Fire Monks (9 page)

Stuart had been coming to Tassajara for years to give first-aid training and assist in fire safety evaluations and drills. He first arrived as a Zen student in 1987—but his connection to meditative practices predated that. When he was growing up, Stuart was introduced to meditation by his godmother, a member of the Franciscan order, and later to Zen by a brief encounter in the San Bernardino National Forest in the 1970s with poet and natural world spokesman Gary Snyder, who once worked as a fire lookout. Snyder read his poem “Control Burn”—“Fire is the old story. / I would like, /with a sense of helpful order, / with respect for laws / of nature / to help my land / with a burn, a hot clean / burn”—and Stuart's ears pricked up.

Having grown up in rural Santa Cruz County, he'd been in the woods his whole life. His first and favorite family dog was a coyote his father had nursed back to health from a gunshot wound. He spent summers at Pico Blanco Boy Scout Camp near Big Sur, racking up merit badges. When Governor Jerry Brown created the California Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1976, Stuart was among the first group hired. He wanted to “heal” the forest. He worked at Pico Blanco on a CCC crew during the 1977 Marble Cone fire.

“My poor mom got a house full of Vikings,” the fifty-three-year-old youngest of three boys told me when we talked at Tassajara in June 2009. He'd returned to Tassajara the summer after the fire to give his annual first-aid training. A drizzle had turned into a downpour and we'd sought shelter in the student eating area. The kitchen crew chopped vegetables nearby at two long tables.

“We were all surfers, wandering around with dirty bare feet on her white carpets,” Stuart recalled with a sympathetic laugh. Both of his parents were activists, though his father's politics were considerably more radical than his mother's. His father was an animator at the Walt Disney Studios and a founding member of the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Guild during the House Un-American Activities Committee era. From his father, whom he described as “a hard-core labor man and true conservationist in the Teddy Roosevelt mode,” Stuart inherited the desire to take care of others, even at risk to himself.

In 1984, a few years after signing up as a seasonal firefighter with the California Department of Forestry (CDF), now known as CAL FIRE, Stuart found out his girlfriend was pregnant. He applied for a permanent position for financial stability but, like many firefighters, got hooked by the “esprit de corps and feeling of family” as well as the sense of being useful to his community. He was promoted to captain in the early 1990s. As station captain at Soquel Station, near Santa Cruz, Stuart oversees a four-person engine crew. He's responsible for the upkeep of equipment, vehicles, and the station itself, budget management, and the training and supervision of firefighters.

“I'm hard on them at first,” Stuart told me. “It's easier to be a jerk and then a nice guy later on.” It's not so easy to imagine Stuart playing tough. He's gregarious, with a warm, tenderhearted demeanor. He has soft eyes, wavy hair, a flirtatious smile, and a quick, slightly nervous laugh. He studied traditional Japanese karate for years but is more surfer than black belt, agreeable and amiable by nature.

Under the surface, though, there's the pain Stuart has seen over a firefighting career that's spanned thirty years. The worst are the tragedies close to home, the people he knows—like the local teacher whose rayon nightgown brushed against a gas burner on her kitchen stove and burst into flame. “Even her hair burned off her head,” recalled Stuart, who was first on the scene.

Stuart's had a few close calls himself during his career, but they weren't on his mind when he showed up at Tassajara with his son—and plans for his girlfriend to join him over the weekend. He wasn't going there in any official capacity. “The Forest owned the fire,” he told me.

The Forest—the Los Padres National Forest and the USFS—“owned” the fire because it was on their land. Stuart works for CAL FIRE, and even though the agencies cooperate on fires in mutual aid agreements, Stuart readily admitted that the USFS and CAL FIRE don't always get along. In part, the friction is a result of a difference in mission, especially when it comes to structure protection. “The Forest Service is a land management agency, a resource management agency. We're a resource protection agency. We're a fire department. Structure protection is what we do.”

