Fire Monks (28 page)

Fire is simply fire. It has no sense of morality, has no persona, does not wish to do good or bad, is neither deliberately enemy nor friend.

—DOUGLAS GANTENBEIN,
A Season of Fire

Nothing Mako had read when she was fire marshal prepared her
for the actual experience of witnessing an advancing fire front. “It had this feeling of being ferocious and unrelenting and aggressive and just, you know, consuming,” she told me later, making explosive gestures with her hands. The entire sky boiled above her head, a canopy of fire. Thirty-foot flames tore down the mountains into Tassajara. Holy crap, she thought, I'm going to die.

A wildfire has a head, a tail, and flanks. The fire blasting over Flag Rock, Hawk Mountain, and the Overlook ridge seemed to have two or three heads, maybe more. But then this head of fire met the moisture hanging in the air from Dharma Rain and transformed into fingers of flame before their eyes. Maybe they didn't have to hunker down in the stone office after all. Maybe all of Tassajara wasn't going to burst into flame at once, so that only the Buddha would be left, buried in a moonscape of blackened tree trunks and soot-smudged rocks.

Maybe they could do something.

The five remaining at Tassajara didn't have the experience of trained firefighters and were in violation of some of the established guidelines for staying safe in the field—what are known as the Ten Standard Orders and Eighteen Watch-Out Situations, or more simply, “the Ten and Eighteen.” They didn't post a lookout. They didn't have a plan or clear assignments. No one was in charge. But they'd mastered one order: “Be alert. Keep calm. Think clearly. Act decisively.” And they had two essential safety tools in abundance—readiness and attention. “We didn't set up a command structure,” Abbot Steve told me later. “We set up a communications structure.”

Each of the five carried a small two-way Motorola walkie-talkie. They used them throughout the day to check in with one another, to announce their whereabouts, and to ask for help when they needed it. But during the next few hours, they had no direct contact with Stuart or Jack Froggatt or anyone else working the Basin Complex fire. This meant, according to firefighting guidelines, that they were in a “Watch-Out Situation”—they couldn't see the main fire and weren't in contact with someone who could.

Some fire managers insist that the Ten Standard Orders are fundamentally non-negotiable, never to be broken. Ted Putnam, wildland fire investigator and longtime meditator, disagrees: “You only think you can follow them if you have never observed your own mind in meditation.” In
On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters,
one former seasonal firefighter wrote that the Ten and Eighteen “are too much to ask of ground-pounding crewmembers engaged in the controlled chaos that is firefighting. These rules are ‘ideally possible but practically unattainable.'”

Ideally possible but practically unattainable sounds a lot like the vow to save all beings that residents at Tassajara (and Buddhists everywhere) make on a daily basis. That the vow cannot be upheld does not mean it's not worth making. The five at Tassajara may not have been trained in the Ten and Eighteen, but they knew intimately the importance of having signs on the path that point the way toward what is often called “right effort.” And they also knew that you shouldn't hold on to any rule too tightly. Reality doesn't follow directions. The fire you want or expect will not be the fire you get.

 

 

On the pine room rooftops, the sprinkler heads sputtered and
hissed; they weren't moving much water. So while Mako wet down the deck and trees behind the stone office to protect their safe zone, David opened a hose line on the stone and pine rooms, some of Tassajara's oldest structures, which sit creekside, just upstream of the office.

It had bolstered his confidence to watch the fire reach the moist valley slopes and slow down—as if the Buddha's hand, sometimes depicted touching the earth in a simple gesture of steadfastness, had halted the flames. The fire now moving down the steep hillside below the Overlook Trail in isolated clumps wasn't directly threatening the stone and pine rooms, but what if it hopped the creek on a floating ember, started the rooms on fire, and spread to the office?

