Fire Monks (8 page)

Find out for yourself, Suzuki Roshi had told his students at Tassajara when they were trying to figure out what an American Zen monastery would look like—a messy, confusing, yet exciting process. The mind of a beginner is as open and receptive as a tilled field in spring. The mind of a beginner doesn't know. It assumes nothing; it tests everything. It asks of all it encounters: Is that so? In this business of wildfire, all of Tassajara's residents were novices, feeling their way in the dark.

Midday on June 26, Chris Slymon sat down at the computer in
Jamesburg to post an update on
Sitting with Fire
, the blog he'd started the prior afternoon when a few dozen Tassajara evacuees had arrived in Jamesburg.

Stunned and ravenous, they had unloaded boxes of fruit, cheese, loaves of bread, and various spreads for lunch, having raided the walk-in refrigerator and dry goods storage at Tassajara before leaving. (There were plenty of extra supplies since the Tassajara kitchen had been prepared to feed close to fifty that night.) After lunch, Jane Hirshfield had hugged Leslie good-bye and slipped away before the start of a four-hour meeting in which the evacuees sorted out the complicated logistics of where each and every person would go—and the animals. The evacuation caravan had included the monastery dog and a couple of cats.

Residents accustomed to greeting one another with a bow embraced when the meeting ended, uncertain whether they'd meet again. Then they reshuffled themselves into cars, preparing to scatter in all directions. Some were relieved to leave the fire zone, while others felt profound disorientation and distress, a state of shock at the quick turn of events.

They had spent thirty-six extraordinary hours together, engaged in the task of preparing for the fire, yet individual responses to the sudden upheaval of the evacuation varied. While Zen holds that the construct of a “self” is actually empty, because like everything else it is always changing, people inevitably bring their own perspectives to the circumstances they encounter. As 1977 Tassajara fire marshal Ted Marshall told me: “You show up with your own life experience.”

One summer resident's friends had thrown her a “monkette” party when she left behind a lucrative career in video production in Austin, Texas, to dive into practice at Tassajara. Heading out of the smoky valley only three weeks after she'd arrived there, she had no idea what she'd do next. “I'd just left my whole life,” she told me.

The student whose San Francisco apartment had burned down returned to a temporary home at City Center, with six small boxes containing his entire worldly possessions and fresh memories of the sounds of his neighbor banging around in the hallway, attempting to escape the burning building. He felt helpless, useless, and resolved to get back in to Tassajara as soon as he could.

For Judith Randall, a member of the senior staff who hadn't been asked to stay, the time at Jamesburg was the hardest part. As the zendo manager, or
ino,
the fifty-nine-year-old priest had sat morning and evening zazen while most residents worked outside. Sometimes she was the only one in the meditation hall. She had carefully removed ritual objects, statues, scrolls, and portraits from the zendo, founder's hall, and abbot's cabin. Randall had coordinated the morning's evacuation at Tassajara, directing residents to their assigned cars, then she'd purposely driven the last car out with only one passenger so that she could pick up the stranded if there were any breakdowns on the road. It wasn't until she arrived at Jamesburg and was confronted with the question of where she wanted to go that the full weight of the evacuation had hit her. She couldn't think. Eventually she drove to San Francisco to be near her teacher, taking a van full of evacuees.

 

 

On
Sitting with Fire,
there were pictures, links to official fire
reports, satellite images, Google Earth maps of fire activity—a wealth of information for anyone curious about what was happening at Tassajara. “The short story is that Tassajara is currently threatened by two wildfires,” read Slymon's first post, published the afternoon of the resident evacuation. The Indians fire did not seem to be moving their way, but the Basin Complex fire continued to mount a direct threat, burning south and east toward Tassajara.

Which meant it was also burning toward Jamesburg. The day after the resident evacuation, Jamesburg was put under an “advisory” evacuation. This first of three alert levels warns residents to prepare for possible evacuation. The next, “voluntary,” is a more forceful recommendation to leave. The final level is “mandatory.” Residents are told to evacuate immediately—as Tassajara was on June 25. Though California residents cannot legally be forced to leave, even in a mandatory evacuation, the language conveys a sense of urgency and authority to strongly encourage them to do so.

