Fire Monks (17 page)

Whether priest or student, Tassajara residents generally put on formal robes between two and three times every day in the summer. A priest's robe called an
okesa,
sewn together in an intricate patchwork pattern inspired by rice fields, wraps around the body and over one shoulder. Newly ordained priests spend months learning how to do things they used to do with ease, such as bowing, now swaddled in a lot of extra fabric. Some senior priests, like Abbot Steve, wear brown robes to signify that they have received Dharma transmission—reception into the lineage of Zen teachers and authority to pass on the teachings. But it had been weeks since anyone had changed out of work clothes; a few hadn't entered the zendo at all. Their work and their meditation were preparing the grounds for fire. Wearing robes while doing heavy labor is not a sensible choice, and Zen is at its core a practical path.

That morning, a reporter and photographer from the
San Francisco Chronicle
had come down the road. The reporter seemed interested not only in the fire, but also in the practice of the monks. In the published story, he quoted one resident's comment likening clearing brush for a firebreak to the practice of zazen, “where you clear the mind from external thoughts burning through.”

While the
Chronicle
reporter waited for a chance to talk with Abbot Steve, absorbed in conversation with branch director Jack Froggatt, the postlunch repose of the group portrait transformed into an orderly haste. The Indiana crew had been instructed to evacuate immediately. The fire had reached the preestablished trigger point of the confluence of Tassajara and Church creeks and now had an easy path to Tassajara Road.

 

 

Froggatt explained the news to Abbot Steve only after he'd initiated
the Indiana crew's departure.

“So they won't be staying for the fire after all,” the abbot said matter-of-factly.

Froggatt shook his head, a deflated expression on his face. Months later, he told me that he may have implied that there was a possibility the crew could get stuck in Tassajara and be able to help. “But we wouldn't be there by choice,” he insisted. “I was told that wouldn't happen.” As their minimal gear evidenced, the Indiana crew wasn't a hotshot, or Type 1, crew—with the most rigorous physical requirements and training; they were a Type 2 crew, drawn from a mix of federal, state, and local government agencies. Froggatt himself had seen the terrain around Tassajara from a helicopter, when there was a lot less smoke in the air. There was no place a pilot could safely set down to pick up people in a medical emergency. So he'd ordered the crew to pack up their gear.

When Froggatt said it was time to go, the Indiana crew immediately stopped stapling up the Firezat wrapping. They left behind fragments of unused material and half-wrapped buildings, including the gatehouse where they'd just taken the group portrait. “They grabbed their backpacks and tools and they were out of here in what seemed like ten minutes from the time they got that order,” Abbot Steve said later.

After the Indiana crew left, Froggatt stuck around, planning to escort the satellite technician back up the road when repairs were completed. The
Chronicle
reporter checked in with his office on the radio phone, the one operational phone line. His boss told him to get out of the valley, but he and his photographer didn't leave right away. They wanted to document the scene unfolding at Tassajara, perhaps struck by the calm that pervaded despite the sudden departure of the firefighters. The reporter interviewed Abbot Steve as residents practiced rolling out hoses in the work circle area.

“We'll be moving more vigorously than usual,” Abbot Steve said, hands on his hips, not a shred of detectable doubt in his voice. “And we'll be watching those tendencies to get overexcited. We'll stay calm and alert. We'll be ready.”

Fire is not a stranger, he went on, smiling, seemingly unperturbed by the sudden loss of hands on deck. “We're not really fighting the fire. We're meeting the fire, letting the fire come to us.” Instead of confronting the fire as an enemy, he explained, they would “make friends with it, tame it as it reaches our boundaries.”

 

 

Colin drove the Isuzu up the road and pulled over at Lime Point,
just below where he'd seen the cloud that turned out to be smoke on the day of the lightning strikes. That was nearly three weeks ago. It seemed like the right thing to do now, as the last crew of firefighters pulled out of Tassajara—to get his own eyes on the fire. And it had the added benefit of getting him out of talking to a reporter.

