Fire Monks (32 page)

Once her own tears stopped, Jane Hirshfield posted an e-mail from a friend whose construction crew had built many of Tassajara's newer buildings, announcing that Steve Stücky “and the boys” had stood their ground. She didn't think to point out that there was a woman among those boys. In the moment,
who
hardly mattered.

When leaving Tassajara with most of the students at the end of June, Jane had tried to quietly convey to Mako and Graham that they were about to be blessed with the kind of experience that sears itself into one's bones, and also, that it would be fun. Months later, when I interviewed Jane, the mention of Mako's name stirred up emotion. “There's something about seeing another person do, thirty years later, what I once did,” Jane said. “It made very real the cyclical nature of time. It's a nonrepeatable universe, as Baker Roshi used to say, yet every thirty years the mountains will burn.”

When the 1977 fire was over, Jane told me, it was like “sitting in the middle of a dying-down bonfire. Everywhere you look there's a heart of a tree glowing red, especially at night.” It was a landscape humans didn't usually get to see.

 

 

A tangle of blackened, rust-red-barked manzanitas grew out of an
ash beach. An upturned, forgotten broom hung on the side of the compost shed, bristles singed off, a scorched halo on the wall behind it. Around six p.m., leaving the flats, Mako spotted a helicopter flying low over Tassajara—the first she'd seen all day. The aircraft flashed a spotlight at her. She couldn't see the faces of the pilot or passengers or read the markings, but she had the impression that whoever was up there, hovering overhead, was relieved to see her alive and walking around. She wondered if maybe it was branch director Jack Froggatt and gave a reassuring wave.

In the stone office, Mako took off her fire suit, carefully extracted her throbbing feet from her boots, and put on tennis shoes. She left on her hard hat and the bandanna around her neck. Her clothes were soaked, as if she'd been walking through a light rain for hours. Dōgen compared enlightenment to walking through fog: You could get wet without even realizing it. She'd gotten wet without realizing it under the fire gear. The dampness had kept her cool. As she set out walking downcreek, she actually felt chilled.

Outside of the intact, unlikely green of the central area, everywhere she looked was shorn down to bare skin. Brown, withered leaves clung to the surviving trees, their black bark blistered and serrated. Some wore burn skirts at the base of their trunks. Some had shed large branches or snapped and fallen over completely. Foot trails, suddenly exposed, meandered forlornly across the bare earth. Rocks lay everywhere in the road, loose dirt heaped at the base of ravines. Smoke trails emanated from smoldering piles of leaf and wood debris. Water spurted from burned pipes. Whatever didn't glow with embers was gray, brown, black, marbled with ash.

Deck chairs, dusted gray, were still arranged around the pool, a number of them twisted by flames, surrounded by a confetti of rocks. Tables had been crushed, their plastic tops misshapen by the fire's heat. The vertical posts of the pool bathroom still stood, pitted and charred, framing the air, but the birdhouse cabin on the hill had completely collapsed, a heap of still-warm rubble. The Cabarga Creek bed seemed to have widened, scraped clean of grasses and ferns. The hillsides, stripped of vegetation, seemed even more vertical. In the fire's twilight, a dusky haze hung over Tassajara.

Mako wanted to wander farther but asked everyone over the radio to meet in the central area at seven o'clock. The five gathered at the work circle below the burned husk of the birdhouse. Mako focused her camera on her firefighting companions, propped the Panasonic on the zendo steps, set the camera's timer, then jogged over to stand between Graham and David. She threw one arm around David's shoulder and tucked the other around her partner's waist.

In the photo, Graham appears to be saying something or breathing out an exhausted sigh. His jumpsuit is smeared with soot. A hose threads across the grass in front of the group and trails through Colin's boots, out of the frame. They're all wearing bandannas in the same triangular configuration around their necks. Every bandanna is a slightly different color, just as each of the five experienced the fire from a slightly different perspective. Each one of them would tell a different story.

The photo was eventually posted on Flickr with a caption: “The Five Tassajara Fire Monks.” Later, the phrase would be abbreviated to the “Tassajara Five,” but not by the five themselves. “We were just a group of people in a situation,” Colin told me months later. Countless beings had contributed to this moment's unfolding, too many to enumerate or even to see. There are five monks in the picture, but so much that supported them is outside the frame. As with any story, there's always something cropped out of our perception, some side we can't see.

At seven thirty p.m., the five finally ate a celebratory meal of left
overs: baba ghanoush, pita bread, tabouleh, and Gatorade. They reviewed the events of the day, filling one another in and trading stories.

Later that evening, Mako went to the bathhouse and had the women's side to herself, a first. The quarter moon, normally suspended over the Overlook ridge on a lattice of stars, was rubbed out by smoke. The valley seemed uncommonly still—as if, as Jane described it, every living thing held its breath.

Graham called his parents in Toronto to report that he was fine and that they'd lost only a few structures. “Just to hear that he was there and alive, I was a babbling nutcase at that point,” said Joanne later, recalling her relief. The abbot made some calls, too, then he lay down in his cabin and, within moments, fell asleep.

David and Colin had volunteered for the first patrol shift, from eight p.m. until midnight, to watch for flare-ups and refuel the pumps. “Various spot fires continue to burn or reignite throughout the night, and burning logs, branches, and pinecones tumble down the mountainsides, often casting sparks in their wake,” wrote David later in his public account of the day of the fire. When we talked, he described wandering the devastated landscape at night, dousing the glowing remains of spot fires with water until he was alone again in the darkness, then stumbling upon yet another smoldering pile or tree stump, smoke rising in the beam of his headlamp. “It was nothing compared to the sight of fire rolling down the mountainsides from all directions,” David told me, “but it was eerie. The night was filled with the sound of crackling, creeping, stillgasping fires and falling rocks”—and the steadfast murmur of the creek.

