patriot of the U.S. Forest Service, but Forest Service policy was the problem here. If I had had one good engine crew, there's no question, I wouldn't have left Tassajara.”

When Froggatt had shared the frequencies used by the Basin Complex incident command staff, Stuart was initially grateful for access to fire information at its source. “But things got dicey for me when they started referring to me as the Zen Structure Group resource. Suddenly I was on the radar. That put a ton of pressure on me,” he said, adding, “It was pretty shrewd on their part. Tag, you're it.” He'd been made official.

Standing in the middle of the failed drill, hearing he couldn't count on professional backup, Stuart had realized he'd be in charge of twenty monks. Or worse, maybe he wouldn't. Would a crew of Zen monks follow his orders? This moment on the ridge seemed to hold his answer. From years on fires, he'd learned there are fires you want to fight and fires best left alone. The fire he saw heading toward Tassajara wasn't a fire he wanted to fight, not with a novice crew of Zen monks trained to continuously question everything.

When I spoke with Stuart for the first time several months after the fire, he sighed with a palpable regret, looking back on the evacuation. He had glanced over his shoulder on July 9, as he always did when about to take a risk, and he'd seen people he cared for, mostly young, unaccustomed to following orders, and untested by fire. “The firefighters on my engine know what they're seeing. They know what to fear.... I was the only professional firefighter down there.” He sounded almost hurt, recalling the loneliness of his position. When asked whether Froggatt ordered the evacuation, he quickly answered no, then added, “He highly encouraged it. You know, I trusted Froggatt. He's a good wildland firefighter. He liked what Tassajara was about. But when he and I had that conversation on the radio, he wanted us out.”

Stuart insisted that he made the right decision at Tassajara with the information he had at the time. But as he recalled the moment when the core team huddled up at Ashes Corner, his expression turned mournful. He knew they'd decide to go back. When they came up to say good-bye, a wave of doubt rolled over him. Had he let them down? The firefighter in him wanted to return with them.

As the five prepared to turn around at Ashes Corner, he nodded toward his girlfriend in the passenger seat of his truck and said under his breath to Graham, “If it weren't for Solange, I'd go back with you.”

He turned to Colin. “If it gets really bad,” he advised, “get an inch-and-a-half hose at the front and back of the stone office, turn it on, and hunker down. If you just can't stand it, jump in the creek with your shelters.”

When the abbot and director reached Stuart, David thanked him for everything he'd done for Tassajara.

“You're really mad at me, aren't you?” Stuart asked.

“It's just a different decision. This is what we feel we need to do. It's our decision,” Abbot Steve said, his voice clear, buoyant. He clasped Stuart's hand and shook it. “You are not responsible for whatever happens.”

Stuart knew the abbot intended these words to release him. They didn't. If anyone died inside Tassajara, he would wish he'd died along with them.

But Stuart dredged up a smile. Now that they were going back, better to bolster their confidence and remind them of the essentials than to dwell on all the things that could go terribly wrong. “Stay together. Don't get spread out,” he told them, resting his palm on David's shoulder. “Never lose contact with each other.”

There were quick good-byes, hugs, good-luck wishes, bows. Mako arranged for one of the departing residents to take care of Monkeybat in Jamesburg. As Graham pulled their belongings from the Suburban and tossed them into the lumber truck, Froggatt stepped in close.

“Those pumps running?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“Got enough fuel?”

Graham nodded.

“Just keep your wits about you,” Froggatt said softly.

It felt like another acknowledgment that their choice was solid. “Like we were doing the thing he would have done,” Mako told me later.

Just past six thirty p.m., Abbot Steve turned his CR-V around. Colin followed suit with the Ford. As blades of flame knifed through the smoke in the canyon below, two vehicles carrying five monks headed back down Tassajara Road.

Whatever you feel is right at the edge of your familiar world, that's the edge of your bodhisattva vow, the edge of your deep intention to wake up with what is.

—ABBOT STEVE STÜCKY

In the vehicle Shundo Haye drove, someone had suggested that they
ride away from Tassajara in silence. From the time they'd pulled out of the parking lot, they'd watched smoke billowing in the canyons and listened to the low drone of the airtankers without a word. When they'd reached the second overlook, Stuart Carlson had waved them past, making theirs the lead vehicle on the road.

Shundo said later that Stuart's pleading with them to leave Tassajara had “flipped something” in his head. All along they'd been learning the politics of the fire world—“the to and fro, who could override whom, along with what the fire can do.” Now that the promise of help had been cut off, and along with it Stuart's confidence, it seemed the proper thing to do to evacuate. Maybe this was easier for Shundo than the others because he no longer lived at Tassajara, he speculated. He'd come down from San Francisco just to help. He hadn't expected to be here this long, hadn't even brought the proper footwear.

When they'd reached Jack Froggatt at Ashes Corner, Shundo had continued around the bend, climbing toward the ridge. It wasn't long before he'd noticed that no one was behind him.

After a few more kinks in the road, the Isuzu reached the ridge more than three thousand feet above Tassajara, the site of the informal finish line for the monastery's “No Race”—a noncompetitive five-mile run/walk/saunter up the road held every spring before guest season starts. They all got out of the car to watch trees flaring into flame in the canyons below and wait for the others to catch up.

