Fire Monks (12 page)

Eventually, he found himself disenchanted with what he described as the “righteousness” of the political movement. “We were our own worst enemy in a sense. Even though we had high ideals, we couldn't seem to get out of our own narcissistic way. I began to look at the nature of that in myself and others, which actually led to an investigation of how I perceived anything.” Which eventually led him to Zen.

Stücky first shared the details of his life before Zen Center in the abbot's cabin at Tassajara, six months after the fire. He gave the impression not of a rabble-rouser but rather of a peacemaker and rabble-rouser rolled into one—flexible and strong-willed. Like his father, Stücky is both a farmer and a spiritual adviser. He's been working hard since he was given his first tractor at nine years old. As a teenager, he traveled from Texas to Montana working the summer wheat harvest to supplement the family's income. From his Mennonite roots, he carries with him a sense of the value of community and a certain industriousness and seriousness of purpose. From farming, he has learned the importance of taking cues from all directions.

Built like the wood fencing on his grandparents' land, tall, lean, and sturdy, the six-foot-two-inch Stücky knows the edges of his mind. While he claimed there was a time in his life when he was mostly interested in playing the blues on his guitar, Stücky seems to have grown more, not less, playful with age. Deep dimples frame his mouth like parentheses, giving the perpetual faint impression of a smile. Stücky was given the name Myōgen—meaning “Mysterious Eye”—at his ordination by Richard Baker, but he identifies himself as “Abbot Steve.” He sometimes ends lectures with a singalong of the old Leadbelly tune “Relax Your Mind.”

From where he stood at Ashes Corner on July 2, Abbot Steve could see the confluence of the Tassajara and Church Creek drainages and the Willow Creek canyon to the south. It was impossible to tell which fire the smoke belonged to, the Indians or the Basin Complex, hard to make out the shape of the fire they were preparing for.

He and Abbot Paul Haller had decided that he should go to Tassajara to check up on things, since Haller was in the middle of leading a three-week period of concentrated practice at City Center, and Stücky knew a bit about fire from farmwork in the summer wheat fields. All it took was a truck's hot muffler to brush the stubble of a cut wheat stalk. If the wind was up, an entire field could erupt into flame.

He planned to stay for a few days, then return to San Francisco to catch a plane back east to visit his daughter. Standing on the ridgeline, he studied the track of the road, cutting across the mountain at a diagonal, its end disappearing into the valley that holds Tassajara, a triangular patch of green.

It could all burn. It had burned before. But he wouldn't call the fire his enemy. “The element of fire is in my own body,” Abbot Steve said later in a conversation with a student. “It's not foreign.” Neither malicious nor magnanimous, fire is simply fire. The earth and the beings that live on its surface have coexisted with fire for millennia in an interdependent relationship. Fire, he knew, could not be removed from these mountains. Fire belonged in the Ventana, just like the manzanita or the oak trees or Suzuki Roshi's ashes, scattered here in a burst of wind.

 

 

On the evening of July 2, the residents met in the guest dining room
at Tassajara. Abbot Steve invited them to share how they felt about their situation. Everyone wanted to stay. Some even expressed impatience for the fire to arrive. The Basin Complex had grown almost ten thousand acres in a mere twelve hours, to more than sixty-one thousand acres. Full containment was expected to take a month. Low fog and clouds moving overland from the ocean had kept the fire in check, but temperatures were expected to soar in the coming days, creating conditions less favorable to firefighters and more favorable to fire.

The residents didn't know it yet, but ten miles west, the fire had already flared, jumping the dozer lines and prompting a mandatory evacuation in Big Sur that displaced fifteen hundred residents, shuttered twenty businesses, and shut down a thirty-mile stretch of Highway 1.