That might mean dashing into a burning building, but it also means preparing structures so they aren't fire hazards in the first place. It means clearing brush so that when a fire moves through, the only fuels available to it aren't anywhere near buildings. Grunt work, most of it. But Stuart knew the work ethic of Zen students. They made his most gung ho firefighters look lazy. Given the prep work that residents had done already and the creek's constant water supply, they were in a good position to make a stand and defend Tassajara. It would take only an engine or two to back up the monks.

Fire season was off to a running start. Three major fires had raged in Stuart's home county of Santa Cruz already, and it was only June. Stuart sensed it was going to be a wild season. After a dinner of squash-and-mushroom casserole, roasted vegetables, and pear crisp that first night at Tassajara, he went to bed early, lulled to sleep by the creek.

 

 

On June 27, the day after Stuart's arrival, sixty-five firefighters
descended into Tassajara to help cut firebreaks. Members of a CDF/CAL FIRE inmate crew from Fenner Canyon, the men worked for a dollar an hour and a day off their sentence for every day worked on a fire.

“Hey, Captain Carlson!” one of them cried out, recognizing Stuart from his days leading a California Youth Authority crew.

Some of the inmate firefighters couldn't scrub the look of bewilderment from their faces. Many had grown up in the inner city and had never seen a landscape anything like this. But it wasn't the first time a prison crew had found themselves at the monastery.

In 1999, when the Kirk Complex fire threatened Tassajara, both inmate and professional crews dispatched to assist the residents were prepared to spend weeks at Tassajara if the road closed. Some staffed the kitchen, helping to turn out meals that featured tofu, or “white Spam,” in lieu of meat. Firefighters helped out with cabin repairs, soaked in the hot plunge at the bathhouse at day's end, and hung their laundry on the line. When zazen instruction was offered to the firefighters, rows of battered leather boots lined the zendo shoe racks.

Subdued by early rain, the 1999 fire never made it to Tassajara. Their last night at the monastery, firefighters moved from their tents into guest rooms. The next morning, as they prepared to pull out and clouds gathered overhead, a crew captain protested, “It wasn't supposed to rain!” Gaelyn Godwin, director of Tassajara at the time, wrote later about the bond that developed between firefighters and monks and caught the media's interest—a bond of mutual kindness, concern, and generosity.

 

 

Another firefighter left in 1999 with these parting words: “If you
want to live here, you'd better learn to live with fire.”

Diane Renshaw, an ecologist who began practicing at Tassajara in 1978 when the mountains were recovering from the Marble Cone burn, agrees. “Fire is one of the primary ecosystem processes that defines the character and beauty of the Santa Lucia Mountains,” Renshaw told me. And you can't talk about fire in California, she added, without talking about chaparral, a plant community that is so widespread, it could well be the unofficial state ecosystem.

In the daily status reports issued by the incident management team, there is a designated space for noting fuels involved. For the Basin Complex, the first word was always “chaparral,” followed by timber and “dead loading” from diseased tan oaks. Covering more than seven million acres in the state,
chaparral
is an umbrella term for a variety of drought-tolerant and fire-adapted plants that thrive in the warm, dry summers and mild, wet winters of Mediterranean climate zones. The chaparral found around Tassajara includes maroon-barked manzanita, chamise, ceanothus, and the distinctive spearshaped blooming yucca, which exists in a profoundly cooperative relationship with a moth that lays its eggs exclusively on the yucca's white petals and, in turn, pollinates the plant.

What chaparral lacks in height—it grows dense and relatively low—it makes up for in depth. The roots of “old growth” chaparral can work their way through crevices in the bedrock to depths of twenty-five feet or more, where cool temperatures and moisture prevail. Different species of chaparral have different methods of post-fire regeneration. Some resprout, some reseed, some send shoots above the soil from underground bulbs. But all chaparral species are energy-efficient, using available resources wisely. After a fire, chaparral shrubs take advantage of increased available light and soil nutrients.

