Fire Monks (25 page)

 

Abbot Steve called his wife, Lane Olson, after dinner. As concisely
as he could, he told her about the day's unexpected events. Ever since Abbot Steve had arrived at Tassajara, he'd been updating her on their preparations. And she'd been following the blog.

When I spoke with Olson months after the fire, she described her husband as “an amazingly capable person. He's just so stable. It's that Mennonite farmer background. He never panics.” She recalled how he and his brothers told gruesome stories of near-miss accidents on the farm. Their father had lost part of two fingers, and a younger brother had to extract his own foot from under a piece of heavy machinery. Once, worn out from a day's work, Abbot Steve fell asleep while driving and woke up as his brother jerked the wheel. The car spun around several times before they regained control and continued down the road, hearts pounding but unharmed. “Farmers are a lot closer to death than the rest of us,” said Olson.

So are Zen students, Olson knew, a practitioner herself.
Everything changes:
Every living thing must also die.
Everything is connected:
Life and death are completely intertwined, never separate.
Pay attention
.

Given her confidence in her husband—and her trust that whatever decisions he made were the best decisions in the moment—Olson wasn't terribly worried. It wasn't until she checked
Sitting with Fire
and read the concerns others were voicing that she started to get a sense of the very real danger and to wonder, Are they safe? Is this going to be okay?

Abbot Steve's patrol shift was from three a.m. to seven a.m., so after talking to Olson, he went to bed and tried to sleep a little. Now that they numbered only five, he would be without a partner. He awoke a few hours later. In the hazy, half-moon, middle-of-the-night darkness, he made several trips up the road, driving beyond the bathtub between Lime Point and Ashes Corner. “At that point, I could see the whole face of the mountain in front of me was on fire,” he said later. “And down below Lime Point—quite a ways down—was in flames. Then the wind shifted, and I felt a hot wind and thought I had better turn around.” Because they'd seen how it could linger in an area for days, he thought the fire might still be a couple of days away from Tassajara, but that it had probably crossed the road farther up.

He went up the road again just after sunrise, around six a.m. on July 10. He drove as far as Lime Point. He thought he saw a fog bank to the west, and the sky was peaceful, a muted watercolor of cloud and smoke and dawning light. The airtankers and helicopters weren't flying yet; it was pleasantly, surprisingly quiet. “Fire was just down the slope from Lime Point, below the road, fifty yards down. It still hadn't crossed over into the Cabarga Creek watershed,” he told me.

But before Abbot Steve could update Thomas in Jamesburg to say he still didn't recommend traveling on the road, David radioed from his communications post in the stone office.

“They can't get in. There's a CHP officer at the forest boundary. He's got a gun, and he says no one is going down the road.”

A patch-robed monk is like a snowflake in a red-hot furnace.

—Blue Cliff Record,
CASE 69

Robert Thomas woke around four a.m. on the floor in the living
room at Jamesburg, having slept maybe four hours. His eyes felt gritty, his limbs stiff, his mind full. The night before, after he'd gotten word from Tassajara that there were flames near the road and he shouldn't attempt to drive it, he'd spent a long time talking with Leslie James and a few others, sifting through the options. The house was quiet and they'd had to keep their voices low—most of the people who'd evacuated Tassajara that day had gone to bed early. It was still dark and quiet when Zen Center treasurer Greg Fain's watch alarm went off. Fain had arrived in Jamesburg around eleven p.m. the night before. Along with Thomas and two others, he'd planned to rise before daylight to try to make it over the road.

Leslie was awake, so she came out to the living room to talk with them before they left for Tassajara. “I think we had a longer conversation than we wanted to,” Thomas told me later. “Light was starting to come at the edge of the sky, and I felt like we'd have a better chance if it was completely dark.”