The air horn sounded, a strange, shrill tone piercing the valley.
Then came the planned announcement over the radios: “Fire at the hill cabins!” The residents converged on the equipment shed below the zendo to practice suiting up in jumpsuits, boots, hard hats, goggles, and waist packs for carrying water, a radio, and fire shelter. Then they split off—the pump crew running to pumps at the creek and the pool to charge the standpipe system, the hose crew lugging hoses up the stone steps and rolling them out. The ready-for-anything crew stood by, an extra set of hands, ears, and eyes.

They perspired in the heavy cotton CDF coveralls—hand-me-downs from Stuart, well insulated but less resistant to radiant heat than the Nomex firefighters wear now. Their goggles fogged, and they had to resist the temptation to pull them off. A dry, steely thirst thickened in their throats. Shundo gave the signal that the hose crew was ready, both arms raised like a referee's on a touchdown, and the pump crew opened the lines. CAL FIRE captain Stuart Carlson wasn't around during this drill by the hill cabins—he'd left Tassajara briefly to take his son home and host a Fourth of July party—but the residents backed one another up on the hoses as Stuart had taught them: one person at the nozzle and a second just behind or halfway down the hose length. Over the radio, lookouts flagged the flames: “Roof of hill three! Spotting between the solar panels and the birdhouse!”

It was just a drill, a test of the residents' readiness. Except for the withering heat inside their fireproof gear, none of it was real, but it made Tassajara fire marshal Devin Patel proud to watch how everyone mobilized. “That was a very sweet time,” he told me more than a year after the 2008 fire. “We bonded as a community.”

A Tennessee native, Devin had been surprised, and not exactly excited, to be given the position of fire marshal. Typically, the part-time job involved testing fire extinguishers and smoke alarms weekly and holding the occasional training or drill. In the early part of the summer, before the fires, it had been hard to recruit people to train on the various fire crews. He'd held only one or two drills. But since the start of the Indians fire, Devin had been attending senior staff meetings, even though he wasn't actually on staff at Tassajara. Now he found himself supervising the fire preparations. “I was walking around doing this management thing, which was funny, because I'd just learned what people should be doing. I was just one step ahead.”

At a meeting that afternoon in the dining room, two weeks after the lightning strikes, Devin didn't say much. In addition to him, the group included many members of the core team—director David, head cook Mako, plant manager Graham, head of shop Colin, and fire scout Shundo—as well as Leslie James, who was down from Jamesburg, Abbot Steve, and fifty-six-year-old former USFS firefighter Kim Leigh. Leigh often came to Tassajara during work periods to do painting projects, and David had called him to ask for his help preparing for the fire.

Most of the residents present at the meeting were senior staff. Most were priests. Most had been at Tassajara for a lot longer than Devin's one year. Both Shundo and Mako had served as fire marshal. “They were all pretty active problem solvers. There was a lot of discussion,” Devin told me. “I definitely hopped in when I had an idea, but I was the quietest one.” At twenty-eight, he was also the youngest.

David wanted to hear from each of them. What is your personal commitment to staying? What factors do you need to take into account in considering whether or not to stay? They went around the room, raising concerns about whether they had the right number of people at Tassajara now, or the right individuals, and about the possibility of a firestorm in the valley.

“I feel safe,” said Devin when it was his turn, “unless an expert tells us otherwise.”

It was an opinion many in the group shared. David wanted to leave behind a thorough written record of the Basin Complex fire, like the ones he'd been reading from the Marble Cone and Kirk Complex fires. Sometimes he had trouble deciphering his own slanted handwriting, so after the meeting he typed up his notes on the stone office computer.

“The consensus of the group,” he wrote, “was that despite the unknowns, we had a lot of confidence in our safety here should the fire pass through, and therefore were all willing to stay.... This was, of course, as long as Stuart or Kim or other firefighters themselves felt the situation was safe enough to stay. If they said leave, we'd leave.”