According to Renshaw, the scientific community has learned much about fire since Smokey the Bear started educating the public in 1944. How fire behaves and the role it plays differs from one ecosystem to another. Within one designated land area, such as the Los Padres National Forest, there are many different plant communities. Conifers such as Coulter and ponderosa pines grow primarily at the higher elevations. Thin-barked Santa Lucia firs favor fire-resistant rocky areas and wet canyons. The steep drainages around Tassajara, especially those that face south, are carpeted with chaparral, while the road is fringed with oaks. Down in the riparian corridor of the Tassajara valley, tall sycamores and alders shade the creek. Big-leaf maples thrive on the lower canyon slopes.

Such ecological diversity makes for a complex fire ecosystem—one that includes some species that do not tolerate fire, others that have developed regrowth strategies to cope with it, and some that depend on a wildfire's smoke and heat for their survival. In the plant realm: Whispering bells, golden eardrops, and the radiant orange fire poppy bloom only after fires. In the animal kingdom: “Fire beetles” (
Melanophila
) mate and lay their eggs in the hot wood of burned trees just after the flames have died down.

It's true that living in the Ventana means learning to live with fire. But learning to live with fire is tricky, because there isn't one kind of fire. There are crown fires, slow creeping fires, wind-driven fires, stand-replacement fires, smoldering fires. There are fires in chaparral, fires in pines, fires in oak savannas, fires in buildings made of wood, clay, and stone. There is fire in the center of each human heart. Knowing what kind of fire you live with, a Zen student knows, is an endless, constantly changing, moment-by-moment process.

 

 

Word of the situation at Tassajara had begun to spread, in part
because of media attention. Days after the June 25 evacuation, a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times,
tipped off by an evacuated resident, had driven down the road with a photographer to interview residents. On June 28, a week after the lightning strikes, the published article noted the cooperative efforts of monks and professional crews in the 1977 and 1999 fires and indicated that the residents hoped for a rerun.

The fridge in the courtyard where guests store personal items was full of wine, but the fourteen residents left at Tassajara in late June 2008 went for the Clif Bars and Hansen's cherry soda instead. With the Fenner Canyon inmate crew digging fireline, the residents' work schedule had eased slightly. They'd begun to hold meetings around a block of tables pushed together in the dining room so they could consult fire maps and share ideas.

“The spirit is good and the group very solid,” noted David Haye, who goes by his Dharma name Shundo, in his journal. A forty-four-year-old expat Brit who was previously the fire marshal and work leader at Tassajara, Shundo had left at the beginning of June to be head cook at City Center in San Francisco. He was one of the four who'd arrived at Tassajara to help with fire preparations just as the student evacuation caravan was pulling out on June 25. Among the small group now charged with protecting the monastery, he felt glad to be on the team, if also a bit guilty for the privilege.

It made sense for Shundo to be there. As a former fire marshal, he could show new resident fire marshal Devin Patel the ropes. A cyclist and runner, he knew every hiking trail within a ten-mile radius. And many of the others who'd remained at Tassajara were his peers. Shundo sat his first practice period in 2002 along with David and Mako. Having “come up through the ranks” and been on senior staff together, they shared a strong connection, Shundo told me more than a year after the fire, his English accent softened by years spent abroad.

Typically, every summer day at Tassajara brings new arrivals and departures. During the fire preparations, the number of residents at Tassajara hovered between fourteen and twenty-two. But sometimes the total number of people there, including firefighters and volunteers, fluctuated dramatically. When the inmates arrived, David had recruited four students who'd stayed near Jamesburg to return to Tassajara to help with food preparations for the additional sixty-five people. Anyone David asked to return had to be physically capable and willing to stay for the fire's arrival.

By the morning of Saturday, June 28, the remaining senior staff members had identified a group of nine who would stay if yet another paring down became necessary. “As soon as we were down to fourteen,” David told me later, “the question came up: How are we going to organize? Who is going to make decisions?” Normally, decisions that affect residents fall to the senior staff, temple officers who meet briefly every morning before work meeting. But half of the senior staff had been evacuated. Those who remained settled on a group of six residents, made up mostly of senior staff, to function as a decision-making team. This “core team” included David, Mako, Graham, Colin, fire marshal Devin, and Shundo.