Fire Monks (24 page)

Inside the house, Leslie made sure that residents whose fretting parents had called—like Devin's mother, who'd already seen a post about the evacuation on
Sitting with Fire
—called their parents back. A mother of two adult children herself, Leslie knew the anguish of a parent's worry. Over a cobbled-together pasta dinner, the evacuees tried to relate what had happened that afternoon. There wasn't one coherent story to tell. It was more like a dozen people working on a puzzle, everyone reaching for pieces and putting them in where they saw a match. Some gaps persisted, and some pieces couldn't be found.

Stuart and his girlfriend stuck around for a while. “He was very calm and contained, but he was pretty upset,” Leslie recalled shortly after the fire in a videotaped interview for a Zen Center documentary,
Sitting with Fire,
named after the blog. Stuart hadn't left Jamesburg yet when David called from Tassajara to say they'd made it back safely, and they'd been thinking, maybe five people might not be enough: Would any of the evacuees be willing to return to Tassajara? Maybe sneak back in during the night, as residents did in 1977?

Leslie relayed the question to the people gathered in her living room, sitting on the furniture and cushions on the floor. The question highlighted the bleak fact that five people couldn't cover all of Tassajara effectively and maybe not safely. But to go back in now was also dangerous, and illegal.

“Are they serious?”

“This is crazy!”

“First they won't let me go with them. Now they want me to go back?”

Former firefighter Kim Leigh, who'd stood on the hogback with Stuart before the fire captain decided to pull them all out, stayed quiet but felt a twinge inside, an urge to grab his pack, sneak back down the road, and join the five who'd returned. “I knew from my own experience fighting fires that you had to have an unfaltering sense of concern and responsibility. They did. They were completely together, completely unified.”

The group in Jamesburg was unified, too. Everyone who'd evacuated—including, ultimately, Leigh—agreed that they wouldn't return to Tassajara without permission from the fire service, even if it meant that for the time being, the five at Tassajara would be there alone. Leslie reported this to David over the phone and told him that Robert Thomas and Greg Fain, president and treasurer of Zen Center, were on their way from San Francisco now, intending to drive in to Tassajara.

Just as Stuart didn't know how dependent he'd been on the hope for backup until that hope was extinguished, some evacuees realized how much anxiety they'd been carrying around only when they set foot in Jamesburg and felt it shed from their muscles like snow from a roof in the sun. When you're in the middle of something, you're just in the middle of it. It's when the environment or circumstances change that you become aware: Oh, that was fear I felt.

Zazen grounds you in your experience. My own teacher often calls zazen “total dynamic activity.” It may not look like much is happening, but
everything
is happening—breath, posture, thoughts, sensations, a quality of attention that is unlimited and alive. Since June, the residents had had little time for formal zazen. Many of them had hardly entered the zendo since the fire preparations began. It was all they could do to have several minutes of silence at the start of work meeting in the dining room and a short service after. Fire marshal Devin Patel wished that they hadn't dropped the meditation schedule and the forms of practice so completely. “It would have been great to have a Dharma talk, or meet in the zendo,” he told me.

But actually, the residents never stopped doing zazen—even though they weren't in the zendo, wearing robes. Their zazen moved from the zendo to the bare paths and the rooftops wet with Dharma Rain.

After a while, Stuart said good-bye to the group at Jamesburg. He had to drive his girlfriend home, try to get some sleep, and report back to work the next morning at his station.

“I'm just so glad you're all out,” he told them. “You did some great work down there, and you're safe now.”

 

 

Shortly after the evacuees arrived in Jamesburg, Zen Center pres
ident Robert Thomas appeared, after driving down from City Center with Sonja Gardenswartz—who had evacuated, unhappily, on June 25—and Simon Moyes, one of the four former residents who'd arrived in the middle of the confusion of that first resident evacuation. Moyes had spearheaded the engineering of Dharma Rain, then left Tassajara, intending to return after attending a wedding.

Thomas already knew that some people in the evacuation convoy had turned around and gone back to Tassajara; Leslie had called his cell phone to tell him. But to his surprise, people in Jamesburg asked him what had happened. Most had little idea, since they weren't among the core group that had met in the stone office. Nor did they know how those who went back had come to their decision. They wanted to know, Did the request for five to return come from City Center? Did Abbot Haller talk them into going back?

Thomas didn't know, but he intended to try to get to Tassajara. He wasn't sure what he would do there, exactly. He'd had no firefighting training. But as president of Zen Center, and as someone who'd lived at Tassajara, he felt he had to be there.

In his interview for the
Sitting with Fire
documentary, Thomas spoke of Tassajara as a sort of headwaters: “It became a reference point for my life, for every moment of my life.” He'd gone there a confused young man and found himself being turned toward a different way of being, not quite by his own will. For the then thirty-four-year-old, disaffected Thomas, this was a new sensation. After days tending to kerosene lanterns during the work period between guest season and the monastic training period, he'd decided Zen practice wasn't his cup of tea. But as Thomas was leaving Tassajara, a priest stopped him on the path, bowed, and thanked him for his efforts. Though Thomas didn't know it at the time, that priest was Sojun Mel Weitsman, then an abbot of Zen Center. And the simple gesture of acknowledgment changed Thomas's life. A few footsteps later, he knew he'd be back. He eventually spent six years at Tassajara. He met his wife there.

