Fire Monks (30 page)

It had been hard to stay put when the fire first entered Tassajara, listening to Steve shout to Mako and Graham to get down from the hill cabins. What if there was a medical emergency? What if someone broke an ankle, passed out, or was burned? The shop was a one-thousand-square-foot matchbox. He couldn't leave it. Yet he knew he would if one of his friends called out in distress.

 

 

After his coughing fit at the bathhouse subsided, Graham had
walked to the opposite end of Tassajara to top off the pumps. He opened the tank on the permanent pool pump and peered inside. Simple enough, but quite dangerous. It's risky to fuel a running pump even when the forest all around isn't on fire. One little lapse of attention, a splash of gas on the exhaust manifold, and you could have a flash fire on your hands.

David had told Graham that things were quiet down past the pool for the moment, so when Graham finished filling the pool pump and the portable Mark 3 at the creek, he headed back upstream, toward central Tassajara. On his way to the pool, Graham had stopped to put out some burning fence posts in the garden. He wanted to make sure they were still out. But in the minutes it had taken him to tend to the pumps, the pool bathroom had burst into flames.

The bathroom structure itself wasn't a high priority. He could see that it probably wasn't possible to save it. But the building was separated from a nearby two-story wooden yurt cabin, one of Tassajara's newer structures, by just a few feet of ground and a fence. And the fence was on fire. It wasn't hard to imagine flames enveloping the yurt cabin, traveling across the path on overarching tree branches to a redwood cabin, then to an adjacent cabin in a domino effect. The bathroom fire could become the runaway flame that brought down all of Tassajara. Graham grabbed a nearby hose and opened the line, soaking the sides of the yurt and the fence, kicking down burning boards, and backing away at the first sign that the smoke was starting to get to him.

Chlorine and muriatic acid for cleaning the fifty-thousand-gallon pool—unused for weeks by now, littered with soot—were stored on shelves outside the nearby changing room, about eight feet from the bathroom. If mixed, these chemicals create something like mustard gas, the toxic brew that burned the eyes, skin, and lungs of World War I soldiers, sometimes fatally.

But Graham didn't know this. Unaware of the danger, he stayed at the pool bathroom until he was sure the fence was out and the yurt cabin safe. Then he walked past the garden again. The fire had tried to penetrate it, without much success. A few vertical posts in the deer fence were burning, but there wasn't much available fuel. Cosmos and lilies bloomed in the beds, a nodding swath of soft-petaled, unlikely pinks and reds amid Tassajara's blackand-brown palette. The grass pathways shimmered a deep green from all the extra watering. Graham watered the beds again, just to be safe. Dry mulch could still catch a spark.

 

 

Tassajara's two yurts sit on theperiphery,at opposite ends of the
grounds. That Mako happened to be fighting fire at one while Graham defended the other was a coincidence, but the image accurately reflects the intimate yet independent nature of their relationship. Mako wasn't worried about Graham, even though the last time she'd seen him he'd been choking on smoke, any more than she was worried about herself. There wasn't time to dwell on anything other than the task at hand. Nearly an hour after she'd first arrived at the burning tent yurt, that task was to move on. Abbot Steve had left the area. Mako didn't see smoke spirals or flames around the canvas yurt anymore. Everything was drenched, including her, and subdued. The air felt cool and damp, more like November than July. She decided to venture out to the flats, where she heard popping fire sounds.

The cabin where she and Graham ordinarily lived appeared untouched, still cloaked in Firezat wrap. Where the ground had burned around it, the earth was a dingy black, silvered with ashes. Various brush piles burned in isolated fires, as if small incendiary bombs had dropped from the air. The wood storage and compost sheds shimmered and smoked. Flames flickered from the stacks of cut wood.

Mako had to choose which fire to try to put out. But first she needed a hose. A heap of them lay scattered about, streaked with char marks. They'd been abandoned when Stuart Carlson had called off the activation the day before. The five who'd returned to Tassajara had decided to leave the hoses out, so they'd be ready for use if the fire arrived over the hogback. They hadn't thought about the possibility that no one would be present when the fire came through there or that the hoses themselves could burn.