When David radioed Shundo and told him some of them were reconsidering the decision to leave, it didn't fully register. What was there to reconsider? They were on their way out. Froggatt was stationed on the road, clearly intending to see that they left. “I didn't think I needed to be part of the conversation,” Shundo told me. “I wasn't invited to come back and be part of it. It just seemed like they were having this discussion, and my assumption was everyone would follow along.”

When a CAL FIRE chief scolded them to continue on, Shundo rallied everyone back into the Isuzu. A few minutes later, a resident radioed from one of the Suburbans and told Shundo some of the core group had turned around.

“I didn't have any feelings about it at that stage,” Shundo said. “I thought, I'm driving the car. I'm going to Jamesburg. In my head I was set on the idea that everyone was going out, for better or for worse. That was the decision.”

 

 

“It went, I'm in, I'm in, I'm in . . . I'm out.” When it was fire mar
shal Devin Patel's turn to choose, he'd opted not to join the group going back to the monastery. Their decision to return to Tassajara alone when the professionals had told them to evacuate had struck him as rash, perhaps even foolish.

As he left Ashes Corner after the five turned back, everything about his own decision felt solid. Devin felt calm, centered, and eager for some rest. His mother, whom he'd called daily to reassure, would be overjoyed to learn that he was leaving the forest. He could spend time with his girlfriend. They could take a break together and make up for the nearly three weeks they'd spent apart since the earlier evacuation, tough on a new relationship.

Of everyone on the core team, Devin felt most connected to Shundo. As former fire marshal, he was helpful and supportive when Devin had questions about equipment or protocols. Both had spoken up in support of Stuart in the hasty preevacuation meeting in the stone office. Now, listening to Shundo say he was driving on toward Jamesburg over the radio, Devin sensed a continuing alignment.

All the time he'd been on the core team during the lead-up to the fire, he'd perceived himself slightly apart from the group, closer to the rest of the students, who didn't have the authority or visibility that staff members did at Tassajara. He'd never shared what he saw as the prevailing headstrong attitude: They did it in 1977. We can do it now! Though Abbot Steve was a compassionate, gentle leader, and Devin never felt discounted by the group, every member of the core team was a priest but him. They'd dedicated their lives to Zen practice and, by extension, to Tassajara. They'd all expressed a wish to stay at Tassajara no matter what. Devin had often found himself being the voice of caution in meetings, reminding everyone that no building was worth anyone getting hurt or, worse, killed. He didn't actually think Tassajara would burn. “And I had this idea that if it did, good things would come of it,” Devin said later. Like a proliferation of wildflowers after a fire, those who loved Tassajara would come forth, band together, and build it again.

More than a year after the fire, Devin told me that he saw the turnaround moment on the ridge as “the final narrowing down to the real core group.” He said his decision still felt as right as it had on the ridge. “There was no consideration. It was instantaneous. I still don't feel like it was even a choice.” The rest of the drive out was less tense, but mixed emotions swirled around inside the car: relief to be leaving, confusion about the split-off, concern for those returning, fear, awe, love. Such a mélange of feelings was hard to put into words. Perhaps Monkeybat said it best, letting out an occasional piercing meow.

 

 

“Bring dinner,” Leslie James had told David. She didn't have
supplies to feed twenty-some Tassajara evacuees at Jamesburg.

When David called just before six p.m. on July 9 and said they were all leaving Tassajara, Leslie was understandably thrown. She'd been present at a meeting with Abbot Steve and the core team shortly after the abbot's arrival, where they'd gone around the room and each had affirmed a willingness to stay. She recalled Abbot Steve saying that he couldn't imagine a situation in which he would leave Tassajara unattended. What had happened to cause such a shift?

But Leslie is not the kind of person who needs to understand why something has happened in order to see what needs doing in the present moment. She has a rare designation—she is not a priest, but she has received Dharma transmission. She doesn't wear brown robes—hers are green—but she is a fully acknowledged senior teacher, in a lineage of transmitted understanding that can be traced all the way back to the Buddha.

There would be time later to find out what had happened. First, Leslie needed to find something to feed the evacuees when they arrived, because she had a feeling they'd forget to bring food. She also needed to call neighbors to round up places for them to spend the night.

By seven thirty p.m., there was another crisis unfolding in front of the Jamesburg house. A California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer had parked his car across the road and was stopping residents on their way back from a community meeting with fire officials and refusing to allow them to return home. The locals argued with the officer. They hadn't been given any kind of warning. Some of them had left children and animals at home. One resident (and mother) was so irate about the closure that she ended up in handcuffs.

While Leslie was outside, watching the cars back up on the road and soothing distressed neighbors, the convoy from Tassajara pulled in from the other direction. As the daylight dimmed, seventeen people—fourteen residents, plus Stuart, his girlfriend, and Kim Leigh—stumbled from the vehicles, hungry, tired, in a kaleidoscope of emotional states. They retreated into the Jamesburg house, instinctively avoiding the drama out front.

Eventually, the local volunteer fire department stepped in to help sort things out, and the CHP officer realized he'd established the roadblock in the wrong place. He moved his patrol car down the road to the Los Padres National Forest boundary. The neighbors drove home as the last light drained from the sky, and all was quiet again in Jamesburg. At least outside.