Lashing the rooftops with water, David felt intensely alive. The necessary actions at last were clear: The fire's here. Put water on it. In fact, put water ahead of it. Far better to wet the buildings down now and prevent their catching fire than to try to put them out once they were ablaze. The fire hoses were heavy and difficult to move, especially when handling them alone, without a backup partner. His throat felt scratchy, his lungs tight from the smoke. In the zip-up, fire-resistant, pale yellow jumpsuit, he felt as if he were wearing several pairs of baggy jeans at once. But David barely noticed these discomforts, so focused was the feeling that doubt had dropped away and now there was merely effort, meeting the moment entirely, with nothing held back and nothing extra.

Eventually David put down his hose, left the buildings dripping as if from a summer shower, and returned to their communications hub in the stone office, hoping that the fire hadn't taken out the radio phone or their one remaining satellite line.

Inside the office, he needed a light to see—all of the windows and the door were now sealed with the fire-resistant wrapping. The Firezat dampened the sounds outside, but he heard rocks dislodging and crashing downslope into the creek, and he heard the sound of the fire: the whoosh of ignition, the roar when it had wind beneath it, the crackling sound when it found fuel.

David called Jamesburg to say that they'd geared up. “The fire's here! It's coming down behind the stone office, by the hill cabins, behind the zendo—,” he began. Then Graham's voice came over his radio, something about lighting a backfire at the hill cabins.

“I've got to go!” said David, and hung up the phone, noting the fleeting question: Would this be the last time anyone would hear from them?

He recalled that a Big Sur resident who'd lit a backfire on his property had been arrested, so David called George Haines, the CAL FIRE unit chief who'd tried to get backup at Tassajara, to make sure they were within their legal rights to do it and to get some direction. He told Haines that the fire had surrounded Tassajara and begun its descent into the valley, slow enough that they thought they could respond. “It's near the cabins on the hill. Can we light a backfire?”

Chief Haines had the legal codes on his desk. In California, a private property owner has the right to light a backfire on his or her land if there is imminent danger to life and property. “I'll stand behind you in a court of law if need be. Be sure you ignite from a high point,” Haines said, “and keep a clear path of egress.”

Over the phone, he walked David through the technique. David relayed instructions by walkie-talkie to Mako and Graham up at the hill cabins, then left the office and stationed himself at the base of the stone steps to the cabins with a hose to protect their way down.

 

 

Up on the hill, Graham took an emergency flare attached to a
metal pole and tipped it into the dry grass between the first hill cabin and the main fire. Ordinarily when fire crews light backfires or backburns, they use special handheld drip torches filled with a mixture of gas and diesel to deposit flames onto the ground. Lacking actual drip torches, the five at Tassajara had raided the abbot's car for flares and fashioned homemade flares on sticks with duct tape and whatever materials they could find in the shop. They'd joked about making drip torches from wine bottles left by guests and lantern wicks. But a car flare would do.

The fire sounded to Graham like a 747 coming in for a landing on the top of Hawk Mountain. Flames threatening the cabins were only fifty feet away, below the solar panels, burning downslope through the low grasses and chaparral. “We were given the impression that fire doesn't burn downhill,” Graham told me later. “It drops stuff, and that stuff lights on fire and burns back up. But I was seeing fire burn downhill. It was burning up, it was burning down, it was burning horizontally.”

From what he knew about backfires, which wasn't much, he had a vision of how one ought to look. “I think of a backfire as lighting a big swath of fire that burns right into the main fire,” he said. But his backfire didn't look like that. It burned here and there where he'd put fire on the ground, but it didn't form a solid, moving mass of fire. Because they'd run Dharma Rain all night, everything was fairly wet up by the hill cabins. And Mako stood nearby with a hose, spraying down the eaves.

Abbot Steve watched from down below in the work circle. He saw fire sweep around the cabins and reach for the shoulders of the slope, threatening to cut off Mako and Graham from the path down. Over his walkie-talkie, he pleaded with them to come down. Mako heard but stayed put, wetting down the cabins and keeping an eye on the distance between Graham and the approaching flames. I'm not one of your daughters, she thought. If it was just Graham up here, would you be telling him to drop it?