They talked about what they'd say if they got stopped. Thomas wanted to keep it friendly and low-key. They wouldn't say they were officers of San Francisco Zen Center or former residents of Tassajara. They weren't wearing robes or anything that identified them as priests. Fain's signature eyeglasses with thick black rims and white cowboy hat made him look more Buddy Holly Meets the Lone Ranger than monk.

Fain and Thomas left Jamesburg at approximately four thirty a.m. It would be just the two of them. The others had decided not to go. They drove about three and a half miles up Tassajara Road before they got blasted by a spotlight on a CHP vehicle parked horizontally in front of the Los Padres National Forest boundary.

“Stop!” an officer's voice boomed. “Stop your vehicle!”

They stopped, got out, and walked toward the officer, who had stepped out of his cruiser with a hand on his pistol, as if to remind them that whatever their business was, he had the final say.

Instinctively, they put their hands up to show that they were empty. “We're just trying to get back to Tassajara,” said Thomas, squinting in the spotlight's glare, trying to step out of it, though he couldn't. It seemed to cover everything.

“Road's closed.” The officer was alert, awake, his voice crisp and clear. “Nobody's getting by me.”

Fain tried then: “Officer, we really need to get to Tassajara. We left and now we're just trying to go back.” It was true, if slightly slanted. Neither Thomas nor Fain had lived at Tassajara for several years. But Fain had helped install Dharma Rain in June before he had to return to the city to attend to Zen Center's finances.

The officer shook his head. There wasn't a flicker of interest in his face. “You're not going in, guys.”

“We just want to—”

“Nope. Turn your vehicle around and go home. We're not having a conversation about this.”

Their faces pale and white in the spotlight, Thomas and Fain looked at each other, bewildered, for what seemed like a long time. Then they turned around and went back to their car. “I remember feeling kind of small and helpless,” Thomas told me. “But anything we would have said wouldn't have worked with this guy. As far as he was concerned, it was over before it started.”

Day finished shrugging off night as they retraced their route to Jamesburg. Fain stewed behind the wheel, struggling to accept the fact that they weren't going to get into Tassajara, that five people, including the abbot, were alone down there.

“Well, I guess that gets us off the hook,” said Thomas, trying to inject some levity to counter their dejected mood.

Much as he was disappointed, Thomas found himself accepting the situation. “We'd spent so much time the night before deliberating. Then we get there and there's really nothing to talk about. It's just not an option.” The truth was, he didn't know how helpful he could have been in Tassajara. “Part of me just felt like I was doing what I should be doing,” he told me later. “But another part of me didn't know why I was doing that, or that I could offer much.”

When the officer said no, those divisions fell away. It's clear now, Thomas told himself, I'm going to support Tassajara from Jamesburg.

 

 

Shundo woke up in Jamesburg just as Fain and Thomas were re
turning. Fain wanted to get back to the city—with Zen Center's revenue from Tassajara choked off by the fire, he had work to do as treasurer. Shundo arranged to ride with Fain back to San Francisco.

The night before, after the Jamesburg house grew quiet, Shundo had mulled over the evacuation, how what happened seemed like random chance but also bore the familiar imprint of his personality. He wasn't one to question authority. It had never occurred to him that when final evacuation orders came, someone might stand up and say no.

Looking back, Shundo felt he would have made the same decision to carry on even if he'd participated in the conversation at Ashes Corner, but it was hard to say for sure. If he'd ridden with Graham and Mako, that might have shifted his inclination to follow Stuart's lead. Instead, Stuart had thanked Shundo in Jamesburg for backing him up.

When David had called Jamesburg to ask whether some people would be willing to come back in, Shundo had had another chance to return. He hadn't taken it. “If you wanted to have a strong response or formed group, then we should have had a different thing happening at Ashes Corner, not just some people deciding to go back in,” Shundo said, describing his thinking at that moment. Shundo had chosen not to return to Tassajara, yet he knew five people was not enough. Never mind fighting fire, how were they going to manage being up all night and all day scouting and patrolling?

