Fire Monks (20 page)

The same rock walls and concrete floor that made the stone office
a safe haven also offered a respite from the heat. Abbot Steve positioned himself behind the counter, Stuart at the counter's end, gripping the edges of the countertop. David stood near the front door. The rest of the core team perched on a few pieces of wicker furniture and wooden benches moved earlier from the student eating area.

The intensity in the room was almost audible, like the low buzz of an electric current. The abbot began by informing the group of the reason for their meeting: the fire captain's recommendation that they evacuate immediately. “We need to understand our situation and make a decision. Let's hear from Stuart first.”

Stuart repeated what he'd said out by the gatehouse, speaking quickly, in a voice pitched with urgency: “We have to leave. Conditions have changed. This is a much more dangerous situation than before. The fire's coming in strong. It's not creeping anymore. We aren't getting any help, and I don't want to be responsible for you in these conditions. We have to leave. We have to leave now.”

“I told Stuart we had to discuss it first,” Abbot Steve added.

“We don't have time to discuss!” cried Stuart. “They're diverting airtankers from somewhere else to hold the road for us!”

The abbot's eyes met the director's. They had come to know each other well over the past year and a half. They'd talked about their Mennonite roots and the respect they shared for its principles of hard work and humility, though neither practiced the religion. But there was also a deep trust between them—in David's words, a sort of “empathetic resonance”—based on their shared experience of Zen practice. If Abbot Steve hadn't been at Tassajara, David, as director, would have been responsible for their decision making in this moment. He was relieved that he wasn't. He stood silently by the door, confident that Abbot Steve would find a way through the confusion to the right words. David didn't think he could—he was too angry, and when he got angry, he tended not to speak.

Shundo was the first to say something, the image of the amateur activation still fresh in his mind. “We agreed we'd do what Stuart recommended.”

“We did say that,” Colin said quietly, almost to himself.

Devin nodded. In his mind, this was a scenario they'd discussed—a clear trigger point for leaving—and Stuart had pulled the trigger.

“What about Dharma Rain?” Graham asked, sitting on his hands, a tightness in his voice, a blush in his cheeks from the sun. As plant manager he knew that though the systems they had in place were good, they required human attention. “The pumps can only run for three or four hours before they run out of fuel. Someone needs to be here to fill them.”

Sitting upright and alert next to him, Mako nodded vigorously. It was unusual for Graham to speak before, or more than she did. But there was nothing to add. He'd said the most important thing without saying it exactly:
If we leave now, Tassajara is finished
. She glanced up at the ceiling above their heads. When 40 percent of it is on fire, they'd been told, it's time to get out and jump in the creek with your fire shelter.

“We don't have time for this!” Stuart pursed his lips to release a stream of air, shaking his head. “We have to evacuate. Right now!”

Abbot Steve laid his hands on the fire maps on the countertop. The Three-Day-Away fire. That's what they'd been calling it for almost three weeks. Did anyone really know how to predict the movements of a fire? he wondered. He sensed the passage of time, moving much too slowly for the fire captain yet too quickly for the group being asked to abandon their temple and home. Later, he described feeling “extreme concentration, a deep awareness of the consequences of our decision”—like a diver on a high-dive board, about to leap into space, knowing every movement counts, even the movements inside the mind.

It was true that they'd agreed to follow Stuart's advice—before Abbot Steve arrived at Tassajara—and that conditions had worsened weatherwise. It was true that the heart of Tassajara couldn't be burned, and buildings did not matter when compared with a human life. But something else was also true. At a question-and-answer session at Green Gulch Farm after the fire, Abbot Steve would observe, “If you look at Tassajara on the map, and you see only one way in and out, and you don't really know Tassajara . . . it looks like this is a very dangerous, risky place to be. Sometimes a close, intimate perspective is critical in understanding what to do, and sometimes you need to step back and have a wide view.”

In fact, having both perspectives is best. Dōgen wrote: “Put your whole attention into the work, seeing just what the situation calls for. Do not be . . . so absorbed in one aspect of a matter that you fail to see its other aspects.” When you wash the rice, see the sand in the rice and the rice in the sand. One aspect of Zen practice is learning not to stick to any fixed view—or sense of situation or self. Zen also teaches the cultivation of “skillful means,” the ability to approach a situation with flexibility and respond appropriately, with an eye toward encouraging awakening, in oneself and others.

Abbot Steve looked up from the stack of fire maps. “Okay,” he said. “I guess we need to go.”

He said, We need to go. But inside the contours of his own mind, he started plotting how to stay.

 

 

The meeting lasted five minutes, maybe ten. After the abbot an
nounced his decision, there was a long moment in which no one moved. It was as if they didn't know what to do next. They had no form for this.

“Can I go ring the bell?” asked Devin, thinking of the rest of Tassajara's residents, who weren't privy to the core team's conversation. No one said anything, so he said, “I'm going to go ring it,” and left the stone office to sound the railroad bell, the residents' cue to drop whatever they were doing and report to the work circle immediately.

“Should we bury the Buddha?” Mako asked.

“Yes,” said Abbot Steve. “Quickly.”

Outside the office, Mako asked Bryan Clark, a member of her kitchen crew, to remove the Buddha from the zendo altar. In heavy fire boots, Clark, Shundo, and a summer student ran past the shoe racks onto the strictly shoeless wooden platform that wraps around the building and stepped into the zendo from the rear door, behind the altar. The Buddha faced the other direction, gazing toward the creek, marks of its previous encounter with fire undetectable in the dim zendo light. With wire cutters placed for just this purpose at the back of the altar beside the matches and incense, they snipped the wires securing the statue. It took the three of them to lift the Buddha, carved from a chunk of dark gray metamorphic rock called schist.