Many of the plastic nozzles had melted. Several hose lines, heavy with water, crisscrossed. She planted her feet and summoned her strength to heave the hoses apart. She managed to free one unburned line from the heap, charged it with water from the standpipe, and opened the hose on the compost shed. Water sputtered out the nozzle's sides, wetting Mako more than the fire.

There was barely any pressure in the line. While flames licked the roof of the compost shed and darted out its open windows—the already hot pile of decomposing organic matter inside had caught fire—Mako disconnected the ruined nozzle and tried in vain to find a usable one. She grabbed an extinguisher attached to the side of the shed, pulled the pin, and sprayed it back and forth on one burning corner as she'd practiced when she first became a member of Tassajara's regular fire crew. The flames subsided under a snow of retardant, then popped right back up again. She tried a second extinguisher. The fire disappeared for a few seconds and then—
whoosh!
—picked right back up where it had left off.

The flames flickering across the roof of the shed reached farther, faster. The fire was heating up. And every nozzle she picked up seemed to have been kissed by a blowtorch.

If she'd wondered about saving the tent yurt, the same question applied to the compost shed. For as long as she could remember, people had said that it needed to be rebuilt. Should she just let it burn? But that didn't feel right. Someone would have to rebuild it, sooner rather than later, and they were all going to have enough to do after this fire.

“High things in high places, low things in low places,” wrote Dōgen in
Instructions for the Zen Cook
—good, practical advice: You don't put a heavy pot on a high shelf that you can reach only on your tiptoes. But ultimately, Zen holds that there actually are no high and low places. Such hierarchies exist only in our minds, in the air of our opinions. To reinforce this teaching, the head student for a practice period at Tassajara, an honored position that marks the transition from student to teacher, is asked not only to give lectures, but also to clean toilets and turn compost.

Standing in front of the burning shed, not long before she would become head student herself, Mako recognized how generously the structure had served them, taking in heaps of discarded peach pits, eggshells, coffee grounds. She wanted to make an effort to save it. She simply needed to find a nozzle that worked, a hose that wasn't burned, and hope for decent water pressure.

She got on her walkie-talkie: “I need a nozzle out at the flats!”

David arrived several minutes later with a replacement nozzle he'd unscrewed from a hose at the bathhouse. But he couldn't solve Mako's pressure problems. The flats area is the highest ground in the Tassajara valley, requiring an uphill slog through the pipes for the water supply. They'd have to get a Mark 3 pump out there if they wanted to boost the flow. David called Graham on his walkie-talkie to see if he could fix the water pressure problem. When Graham didn't respond, David went looking for him and found him at the smoldering pool bathroom ruins.

While Abbot Steve, who'd arrived at the flats shortly after David, tried again to sort out hoses, Mako did what she could with what she had at that moment, one unburned hose and one good nozzle. She screwed on the new nozzle and leveled a few burning debris piles with the toe of her boot, then doused them with the hose. She liked the sizzling sound the embers made when the water hit them. Even when the piles burst into flame again, she found the sound distinctly satisfying.

The sound of fire meeting water.

 

 

While Mako, David, and Abbot Steve were out at the flats and
Graham dealt with the burning pool bathroom, fire slipped through the temple gate, a traditional Japanese-style gate with a roof. Colin attacked it for a while with a dry chemical fire extinguisher, but moments after he thought he'd put it out, the gate blazed again. Rocks and flaming clumps of roots and branches still tumbled down the hillside above the shop. The hoses on hand wouldn't reach the gate. Still hesitant to leave the shop for long, he radioed the others, “The temple gate is on fire!”

Abbot Steve arrived first, with his shovel. He'd left Mako at the flats after the compost shed fire was under control and walked to the upper lot, where guests parked. They'd left the lumber truck there the night before. Too late. A falling rock had left a spider web-shaped fracture on the Ford's windshield. He'd moved the vehicle into the center of the lot, then Colin had called for help.