At one time, Colin had wanted to be a writer himself. He wrote short stories as an English major at the University of Michigan but dropped the habit when he began to sense that he was hiding out behind his own writing. “I didn't even need a Twelve Step program to quit,” he told me with a wry smile the summer after the fire.

Colin didn't need a Twelve Step program to end what he calls his relatively short “drinking career,” either, a time that overlapped his military service. He sobered up on the road after realizing he'd probably die in a motorcycle accident or kill someone if he didn't dry out.

In the Marines, he took heat for being too much of an individual. Now he's a Zen priest and lives in a community where the self's very existence is called into question. At first, he didn't make a connection between being a soldier and being a monk. Slowly, he saw the resemblance. “Both are about letting go of the self. One wants to crush it. The other just wants to release it.”

At Lime Point on July 9, the clouds overhead offered a kaleidoscope of fire color: red and purple, orange and black. For weeks, the fire had simmered just shy of the confluence of Tassajara and Church creeks, in the Tassajara Creek drainage. Now smoke trails spiraled from farther downstream. The fire had crossed into Church Creek. It had already burned an area where there are caves etched with handprints and drawings of the Esselen Indians.

Farther up the road, looking west toward that area, there is a massive sandstone formation weathered into the shape of two hands pressed together as in prayer. The same image, held in high esteem by the Esselen, adorns the interior walls of the caves. Tassajara residents call the site
gassho
rock, after the hand gesture that is also a staple of Zen.

But Colin didn't drive any further. He'd seen all he needed to see.

“I thought, This thing's taking off,” he told me later, standing at Lime Point, the brim of his baseball cap pitched down to block the midday sun. He also thought: Stuart should see this.

Throughout their fire preparations, it had seemed important that the same people do the scouting. Consistency was critical to properly measuring the fire's progress. Shundo hiked; Colin drove up the road—when he wasn't boarding up windows and eaves with plywood to keep sparks from entering and igniting a building or helping Graham troubleshoot the pump near the stone rooms that had been acting up. But as Colin looked through his binoculars and tried to see anything but smoke, he remembered what the fire captain had told him: “The difference between a professional firefighter and you is I know what to be afraid of.”

On his way back to Tassajara, Colin met the departing crew from Indiana on the road. He'd begun to suspect that some of the firefighters flowing in and out of Tassajara were sightseeing more than anything else, but these men and women, like the inmate crew, had done real work. “The cabins were wrapped up like Christmas presents,” Colin recalled. Their engines pulled over at a wide spot so he could pass. Hands reached out the windows, waving. It was a strange sensation, to keep going in the opposite direction from those who knew what to fear.

 

 

Around two p.m., while Colin was up the road, Shundo hiked over
the hogback ridge on the west end of Tassajara, above the flats. Visibility was poor from there, so he jogged partway up the Tony Trail. He saw plenty of smoke. It was hard to tell where it was coming from exactly, but he wasn't particularly alarmed. He'd seen similar smoke plumes most afternoons, when the fire rose up with the day's heat before dying back down again at night. The departure of the Indiana crew troubled him more.

Having covered close to five miles of trail that day already, Shundo returned to Tassajara and jumped in the creek again. On his way back to his cabin for a fresh set of clothes, he met up with Colin, returning from Lime Point. He and Colin had a running joke that they traded places—usually, whenever one was back at City Center in San Francisco, the other lived down at Tassajara.

“It's taking off,” Colin said, standing at the foot of the steps to the hill cabins.

“I couldn't really see much,” said Shundo. “Just a lot of smoke.”

“How was it over the hogback?”

“Smoky,” said Shundo, his eyes tearing up, irritated by sweat and sunscreen. “And bloody hot. I think your shoes are melting,” he said, lifting a foot to show Colin the treadless sole.