They placed a yoga mat under the Buddha and folded blankets over him at the bocce ball court just after five thirty p.m. Whenever a Buddha is installed on an altar or removed from one, the statue's eyes are brushed open or closed in a formal ceremony. After gathering whoever happened to be around as witnesses, Abbot Steve performed an abbreviated eye closing. Graham, making a last check of all the pumps, walked by, saw the ceremony in progress, and thought, Good, that's being taken care of, one less thing to worry about. Abbot Steve wouldn't remember what he said to the Buddha exactly. Others who were present recalled something like “You're going to sleep for a while.” But Mako remembered something more—part request, part apology—the abbot saying to the Buddha: “You'll see what happens here.” Then Kim Leigh and Colin shoveled dirt back into the hole.

Leigh had seen the plywood over the hole in the bocce ball court earlier but hadn't realized what the hole was for until he found himself in the middle of the eye-closing ceremony. “It was very quick and urgent,” he told me later. “Lots of energy was flying around, but they took the time to do this sacred thing.”

Why hadn't the residents taken the Buddha out to Jamesburg, as they had the other ceremonial objects and statues and the recipe binders? The Buddha should stay put, they'd decided early on. To take him up the road would have felt like removing a ship's keel. He would be safe at Tassajara, tucked into the earth.

Letting go of the idea they'd held collectively for nearly three
weeks—that they'd be there when the fire came through—the residents enacted the one scenario they'd never discussed or drilled for: leaving Tassajara entirely.

Ten minutes of orderly chaos passed as the community scattered to attend to whatever individual tasks still needed doing and fetch personal belongings before meeting in the parking lot. In the stone room she and Graham shared, Mako stripped off her fire gear. She put on a pair of sandals, grabbed her backpack, and tucked a distressed, meowing Monkeybat inside a pillowcase, an impromptu carrier. Colin threw his bag in the lumber truck, figuring he would drive it out so it wouldn't burn—they would need it if they had to rebuild Tassajara. Shundo recovered a small statue of Kuan Yin, the goddess of compassion, sitting on the back of the zendo altar—he'd noticed it there when they went to get the Buddha—and handed it to Stuart's girlfriend for safekeeping, the statue's, hers, and theirs. In the parking lot, the resident charged with making sure they were all accounted for consulted her clipboard and directed people to their assigned vehicles. Abbot Steve had radioed her that he wanted to be the last to leave, alone, in his own car.

Stuart had positioned his Toyota pickup at the top of the parking lot so cars could queue behind him. The fire captain's countenance had shifted from extreme frustration to provisional relief. Just before six p.m., five cars had lined up behind Stuart's truck: Shundo had four passengers in the Isuzu. Behind him were Tassajara's two Suburbans. The first one, driven by Graham, held five passengers, including Mako and Devin. The other also held five, plus a driver. Colin tailed the second Suburban, alone in the lumber truck. Abbot Steve stood beside his Honda CR-V, last in line. Including Stuart and his girlfriend, the resident with the clipboard counted twenty-one heads. Everyone was present but the director.

“David, where are you?” she asked over her walkie-talkie.

After a brief delay, he answered, “I'm on the phone with Paul.” Paul Haller, Zen Center's other abbot.

Some in the cars thought, Must this conversation happen now? A few speculated that Haller, who had installed the standpipe system after the Marble Cone fire, might try to talk David out of leaving. Haller could be a fierce teacher, in the confrontational style of the old Zen masters. He'd once shouted at Shundo in a student-teacher interview that Shundo was wasting his time—and Shundo is not the only one with such a story. Haller grew up poor in Belfast, Ireland. His Dharma name, Ryushin, means “Dragon Heart/Mind.”

After a few minutes, the resident responsible for counting heads raised David again on the radio: “David, we're all waiting for you.”

“I'll go get him.” Mako set Monkeybat on the front seat and jogged to the stone office in her sandals. Abbot Haller had ordained both her and Graham, giving them the same Dharma name, Unzan, or “Cloud Mountain,” though unintentionally. She wanted to talk to Paul herself, to make sure he knew what was happening. She and her teacher had had many pre-dawn
dokusans,
one-on-one encounters in which teacher and student, sitting cross-legged on the floor facing each other, a bit too close for comfort, discuss the student's practice or some aspect of the Dharma. Again and again, by flicker of candlelight, Haller had shown Mako to herself, helped her touch what in Zen is known as “big mind.”

Big mind is an awareness that includes all existence inside its own. From cells viewed through a microscope in a neurobiology lab to trees torching in the Ventana Wilderness to satellites arcing through space, capturing images of fire thousands of dark miles away—all are recognized as the self, and the self as threaded to all existence. With Haller's help, Mako had learned that Zen wasn't just mind tricks, as she'd once thought. It wasn't about fooling yourself or anyone. It was about facing the reality that we are not separate from anything in the world. Not from fire, not from one another, not from our own minds. All things arise and cease together.

But what she wanted from her teacher now was one of his fierce shouts. She wanted him to do something, say anything, so they wouldn't have to leave Tassajara.

 

 

After the core team meeting had ended in the decision to leave,
David had sat at the desk where for weeks he'd called an ever-changing list of information lines and fire management contacts. He'd dialed the Jamesburg house and told Leslie James they were evacuating, and no, he didn't have time to explain. Then he'd grabbed his radio and walked to his cabin to get his duffel. When he'd realized that the green bandanna he used to shield his lungs from smoke was still in the stone office, he'd doubled back to get it—and to make sure they hadn't left behind anything essential. The phone rang as he walked in the door.