The Basin Complex fire was under what is called “unified command” within the ICS, which meant that fire management decisions, while ultimately the responsibility of the incident commander, included input from the USFS, the Monterey County Sheriff's Office, and CAL FIRE, the state firefighting agency. From June 23 to 25, the twice-daily status summaries from the incident management team were consistent, predicting a threat to Tassajara in the next twelve-hour period and fire spread toward Tassajara Road thereafter. The Basin Complex fire's acreage continued to increase—20,600 acres had burned by the evening of June 25. Containment estimates hovered at a mere 3 percent. Incident Commander (IC) Mike Dietrich had his hands full in Big Sur, where sixteen homes had just been lost.

On June 26, IC Dietrich told a reporter for KAZU, an NPR affiliate in Monterey: “This country is straight up and down and brushy and very unsafe.” Since it was likely that the Indians and the Basin Complex fires would also merge and become one fire, Dietrich explained, “that's a strategy that we're looking at.” The “strategy” under consideration seemed to be: Do nothing and let the fire dictate its course. “There's no good place in the middle of the wilderness to fight the fires,” IC Dietrich said. In 1977, the Marble Cone fire had spread through the Ventana despite significant efforts to contain it. This time, Dietrich and his cohorts on the incident management team planned to let the fire burn inside a big box drawn by the old 1977 “dozer lines”—wide firebreaks cut by bulldozers.

Thirty-one years after the Marble Cone fire, the incident commander on the Basin Complex fire invoked that fire as a strategic model for how to fight this one. Indeed, there were many similarities. Like the Basin Complex fire, the Marble Cone fire was lightning ignited. It was an aggregated fire—the result of several smaller fires that burned together. At 178,000 acres burned, it was the biggest fire the state of California had ever seen. Estimates of the combined acreage for the 2008 Basin Complex and Indians fires were approaching that record figure.

For Tassajara residents, too, the 1977 Marble Cone fire provided a gauge for what to expect. One of the first things David had done after the lightning strikes was to read the Marble Cone fire log. Tassajara had been ordered to evacuate in 1977 as well. After initially following those orders, residents had made covert trips into Tassajara at night. One group had even driven through a roadblock while some students distracted the officers posted there. A couple of days after being told by the USFS not to expect help, hotshots—the gritty elite of firefighting—had arrived at Tassajara.

Hotshots hike extreme terrain on foot, carrying thirty-five-pound packs, chainsaws, and other tools to do the backbreaking work of digging a trough of bare earth to catch flames and stop their spread through fine surface fuels like grasses, twigs, pine needles, and leaf litter. They also light backfires to consume fuels and create a safety zone—an area that has burned won't burn again.

At Tassajara, when the main fire was still off in the distance, the hotshots lit the hill behind the monastery, across the creek. They disappeared either up- or downstream to continue their work as a crew of residents extinguished spot fires from drifting embers inside Tassajara. Once that large area had burned, there was less chance of a firestorm in the canyon, and a group of residents returned to prepare for the main fire's arrival. Jane and Leslie rode in the last vehicle to return to Tassajara from Jamesburg before fire closed the road.

For two weeks in 1977, Zen students cut firelines and set sprinklers on the roofs of the central buildings. From time to time a fire crew arrived, took baths, ate some of that truckload of peaches, then hiked upstream. When the Marble Cone fire finally burst into the canyon over Flag Rock one August afternoon after several weeks of lingering nearby, a small fire crew was at Tassajara. The crew boss invited then abbot Richard Baker to do the honors of igniting a backburn on the slope across from the stone office. The monks who worked alongside firefighters to defend Tassajara became known as the Tassajara “cool shots.”

