Fire Monks (16 page)

Don't-know mind doesn't mean willful ignorance. It was better to know where the fire was, that it was making its approach. They still didn't know which arm of it would reach Tassajara first. They just needed to stay calm, alert, and ready for anything. Add “Think clearly” and “Act decisively” to those imperatives and, taken together, they make up one of the Ten Standard Orders every firefighter has to know by heart.

By the morning of July 9, the Basin Complex fire had charred more
than eighty-six thousand acres—an area roughly the size of sixty-five thousand football fields—at an estimated containment cost to date of nearly twenty-eight million dollars. The six a.m. report from the incident management team noted “poor overnight humidity recovery” as a cause for concern, the lack of moisture in the air likely to add more blackened acres.

Around nine a.m. that morning, Shundo Haye and Bryan Clark set out for the peak of Hawk Mountain. It was already stifling—too hot even for Shundo, who usually relished Tassajara's heat. On the shadeless, steep trail that climbs fifteen hundred feet above the solar panels, his heart thumped, his legs dragged, his fingers stiffened and swelled. “It was the hardest climb we'd done,” Shundo told me later.

At the top, through the haze, they observed a fat plume of smoke rising from the ridge separating Church Creek and Tassajara Creek. They stood looking at it for a while, catching their breath. Neither stated the obvious—now the fire had only to work its way down into the Church Creek drainage and make an uphill run on the opposite slope to reach Tassajara Road. But how long would that take? This fire wasn't in a rush, or at least it hadn't been for the past couple of weeks.

After a minute or two, Shundo's heartbeat calmed and his breath no longer came in gulps. But he felt as if he'd run a marathon—in a pair of borrowed sneakers; he had somehow neglected to bring his own to Tassajara and wore Colin's old cross-trainers.

Their mission that morning went beyond scouting. They'd carried up some Firezat for covering the radio phone antenna, one of Tassajara's few links to the outside world. The signal traveled by line of sight from mountain to mountain, but there wasn't a clear line of sight in the Ventana. The ridgelines intersected and bisected one another at eccentric angles. The radio phone's functioning had always been patchy at best, but they would do what they could to protect it.

Graham had announced at the morning work meeting that a repairman was arriving later that day to switch the satellite phone—the source of Tassajara's other two phone lines—to a different signal source. “The forest is on fire,” he'd said straight-faced, “so they thought they'd come do some maintenance.” The timing couldn't have been worse, but if they didn't make the switch now, they'd lose the satellite link entirely. Tassajara would be even more isolated than it already was.

Shundo and Clark took the rolled remnants of Firezat from their packs, covered what they could of the radio phone antenna, relay box, cable, and replacement battery boxes on the ground, and secured it with tape. By necessity, the antenna stood in a prominent, vulnerable place, poking up from an exposed ridgetop. If fire stormed uphill, as it had in the Esperanza fire, the wrap would do little good.

Shundo had heard some firefighters at Tassajara say that the doomed crew should never have been on that ridge. But Tassajara wasn't on a ridge. It was down in a valley, cut through by a creek whose cold waters he planned to soak in when he returned from the peak. That was his habit on the hottest summer days even when there wasn't a fire.

The night watches, the miles spent running trails in Colin's Nikes, the smoke, and the waiting were all wearing on Shundo. Yet there was nowhere he'd rather be. He'd talked to his ex-wife on the phone. She'd told him someone had suggested on the blog that they rotate new people into Tassajara to spell those who'd been preparing for the fire. Shundo had shot down the suggestion as nonsense. Why would they leave now, when they'd learned so much about fire, about pumps and hoses and working together like a fire crew? They were in a groove.