During that first evening patrol, a flaming tree trunk rolled down below the Overlook Trail, directly across the creek from the guest dining room. David climbed onto the dining room roof to hose it down, but the fire never completely extinguished. It smoldered quietly for days. They'd all seen how persistent fire could be, equaled only by the persistence of water. Dharma Rain hissed steadily, reassuringly, on the rooftops. Above the tops of the mountains, the sky still glowed, reflecting fire in the distance, fire not yet burned out. But the high-vigilance atmosphere of the afternoon had waned. The worst, it seemed, was over.

They wouldn't know until the following morning, when the incident management team released its daily status report, that the Basin Complex fire had spread nine thousand acres on July 10—more than fourteen square miles—with Tassajara right in the middle. A few more days would drift by before an article ran in the
Monterey Herald
describing the fire on Tassajara Road, witnessed by a crew stationed there on July 10: “The unit was forced to pull back before noon . . . because the fire had kicked up substantially, expelling a plume so large that at one point it obscured the midday sun. As an airtanker flew toward the massive smoke, it looked as small as a sparrow flying toward Niagara Falls.”

 

 

Friday, July 11, the day after the fire, felt to the five like the day
after a marathon. “I was so dehydrated, I don't think I peed for a couple of days,” Colin told me. The smoke gave them headaches. The by-products of exertion and adrenaline pooled in their muscles, sapping their energy. They were used to going without sleep and enduring pain during long stretches of meditation, but this was different. “It was something deeper in the bones than normal sleep deprivation that can be cured by a good night or two of rest,” Mako said later. But the road was closed. The mountains around them smoldered. Despite their exhaustion, they needed to stay active and alert.

Abbot Steve's dawn patrol shift doubled as a post-fire inspection. A few buildings would need to be entirely replaced: the pool bathroom, the woodshed at the flats, and the birdhouse cabin, probably the compost shed, too. Many structures and some of Tassajara's infrastructure would need repairs: sections of fence at the bathhouse, front gate, and garden, some redwood decking at the pool, wooden steps at the yurt and the trail to the solar array, the lumber truck windshield, the radio phone, and the spring box—the source of Tassajara's drinking water.

He walked from one point to another, upcreek and then downcreek again, as if making his usual incense offerings at several altars before entering the zendo, but each place, each patch of ground, was now an altar.

The center of Tassajara was untouched. The grass glistened a deep green on the stone office lawn. The wisteria-draped trellis shaded the gravel walkway, as it has for decades. A cluster of tall sycamores fanned the bocce ball court. The creek continued to flow down the length of Tassajara, continuous, selfless, ever-present. If you blocked out the periphery and the hoses strewn about, you could imagine there hadn't been any fire. But lift your eyes a little and you saw the blackened hearth the fire had made of the mountains, the remains of the buildings the fire had consumed. Life and death, right next to each other, braided together, as they always are.

That morning while Abbot Steve was on patrol, Mako ventured out with her camera again. Near the bathhouse, she found a dead Steller's jay, eyeless, beak tucked in a wing, a shock of blue feathers against the dirt. Out past the flats, she discovered a dead buck, stiff on his side, twig-thin legs splayed, fur singed from the lower half of his belly. Its carcass lay just feet away from an old children's playground, where a metal swing stood, untouched by the fire. Many of the animals, except these unfortunate ones, had fled before the fire. Shortly after, they reappeared. Foxes and rabbits—not commonly seen in the valley or just ordinarily hidden in the brush—trotted and hopped in plain view. Squirrels scurried across rocks. Lizards sunned themselves on the fire hoses.

Abbot Steve continued his patrol past the yurt toward the Suzuki Roshi memorial, a pilgrimage he makes each time he arrives at Tassajara. How curious it was to see how the fire had touched some places and not others. They'd taken down and stored the wooden post that usually marked the place where some of Suzuki Roshi's ashes rested, beneath a large white-veined stone from the creek, but they'd left the markers for Katagiri Roshi, who had helped guide the practice of Zen in the West, and Trudi Dixon, the student who had painstakingly edited the lectures for
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
. In a field of ashes, the wooden markers stood upright, though Katagiri's was charred at the base.

Later that morning, Abbot Steve and the others put on their priest robes. They held a service in the zendo to express their gratitude. There were just enough of them to fill the positions—one to ring the bronze bell and one to strike the hollow wooden drum shaped like a fish, one to lead the chanting, one to be the
doshi,
or lead priest, and one to be the doshi's attendant. The Buddha was still buried in the bocce ball court. They bowed to an empty altar and dedicated their chanting to everyone and everything that had supported them and Tassajara, including fire.

 

 

Around one o'clock that afternoon, Abbot Steve was walking back
to the abbot's cabin for a short nap after lunch when he heard a crackling sound coming from the shop area. A moment later, the air horn shrieked. The woodshed across from the shop had burst into flame. Colin had called it out on the radio first and reached for the air horn when he got no response. Abbot Steve ran to help on weary legs.

They'd thought the fire was over. The standpipes weren't charged. The pumps weren't on. And the woodshed fire roared across from the shop, flames flickering twenty feet high. Several overhanging trees had caught a spark. Their burning branches swayed toward the shop and its flammable contents.

They tried opening the hoses connected to the nearest standpipe, but gravity worked against them. The water pressure was half what it would be with the pumps running. Colin and Graham wrestled with the Mark 3 again so they could charge the hose lines directly from the creek, while David smothered spot fires just a few feet away from the propane tanks with fire extinguishers. But by the time Colin and Graham got the pump started, they could only soak the woodshed ruins.