Before Shundo left Jamesburg the morning after the evacuation, he talked with Jack Froggatt, who stopped by to brief Jamesburg on current conditions. “He repeated the likely weather, which made everything worse, said there were fires at three places on the east side of the road now, and said it would be four days minimum before anyone went in. I resigned myself to going back to the city,” Shundo wrote in his journal.

They left Jamesburg around ten a.m. The field at the base of Tassajara Road had been converted into a helibase. “It looked like a circus or fair setup, with a big sign at the gate,” Shundo told me, and helicopters and fire vehicles parked here and there. As they headed west toward Carmel Valley Village, they saw signs everywhere, handwritten expressions of gratitude for the firefighters tacked to trees and telephone poles.

Eventually they descended into the Salinas Valley's lush growing fields dotted with migrant workers, then merged into the unruly stream of freeway traffic. A few hours later they arrived in San Francisco, and Shundo felt glad to be in the fog zone for once.

He got to City Center at lunchtime and was bombarded with questions. “There was so much relief to hear what was going on. That's when I really sensed how much people felt excluded. For people in the city, it was all playing out in their imaginations.” Often, with limited information, they imagined the worst.

Shundo had been one of a select few inside events at Tassajara. But now, back in the Bay Area fog belt, he was also outside. And he had to imagine, to worry.

 

 

It was Thursday, July 10, nearly three weeks since the June lightning
strikes. The red flag warning issued by the Monterey Bay office of the National Weather Service (NWS) had predicted that a ridge of high pressure would build over California, that low daytime humidity and poor overnight moisture recoveries in the region, combined with gusty winds, would create moisture recoveries in the region, combined with gusty winds, would create “explosive fire growth potential.”

But by the morning of July 10, the fog approaching the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was also drifting onshore farther south, in Monterey Bay, in a more typical summer pattern, when spiking temperatures suck cool, moist marine air inland at lower elevations. Weather observers in both coastal Monterey and the interior Salinas Valley noted the presence of fog and a temperature dip in their July 10 daily logs. Abbot Steve felt the fog's cooling influence when he drove up Tassajara Road on his morning patrol.

Forecasters at the national Storm Prediction Center and local NWS offices, and incident meteorologists and fire behavior analysts in fire camps, make their best effort to predict weather and anticipate its potential effect on a fire. When meteorological warnings are missed, catastrophes happen. Firefighters can die because they didn't get a weather report.

“Weather is the wild card,” says NWS forecaster Chris Cuoco in
Fire Wars,
a
NOVA
documentary. Cuoco knows well just how critical weather information can be on the fireline. In 1994, he sent out an urgent red flag warning that was never received by firefighters on the South Canyon fire in Colorado. Winds created a chimney effect and fourteen young people died because they were someplace they probably would not have been had they heard the forecast.

“We have National Weather Service personnel out there with their trucks and equipment on fires now, people with PhDs. And these guys are usually right,” Stuart told me. Though relative humidity did drop into the single digits on July 10, the predicted high winds and temperatures that played so heavily in Stuart's decision to evacuate Tassajara never materialized over the Santa Lucia Mountains. For the first time in days, the weather turned in the firefighters' favor.

With Dharma Rain running—and people around the world visualizing the monastery bathed in a protective mist—Tassajara itself felt more like a rain forest than a sauna. For now, the threat of severe weather conditions had died down, but the intense heat of the past few days had helped the fire gain momentum. It continued moving toward Tassajara, burning through the dried-out forest with nothing to stop it—no broad river, no rain. Cooler conditions may slow a fire, but they don't put it out.

 

 

The names of the five inside Tassajara were announced on the Zen
Center's Web site and the
Sitting with Fire
blog on the morning of July 10. Slymon also posted news that the fire was approaching the road “along a broad front” but hadn't yet reached Tassajara. “They do not plan to fight the fire and they are receiving a steady flow of requests not to try to do anything heroic,” he wrote.