Fire Monks (36 page)

Shortly after guest season reopened, David was on the telephone behind the stone office, the same place he'd been sitting when lightning struck, starting the fires that became the Basin Complex. Looking around, he realized everything was arranged just as it had been before. The picnic tables in the student eating area, with jars of hot sauce and salt and pepper shakers; a pile of newspapers, folds worn from being opened and closed, on the round table near the phone; turn-of-the-century photos of Tassajara hanging on the walls. Physically, Tassajara looked the same. And yet, he knew, everything had changed, was constantly changing, each moment a complete transformation. Even when we don't see it. The fire had made that truth undeniably clear.

For days after the fire, a smoldering log or gently smoking pile of leaves would suddenly ignite. The birdhouse ruins had burst back into flame eleven days after first burning. In the same way, the fire's effects continued to smolder, lighting a flame of realization or recognition, revealing a teaching.

The fire was not just flame, David said in an interview a few weeks after the fire. It was “everything that came together during that time frame and that continues to come together. It was the firefighters helping us. It was the wilderness that was burning. It was every member of the community who came forth to meet the moment. It was the smoke in the area, the ash falling down, our fears and concerns for each other. It was how we supported each other, and it was everybody who really, even for a moment, thought about Tassajara” and what was happening for the affected communities and the wilderness around them.

Whenever someone approached one of the five directly to express their gratitude, as happened on many occasions after the fire, their practice became, How can I receive this? Mako often heard guests whisper, “There she is, she's one of the five.” Sometimes Graham gave the gratitude back: “I'd thank them for thanking me.”

When Jane returned to Tassajara the next summer and saw David as soon as she came through the gate, she bowed. “You're probably sick of talking about it, aren't you?”

He smiled. “I am.”

“Thank you” was all she said. “For me it was a big moment,” she told me later, “to be able at last to say thank you to each of them.”

People wanted to express their gratitude. After the fire, nearly half a million dollars in donations poured in to Zen Center. People who visited Tassajara wanted to look into the eyes of those who were there through the heat of it and say, Thank you. It was challenging to be on the receiving end of the outpouring, but it was also difficult not to be. Sonja Gardenswartz, the ten-year resident who hadn't been allowed to stay, interacted often with guests in her position as guest manager. “I don't know” was all she could truly say in response to their curiosity and questions about the fire. “I wasn't there.”

A few days after the fire passed through Tassajara, she had left Jamesburg to cook for several Tassajara retreats being relocated to Mayacamas Ranch, a retreat center near Napa. Gardenswartz lived at Tassajara for another year after the fire, but in 2009 she moved to Green Gulch Farm, feeling the need for a change. “Time has moved on, and renewal is always taking place,” she told me. “I am a participant in that renewal.”

 

 

Long after Tassajara's residents thought they were done with evacu
ations, another advisory came. In the fall of 2008, two official reports by teams of soil scientists, hydrologists, and other post-fire assessment specialists predicted “extreme” risk of flooding and life-threatening rock and mud slides. The reports cautioned that Tassajara would be unsafe to inhabit during the upcoming winter rainy season. The fall practice period, led by Abbot Paul Haller, started nonetheless as scheduled in late September, but all participants and visitors had to sign waivers acknowledging their acceptance of the danger.

For Mako, the threat of being washed away in a flash flood was much scarier than the fire. Later, she laughed about it, recalling one official's recommendation that residents walk around with something tied to them so bodies could be found. There was a lot of gallows humor that practice period. At the work circle I attended in November, David announced that light rains were expected that week, and by the way, he still needed waivers from a few people. Someone made a joke about the killer rain in their midst.

They held it lightly, the danger they were in, but they also did something about it. Using some of the funds from the post-fire donations, Zen Center hired Tassajara's neighbor up the road, Little Bear Tom Nason (Grandpa Fred Nason's son), to fortify Tassajara for the rains that could pour down the now denuded hillsides, with little to slow or absorb them, for the next few years. While the residents went about their intensive practice—meditating in the zendo, working around the grounds, sewing robes, and studying sutras—a work crew placed sandbags and built retaining walls and trenches to divert water and mud away from structures and public areas.