After all this time, and with the fire finally in sight, Shundo couldn't imagine leaving. His ex-wife had teased him, pointing out his attachment. Shundo didn't deny it. He'd lived in the city and practiced with sirens and homeless people and stinking exhaust. He'd lived at Tassajara and practiced with the biting blackflies and no Internet and no toast—his favorite—for breakfast. But he'd never had a chance before to practice in the realm of fire. He wasn't sure he knew what that meant, but he knew it meant something. He could feel the energy of the community's shared concentration beneath his tired feet, the falling away of the inessential, the crucible of the unknown. He could see that the fire was a field test for Zen practice.

In his journal, Shundo had tried to describe a feeling of complete and fundamental integration, the way the residents' task connected them to the land, to one another, to themselves, to the essence of all things. “We become elemental,” he'd written. What would they become, he wondered, when fire reached the valley? They wouldn't fight fire; they'd meet it. In one hand a fire hose, in the other the
vajra,
or diamond, sword of what is called the bodhisattva vow—to save all beings before oneself. It's a pledge that can never be completely fulfilled, yet anyone who formally takes Zen Buddhist precepts, whether priest or lay practitioner, vows to refuse his or her own liberation from suffering until every other being is enlightened.

One of Zen's most beloved bodhisattvas is Manjusri, the bodhisattva of wisdom. Often depicted sitting on a lion, holding a sword in his right hand, Manjusri symbolizes insight, a clear-eyed, deep knowing that transcends conceptual and dualistic thinking. Sometimes his sword—used to cut through delusion—is on fire.

But bodhisattvas come in many forms—like the firefighter who gives up his vacation to help his friends prepare for a wildfire. Shundo felt safe at Tassajara in part because Stuart did. “He'd been there and done it before,” Shundo told me later. “We really depended on him.” Unlike the various fire officials who'd given the residents a talking-to, painting vivid worst-case scenarios to scare them, Stuart didn't seem overly concerned about the road being cut off—he'd driven it many times, and like Shundo and the other residents, he knew that the road was always a risk, fire or no fire. If someone had a heart attack at Tassajara, it would take at least an hour just to get that person to an ambulance at Jamesburg. One time a hiker had broken a femur and had to be airlifted to a hospital. Risk was always present, whether acknowledged or not.

“It's not pretty, but that should do it,” Shundo told Clark as they finished the wrapping and inspected their work.

Shundo watched his footing carefully on their descent. He'd ground the soles of Colin's trainers to a smooth, slick finish in the last couple of weeks. Still, the way down went much faster than the way up—the opposite of fire.

When they passed the wrapped solar panels and reached the first patch of shade at the hill cabins, Shundo took a long drink of orange-flavored Gatorade. There were cases and cases of it now at Tassajara, brought in by the fire crews. The residents had pronounced it the official drink of the fire. It had gone warm in his pack, but he drank it anyway, then headed straight for the creek.

 

 

The routine nightly task of ensuring that all kerosene lamps are
extinguished, called “fire watch” at Tassajara, is an adaptation of a centuries-old practice in Japanese villages. Nonetheless, most Zen temples in Japan have burned to the ground not once but several times. This is due in part to building materials—most temple structures are wooden—and to the traditional use of fire for light and cooking. At Soto Zen founder Eihei Dōgen's own monastery, Eiheiji, where Suzuki Roshi's son Hoitsu Suzuki is now the head teacher, the temple gate is flanked by six-hundred-year-old cedar trees, but none of the current structures are more than a few hundred years old.

Especially during the tumultuous fifteenth-century Onin War in Japan, many temple fires were started intentionally—by monks in rival sects. While contemporary Buddhism in the West carries strong pacifist sensibilities, in medieval Japan warriors meditated in the morning, then headed off to battle with sharp swords in their belts. Zen found a home among the samurai. Says G. B. Sansom in
Japan: A Short Cultural History
: Zen encouraged “a useful type of practical wisdom, and thus no doubt made it easy for clever Zen teachers to deal with military men who like simple answers to difficult questions.”