Reading the Marble Cone log in 2008 gave David reason to believe that help was coming, eventually. The record also provided a glimpse of what to expect after a fire passed through—as well as what couldn't be expected but could happen anyway. At the end of August 1977, the skies above Tassajara were still smoky and spitting ash. That fall and winter, hundred-year rains streamed down the charred watershed and flooded Tassajara. The creek turned chocolate brown and swelled several feet. Some twenty-five hundred sandbags were placed around buildings, and a few hundred creekside trees were felled to prevent damming. Tassajara Road, which had been closed for days during the fire's passage, washed out in six places. Food and supplies had to be ferried across impassable areas on garden carts and wheelbarrows. The students worked through the winter and spring practice periods to protect Tassajara from the post-fire floods. Then, on the final day of the spring 1978 practice period, the zendo—the original zendo
,
the one that was a bar before it was a meditation hall—burned to the ground.

The fire started in the middle of a ceremony in which the abbot answers a question about the teachings from each member of the sangha. Both questions and answers indicate understanding. Within a few minutes, fire engulfed the building where Suzuki Roshi had given his talks, seated in front of the old fireplace converted into an altar; where before that, whiskey had warmed the bellies of hunters; where even before that, an Esselen Indian might have made a meal of acorn mush over a campfire.

A monk visiting from Japan tried to dash back into the burning building to save the two-thousand-year-old stone Gandharan Buddha statue on the altar, probably smuggled on a donkey cart from inside the borders of present-day Pakistan or Afghanistan before Zen Center purchased it from an American art dealer. “First I stopped him,” Jane told me. “Then I changed my mind. We walked back in together and half the ceiling was burning, so I pulled him out again.” The next day, the two sat staring at the remains of the zendo. “I'm sorry I didn't let you go in at the beginning to get the Buddha,” Jane said to the Japanese monk.

The monk looked at her, then pointed at the old altar. “Buddha,” he said. He pointed at the ashes: “Buddha.” Then he pointed at Jane. “Buddha,” he said again.

Because of problems with the emergency water pump after the floods that followed the Marble Cone fire, the resident fire crew at Tassajara in the spring of 1978 wasn't able to get water on the zendo fire in time. They'd saved Tassajara from a wildfire only to lose its most significant building the following spring, probably because of a faulty pilot light on a propane gas refrigerator. No one was injured, yet nothing was left of the zendo but fragments of stone walls. Drums and bells melted in the flames. The Gandharan Buddha toppled from the altar. Some who were at Tassajara at the time, like resident fire crew head Ted Marshall, recalled that the Buddha shattered into pieces, none larger than a teacup. But Roger Broussal, the restorer who worked on the statue at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, told me it had split into several large chunks, and pieces of schist had stripped away “in layers or sheets, almost like shale.”

After the new zendo was built, the Buddha was placed on the altar, on a pillow with red and gold accents, where he has sat for three decades. Two feet tall, with a chiseled, slender torso, he's a fit Buddha, not rotund or androgynous. His eyes are half-lidded, the left eye set slightly higher than the other by the original sculptor's hands. Aside from chips in his right ear and knee—some pieces were lost forever in the zendo's ashes—there is little evidence of the damage. His lips press together in a hint of a smile.

 

 

Within twenty-four hours of the resident evacuation on June 25,
linked lengths of PVC pipe zigzagged across the dining room roof at Tassajara in a white, angular web. In 1977, David had learned, students used garden hoses, sprinklers, and blankets to keep the roofs wet. This time they constructed something more complex yet elegant. When they turned on the jury-rigged sprinkler system for the first time and it worked, drawing water through the standpipe system from the twenty-thousand-gallon spring-fed water tank up the road and showering it over the rooftops, plant manager Graham smiled and said, “Ah, Dharma Rain.”

When CAL FIRE captain Stuart Carlson arrived that afternoon, he admired what Tassajara's residents had already accomplished—the rooftop sprinklers, the firelines, the cleared ground around the solar panels and cabins. He'd been headed to the Sierra Nevada mountains for a weeklong backpacking trip when he got a call asking him to come to Tassajara to advise the residents and help them prepare for the fire. “I'm on my way,” he said. He brought his eighteen-year-old son with him.