Colin laughed, but the brief levity didn't fully penetrate his features or linger on his face. He looked across from where they stood in the work circle area, where eighty steps led up to the hill cabins and the trail to the solar panels, radio phone antenna, and satellite dish, and above that Hawk Mountain, where Shundo had hiked earlier that morning. “That satellite guy still here?”

“Don't know,” said Shundo. “I've only just got back.”

Colin drank some water, then pulled his bandanna back up over his mouth for protection from the smoke. “I'm gonna go out there,” he said, gesturing in the direction of the hogback with his chin. “Then I'll check in with Stuart.”

“Right,” said Shundo. Sweat trickled down his brow as it sometimes did when the zendo was hot and he was in robes. The urge to wipe it would arise, and he'd have a choice. Brush it away or simply do nothing? The choice for how to respond was always there, and there wasn't a right or wrong answer. When he simply had to move, he moved. Other times, he let a droplet of sweat, or a tear, simply follow its own course.

“I'm going to rest up,” he told Colin. “I'm knackered.” First, he washed out two sets of sweaty clothes in the laundry area. Then he went to his cabin, lay down, and promptly fell asleep.

 

 

Up on the hill with the satellite technician, Graham answered a
call from David on his walkie-talkie, asking about the status of the satellite switch.

“Umm, still in progress,” Graham said. He looked up at the sky, a constantly changing canvas of smoke and sunlight and helicopters with water buckets swinging beneath them.

“Jack wants to drive up to Lime Point so he can keep an eye on the fire. Any idea how much longer the switch will take?” David asked.

Graham looked at his watch: It was after three p.m. “Not really,” he said, regulating the amount of frustration he allowed to surface in his voice.

When the Indiana crew had pulled out after lunch, the technician had wanted to go out with them, but Graham had persuaded him to stay. If he left Tassajara without implementing the switch, they'd be down to just the unreliable radio phone. But the satellite switch, which was supposed to be straightforward, had gone curvy. For the past hour, they'd been adjusting the position of the dish and testing the connection, unsuccessfully. Now the technician wiped his damp brow with his sleeve. He punched some numbers into a handheld device and muttered in frustration.

Neither of them wanted to be up here on this hill under the intense sun, breathing the smoky air. There were any number of places Graham would have preferred to be. But Tassajara needed the phone. It wasn't the technician's fault his company had sent him into a burning forest on a job. Playing goalie on a hockey team as a kid, Graham had to stop whatever came flying at him from going in the net. He didn't get to pick the shots. Now, as Tassajara's plant manager, he needed to see the repair through.

“Tell Jack I'll take the tech out when we're done,” Graham radioed David. “I'll make sure he gets safely over the ridge.”

Shortly after this radio contact, David picked up a message from Jamesburg on the answering machine in the stone office. Los Padres National Forest deputy supervisor Ken Heffner had called, with his boss, supervisor Peggy Hernandez, at his side. They reiterated that they would not provide the support of professional firefighters on the ground and requested again that everyone evacuate Tassajara immediately.

David transcribed the message in his slanted handwriting and left it on the desk instead of putting it in his pocket with his notebook containing important phone numbers and whatever else he needed to remember. There was nothing new or surprising in it and therefore no need to carry it around.

 

 

So this is spotting, Colin thought. He climbed over the hogback,
looked up Tassajara Creek, and saw the fire advancing downstream, throwing embers with the wind behind it. On big crown fires or fires driven by warm winds, flames can drift for miles. This wasn't miles, but the way wind and flame cooperated to move the fire astonished him. Above the bandanna he wore to mask the smoke, the exposed skin of Colin's face prickled in the heat.

Asked what a Buddha is, Dōgen said, “An icicle forming in fire.” He evoked the metaphor of fire for the urgency of the endeavor to wake up, instructing his disciples to practice as if their heads were enveloped in flames. The way it looked to Colin from the hogback, Tassajara's head was about to catch fire.

He called Stuart on his walkie-talkie. “I'm at the hogback. It's spotting down Tassajara Creek. It's coming.”

Finally, sitting with fire was about to become meeting fire.