Shortly after Thomas's arrival in Jamesburg on July 9, the phone rang. It was Abbot Steve, calling from the stone office. “We've been talking here, and we don't think you should come in to Tassajara,” he told Thomas. “You haven't had fire training. For your safety, everyone's safety, it would be better if you didn't come down.”

The room had hushed. People who knew it was the abbot on the line wanted to hear Thomas's side of the conversation.

“I appreciate your concern,” said Thomas, “but I'm coming in. I'm just stopping in here at Jamesburg. I'm coming in to Tassajara.” As Zen Center's president, Thomas wasn't looking for the abbot's permission. “I think I had a lot of force behind my voice,” Thomas told me later. “Maybe Steve felt that.”

In a tense telephone conference call a few days before, Thomas had pushed Abbot Steve and other senior members of Zen Center's leadership to ponder some difficult questions: What exactly are we doing here? Are we asking people to fight the fire? And if so, what if the fire comes and somebody dies? He'd been assured that the safety of the students was the first priority, that they'd been told repeatedly that Tassajara could be defended, and they had a place to take shelter if necessary.

“I said, ‘We can't be asking people to risk their lives to save Tassajara,'” Thomas remembered. “‘I hope that's what we're saying here.'”

To Thomas's relief, everyone on the call agreed: Clearly, no one should risk his or her life for Tassajara.

Abbot Steve talked Thomas into waiting to drive in until they could check fire conditions on the road. Thomas promised he'd stay in Jamesburg until they called with an update.

 

 

Earlier that evening, even before the convoy had pulled out of the
parking lot at Tassajara, Chris Slymon had posted news of the evacuation on
Sitting with Fire
: “We do not know how long Tassajara will remain empty but the current red flag warning does not end for a couple of days. Fire crews have told us of strong winds at the ridge. These winds together with the extreme temperatures and little or no recovery in humidity overnight produce ideal conditions for the fire to move faster than we had hoped . . . We appreciate that this news may cause concern but please do not call the Tassajara or Jamesburg numbers as we need the phones.”

When the convoy arrived at Jamesburg, its passengers startled and confused by the turnaround on the road, Slymon didn't post an update. But someone else put the word out in an anonymous comment on the blog around nine p.m. that night: “For those of you who don't know . . . There are 5 people still inside Tassajara. The last car turned around and decided to stay.”

Within the hour, a Zen student who had attended a meeting about the evacuation at City Center in San Francisco responded with an attempt to allay fears. He reminded blog readers of the fire preparations that residents had completed and the training they'd received—and noted that “these are long-term, senior practitioners making these decisions.” But the word was out: Five people had gone back in to Tassajara in the midst of an evacuation just as the fire was heating up and drawing close. Only two were named—the abbot and the director. Worried friends and family responded with frustrated posts like this one: “If I cannot find out where my son is another way very soon, rest assured, I WILL call. PLEASE contact the families of those who stayed, & tell the evacuees to call home.”

Back in the stone office, the five who'd returned to Tassajara iden
tified their immediate priorities and established a schedule for night patrols. It quickly became clear that they would be spread thin. “I remember making the recommendation that we keep ourselves in the central area, given how far the flats is. It would be so easy to get cut off,” Colin told me later.

After David called Jamesburg to float the possibility of a few more able-bodied residents sneaking back down the road, Abbot Steve called Abbot Haller. The five also discussed the complex web of conditions that had led to Stuart's sudden push for evacuation and their own decision to return. “Stuart didn't want to see anyone get hurt. He had made a decision about the twenty-two of us that were here,” David told me later. While the abbot shared Stuart's concern for the residents' safety, “Steve made a decision about the total well-being of Zen Center. He was holding a larger picture.”

They ate well that evening, a dinner planned for four times as many people: pasta with avocado, cherry tomatoes, and asparagus, and strawberry shortcake for dessert. The mood was purposeful as they set about wrapping the stone office door and windows with leftover Firezat. They'd discovered by then that only one of the two satellite lines switched earlier that day was actually operational, and David didn't know what lay ahead of them, but in some ways it didn't matter. What mattered was that they had not abandoned Tassajara. He felt a sense of relief, a communion with the unknown. Making this effort felt right. He had faith in their ability to be fully present for whatever showed up.

That didn't mean there weren't also moments of great doubt.

For David, one such moment came while on patrol, standing on the bridge over the creek bed named for Tom Cabarga—a 1977 resident who foresaw the potential for the then-unnamed stream that flows past the zendo to surge to flood levels the winter after that year's wildfire. It was just past dark, around nine o'clock, when David looked up Cabarga Creek and spotted a mountain of flame through the trees.

At approximately the same time, Colin was up the road at Lime Point, watching the fireworks below. It glowed a beautiful, terrible orange, as if the sunset had spilled from the sky into the valley. And this upside-down sunset sounded like a blast furnace.

“This line from
Jaws
came into my mind,” he recalled later. “It's the first time Roy Scheider sees the shark. He's so stunned he backs into where the captain is and says, ‘You're gonna need a bigger boat.'” We're no match for this fire, Colin thought. We don't stand a chance. “But we're trapped at that point. The one thing they hammered into us over and over again was, When it gets down to it, don't get on the road. If you get trapped in a chimney, you're burned. We'd had our chance to leave.”

An hour later, Mako and Graham drove less than a mile up the road on patrol before they had to turn around because the surrounding mountains looked like active volcanoes, spouting flames. They called Jamesburg to tell Thomas: Do not come in over the road tonight.