That morning, after returning from the Overlook Trail, Mako had walked by the pool pump and called Graham on her walkie-talkie, asking if she should start it. They'd planned to start Dharma Rain around noon, and it was about that time. When Graham had answered in the affirmative, Abbot Steve had radioed that he ought to help her, not knowing that Mako had trained Graham on the pump in the first place. “The fact that I'm a woman might have made Steve feel protective,” she told me later. “It's understandable. But at the time it just pissed me off.”

When the wall of flame crested the Overlook ridge at twelve forty p.m., she'd started hosing down the hillside and wooden deck behind the stone office, following her first instinct to protect their safe zone directly below that ridge. “I was ready and waiting, but it just kind of trickled over. I remember feeling like, there's nothing happening over here. Things are happening over there. I need to go!” Around one p.m., she'd walked around to the front of the stone office, seen Graham up on the hill, a canopy of fire behind him, and climbed the path inlaid with stone steps to help.

“Mako, Graham!” Abbot Steve tried again. “Please come down from there! Do you see the fire moving toward the steps?”

Fear sharpened the abbot's voice, seeing that their exit from the burning hillside could be cut off. But it was more an urgent request than an order. The couple looked at each other, knowing the backfire wasn't a success but that they'd done what they could with what they had on hand. The rest of Tassajara needed tending to.

Mako set down her hose. As David wet the area around her, she descended the set of eighty stone steps back to the work circle. Graham ran straight down a firebreak built by the inmate crew.

 

 

The firebreak let Graham out on the dirt road that leads from the
work circle out to the bathhouse and flats area. The road is flanked on one side by the steep lower slope of Hawk Mountain, on the other side by the creek. He walked toward the flats, where he'd watched roiling smoke less than thirty minutes before. Now, looking upstream from the bathhouse, toward the flats at the far western edge of the Tassajara valley, he saw so many spot fires that he didn't know where to begin. The bathhouse fence on the women's side was burning. Fire fringed the tree trunks and flashed on the uphill side of the dirt road. Seeing this, Graham hesitated—he didn't want to get cut off from central Tassajara. Debris clattered constantly downhill, rocks like giant, rough-hewn hockey pucks.

Because of the smoke, he couldn't see past the tent yurt. Had it all burned when the head of the fire swept through? He stopped near the large sycamore tree in front of the bathhouse. A dozen small fires encircled its trunk. Though the area had been cleared repeatedly, more leaves had fallen, and the fire had found fuel. He needed to put out the burning fence on the women's side of the bathhouse, but flames stood between him and that fire. Because the building was flanked by the creek on one side and the road on the other, the residents had chosen not to wrap it. Graham reached for his radio. “The bathhouse is on fire.”

He picked his way through patches of burning grass and shrubs toward the nearest standpipe to turn it on, putting one foot carefully in front of the other. He pointed the attached hose at the closest flame, a burning bush at the base of the sycamore.

Even with his goggles on, his eyes watered. The smoke found the smallest opening. His bandanna filtered some of it, but not enough. He could taste smoke, smell it, feel it filling his nostrils, coating his throat. He felt dizzy, sick to his stomach. Then the coughing started. At first he covered his mouth with his elbow, a relic of zendo decorum, where you cough into your sleeve to preserve both the silence in the zendo and, if you are ill, the health of those near you. But soon the coughing took over. It wasn't the kind of cough you could cover. It was a sputtering, full-body spasm.

Smoke inhalation causes more deaths from fires than burns do. In the most serious cases, the fire sucks up all the available oxygen, leaving none to breathe. But the chemical by-products of fire can also do great damage, interfering with respiration at the cellular level. Too much carbon monoxide, a toxic gas released during incomplete combustion, can cause loss of consciousness and death. Hydrogen cyanide is another gas often found at poisonous levels in firefighters and civilians who have succumbed to smoke inhalation. Though typically of more concern to structural—as opposed to wildland—firefighters, hydrogen cyanide exposure can cause fatal respiratory arrest.