 

 

While everyone else was out digging fireline and raking leaves,
Mako had to cook dinner. She loved being head cook, but as a former fire marshal—and one who had filled the position so thoroughly—she struggled with the juxtaposition. She knew how the pumps worked, where all the standpipes were. Though her body had begun to tire from the physical strain of kitchen work, she wanted to be outdoors, preparing Tassajara alongside everyone else, including her partner, Graham, who as plant manager was charged with safeguarding the water supply, the pumps, the communications systems, and the solar array.

On the one hand, Mako knew that there were cooking fires and wildfires and that both deserved equal respect and attention. It was important—vital, in fact—to fortify the monks for their labors. “But there was also this feeling, everyone's doing the necessary work, and I'm in the kitchen,” Mako said later of the weeks leading up to the fire's arrival. There wasn't anything to do about the feeling necessarily, except to watch it come up.

Mako couldn't remember who or what had started an argument between her and Graham, but exhaustion was the likely cause—the duress of nearly two weeks spent in a continuous state of alertness and preparation, waiting for the fire to come. For Mako, there was the added edge of being confined to the kitchen while Graham got to move around and do the “necessary” work. A friction between them had built until it generated enough heat to flare into a full-blown conflict.

When Graham and Mako met in 2003, they had discovered a mutual interest in the martial art aikido. They had much in common. Both had spent summers unleashed in the wild, rural environments of their grandparents' homes—Graham in one of the last remaining old-growth red and white pine stands in Ontario's Temagami region, Mako in coastal New Jersey. Both had a deeply rooted, ongoing interest in studying the mind.

Yet it wasn't unusual for the couple to find themselves in disagreement. There were times when they'd been up most of the night in a fight and still had to go to the zendo in the morning. At Tassajara, a couple in conflict is in conflict in the middle of a very intimate space, with nowhere to go to get away.

As head cook and plant manager, Mako and Graham hardly saw each other during the day under normal circumstances; their days off overlapped only once every three weeks. They'd catch up at night, back in their cabin. But sometimes the couple deliberately spent time apart. During a practice period sesshin—lasting anywhere from five to nine days and conducted mostly in silence—it wasn't unusual for Mako and Graham to live separately or at least carry the silence of the intensive back to their living quarters. “When we're in sesshin we don't really talk to each other,” said Mako. “Sometimes we don't interact at all.” Such strictures were more for Graham's sake than hers. “He needs more time alone and more space to himself than I do,” she said the summer after the fire. “I'm pretty extroverted and have never sought after quiet. It's kind of weird that I'm in a Zen monastery.”

During the fire, they were often too tired to talk at night. Sometimes Mako would want to connect, and he would just want to read or need to sleep.

They were both under pressure. “It was smoky down here, so we were constantly not getting enough oxygen. And we were so thoroughly tired,” Mako told me later. It was a different kind of tired from the tiredness that comes during sesshin. They hadn't had a day off or been out of the valley in weeks. “Graham got snippy and irritable,” she recalled. Something he said, or didn't say, got under her skin. She reacted. “He got defensive. I got angry. It escalated from there.”

It was July 3, their anniversary, and by day's end they weren't speaking to each other.

 

 

As of July 4, two weeks after the lightning strikes, the Basin Complex
fire had not resulted in any fatalities. However, a volunteer firefighter had suffered a fatal heart attack while working a fireline in Mendocino County. And two bulldozer operators were injured when their machines rolled. Often it's not fire that directly threatens the life of a firefighter. It's a rolling rock, a falling tree, a truck tipping over a road edge, too much smoke, an overdose of adrenaline that stops the heart.

But what does happen when a firefighter gets caught in the flames? This is one of the questions author Norman Maclean took up in
Young Men and Fire,
reconstructing the race uphill between a wildfire and fourteen smoke jumpers in Montana's 1949 Mann Gulch fire: “First, considerably ahead of the fire, you reach the verge of death in your boots and legs; next, as you fail, you sink back in the region of strange gases and red and blue darts where there is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink into the main fire that consumes, and if you are a good Catholic about all that remains of you is your cross.”