In one legendary sixteenth-century episode, the abbot of a temple near Mount Fuji sheltered enemy troops of the warlord Oda Nobunaga and refused to turn them over when Nobunaga demanded it. In retaliation, Nobunaga forced the monks into the gate tower and set it on fire. The abbot is said to have turned to the monks and offered these words from the
Blue Cliff Record,
a compilation of koans, or teaching stories: “Calm meditation doesn't require peaceful surroundings. If the mind is clear, fire itself is cool.”

But just as wildfires sweep the forest and promote new growth, temple fires created opportunities for sculptors, builders, and those skilled in art restoration. Despite the loss of relics, and sometimes lives, newer structures often surpassed those that preceded them. Creation and destruction are not leagues apart. They are, rather, in league, arising together. And Buddhism's own edifices, no matter how glorious, are not free from impermanence.

Yet it would be a mistake to think that acceptance of impermanence and the practice of nonattachment, another guiding Buddhist principle, requires allowing a monastery threatened by fire to burn. “There's nonattachment,” Abbot Steve told me after the fire at Tassajara, “but there's also not turning away. Nonattachment doesn't mean you separate yourself from things.”

At the core of Zen is the practice of taking care. It starts with your own body and extends outward to all phenomena and beings—to the sangha
,
or community, the temple objects, buildings and grounds, and, ultimately, the land and its natural processes, including fire. It's a particular kind of caring, free of rigid expectation, free even of hope.

Not to say the residents at Tassajara didn't hope to save it. They did. Tassajara is a living record of Zen in America. Suzuki Roshi's generous spirit supports every floorboard, peeks from behind every door. To lose the place where he walked around laughing and encouraging, the buildings where he shared the teachings that have touched so many lives, would be heartbreaking.

But hope can be held too tightly. Zen cultivates a mind that doesn't tether itself to any fixed view or perspective—the belief that the buildings at Tassajara must be saved or, by contrast, that physical structures aren't important and worth saving. Hope is fine, as long as it doesn't lead to inflexibility. “When you're living in the present moment, you're not so involved in hope or invested in a particular outcome,” said the abbot. You do what needs to be done simply because it needs to be done, accepting that your actions may not bear the fruit you intend—and that this does not render the actions themselves fruitless.

A clever Zen teacher might say that standing back and letting the monastery burn belies a kind of attachment to the idea of nonattachment, that trying to save it when it could all burn anyway is true nonattachment. In trying to save Tassajara from the fire—or your own life from disaster—you can't be sure you will. In fact, you can lose everything you love in a moment. And that's not a reason to give up. If anything, it's a reason to turn toward the fire, recognizing it as a force of both creation and destruction, and to take care of what's right in front of you, because that's all you actually have.

 

 

Around one thirty p.m. on July 9, residents and the members of the
Indiana fire crew gathered in the shade for a group photograph in front of the gatehouse. Shundo, fresh from his dip in the creek, handed off his camera to someone else to take the picture, which looks like a post-vacation snapshot. The mood is relaxed, collegial, as if they'd just finished an expedition together and were now back at home base, celebrating. No one in the photo knew how quickly and dramatically things were about to change.

In the photo, David squats in the first row, in front of Abbot Steve, who stands behind him. Stuart sits on the grass with his legs out straight, boots crossed, at the opposite end of the front row from David, with his arm around his girlfriend. The core team is scattered around, monks interspersed with firefighters—a bit hard to tell apart unless you know the people. Only the abbot and the director, at the edge of the group, wear hipparis. Members of the Indiana crew, which included a couple of women, wear dark pants and T-shirts, like most of the residents.

“When other crews came,” Mako told me later, “they looked like they were about to jump into the wilderness and fight fire, but the Indiana crew didn't look like that at all.” They weren't wearing heavy-duty fire gear. They didn't have radios, maps, and other firefighting accessories strapped to their packs. They wore sunglasses and baseball caps, not goggles and hard hats.

Earlier, when the Fenner Canyon inmate crew had arrived at Tassajara, one of the firefighters had looked around and asked Shundo, “Where are the monks?” The inmate was confused because they weren't in robes.