Abbot Steve had stood at the gate many times for the opening and closing of the monastery, first as a student and then, more recently, presiding. Now he hacked at it with his shovel. Soon, David arrived with a couple of fire extinguishers. While he smothered the fire, Abbot Steve wrangled hoses again, attaching one line to another so that the length would reach from one of the shop area's two standpipes to the gate. When pine needle duff on the gate roof ignited, he was there with the hose to stop the spread.

Once the gate fire was out, David walked downcreek again, patrolling the large area between the Cabarga Creek bridge and student housing. But Abbot Steve stayed in the shop area manning a hose, helping Colin watch for flaming debris tumbling down from Flag Rock, the kind that had probably started the pool bathroom fire. The abbot's instincts told him to stay close. The zendo, the abbot's cabin, and the founder's hall were all nearby, directly under the shower of embers from Flag Rock, and only the backsides of the abbot's cabin and founder's hall were wrapped.

The two priests listened, and when they heard the telltale sound of a chunk of burning wood careening downhill, they followed the source of the noise and hit it with water. They basically watered the entire slope, over and over and over, grateful for the endless supply the pumps drew from Tassajara Creek. Like any vigil, it was tiring. Dangerous enough that you have to stay awake and alert, but not so dramatic that you are oblivious to the fact that you are hungry, thirsty, and impossibly tired.

Colin had long ago drained his water bottle. During a quiet stretch, when it seemed that maybe it would be safe to turn their eyes away from the burning mountain for a moment, he turned to Abbot Steve.

“I need a drink. There's got to be some Gatorade around.”

“That sounds pretty good.” Being abbot was a round-the-clock job. But this was the hardest work Abbot Steve had ever done. Even when he was young and working on the farm, “from can see to can't see,” as they say, it was never as intense, as continuous, as this. He hadn't been off his feet, had anything to eat, or taken a drink for hours. The fire wasn't finished, but they couldn't go on like this for much longer without giving their bodies some sustenance.

Colin pressed the talk button on his radio: “This is Colin. David, we could use some Gatorade up here at the shop. Over.”

After a brief silence, a voice replied: “Copy. This is Mako. The Gatorade's on fire. Over.”

Colin and Abbot Steve looked at each other, unsure what to make of the response.

“Copy. Um, we need some Gatorade here. To drink. Over,” Colin clarified.

“Copy. There's a case of it burning out here at the flats. Over.”

Someone had carried out a case of Gatorade before the activation the prior afternoon. It had been left by the fence in front of the massage gazebo, and the plastic bottles were actually burning around the liquid inside.

Mako put out the Gatorade fire, then salvaged an undamaged bottle from the pile and drank it.

Eventually Colin and Abbot Steve got their Gatorade, too. Theirs was actually cold, as David had fetched some from the walk-in and delivered it.

 

 

Not long after their break, around four p.m., Colin saw fire on the
slope above the gatehouse. At first he thought it was just a torching shrub. Within seconds, he realized that it was in fact the birdhouse cabin, completely engulfed in flames, its silver Firezat wrap flapping in molten sheets. He announced it to the others, but just a few moments later, he radioed again: “The birdhouse is toast.”

Of all the cabins that could have burned, why this one, relatively new, with its private deck and penthouse view of Tassajara?

On his way back from the garden when he heard Colin's announcement, Graham ran to the work circle, picked up a hose line, and opened it on the birdhouse.

“It's toast, Graham!” shouted Colin, not understanding why Graham was making the effort. It was already just a skeleton of blackened posts, well past saving.

“I wasn't trying to save it,” Graham told me later. It was the big oak tree growing next to the cabin that he wanted to spare, with a plaque nestled in a fork at the base of its trunk:

But it's not quite right to say the oak grew next to the birdhouse; the cabin practically perched in the old tree's expansive branches—thus the cabin's name. Tree and cabin seemed to be holding each other in place on the steep hillside.