The first winter rains were gentle. The hillsides sloughed rocks and soil, and the creek ran dark with silt. But then, on Christmas Eve day, a quiet time when Tassajara is between monastic training periods and former residents can return to practice, the unexpected happened. “Everyone has been looking to the skies for signs of impending danger. Rain, snow, wind,” wrote Slymon on
Sitting with Fire
. “And so, on Sunday the earth moved to remind us that it too can cause problems.” The quake was east of Salinas, but they felt the house shake in Jamesburg.

 

 

On a clear spring morning a year and a half after the fire, David
settled onto his cushion, arranging his robes. He closed his eyes and breathed in the deep silence of the zendo, penetrated occasionally by throat clearing or a muffled cough. This wasn't his first talk as
shuso
, or head student, during the spring 2010 practice period led by Abbot Steve. David had already given two talks, and he had eighteen pages of typewritten notes for this one, which he placed on a lectern in front of him. So why did he have this tight feeling inside, this suspicion that there was something wrong with the words he'd carefully prepared?

After the opening chant, an evocation of gratitude for the Buddha's teachings and the ability to hear and “taste” them, David opened his notes and began to read. Typically, Dharma talks are not read, but he always prepared his. He didn't want to risk having all thoughts drain from his brain while a roomful of people waited for him to speak—and not just to speak, but to say something perceptive and inspiring.

He'd entitled this third shuso talk “Surrender.” He started it by confessing his own “addiction to control”—citing as an example his desire to manage “the quality of care” the monastery and guests received from students. As he read on, he felt a strange disconnection with the material, a dislocation from his listeners, many of them good friends. But about ten pages in, he reached the section about his practice of “don't-know mind” during the fire. Something broke loose in him. He began to weep.

During the 2008 fire, he'd felt deeply responsible for the safety and confidence of others and acutely aware of how little he could actually control. But as he gave his shuso talk—twenty months later—he finally felt “the full weight of don't know, of truly having nothing to rely on,” for assurance that Tassajara and its residents would survive the fire.

David felt the attention sharpen in the zendo as he spoke, the upright antennae of bodies tuned to his words. He sensed that people wanted him to talk to them in an unscripted way, about what was happening right now. For several minutes, he couldn't speak at all. He sat still, but inside he was falling. No wings, no parachute, no ground even to land on. Yet he felt as though he had to continue, for the sangha. He reached for his notes and resumed reading.

David felt raw for days after the talk. “At the time I didn't realize that it was the sangha's turn to carry me,” he told me later, “and I wasn't ready to be that vulnerable.” In the end, the experience schooled him on his own topic. You can't make surrender happen. You can only let go. In fact, “there can be no ‘you' in wholehearted surrender,” David said.

Nearly two years after the fire, the mountains around Tassajara were felted green. But David still remembered how they'd looked just burned, down to bare earth. It was as if he could finally really see them. “It was so beautiful, the way that a dying person can be,” he told me. “The mountains in this form expressed a profound teaching for me: When everything extra is burned away, what's truly essential in our lives is exposed in all its beauty and defenselessness.” What's truly essential cannot be defended. Vulnerability is the only solid ground beneath one's feet.

In May 2010, I walk up Tassajara Road with Abbot Steve and
David, noting the contrast between the evidence of burn and the fierce display of new growth. Hillsides studded with blackened trunks have filled in with grasses and chaparral. Whorled lupine, morning glories, and hummingbird sage bloom profusely in the carbon-rich soil.

David takes short, quick steps on my right, while Abbot Steve strides long-legged on my left. For awhile, we talk about the fire—David tells me that a new district ranger visited a few weeks back, interested in cultivating a relationship with Tassajara, that she and Mako had discovered that both of their mothers are Japanese. But then our conversation drifts, widens. I don't have a recorder, a notebook, or a list of questions. I simply enjoy their company as we move together up the road.

Telling the story of the fire, I came to know Tassajara and its residents in a way I hadn't before. Different people told me different stories. Some called into question the trustworthiness of telling stories at all. Memories shift, expand, and fade. A narrative is always in flux. Meaning exists only in relationship—to the storyteller, the listeners, the moment within which the story is told.

During the book's writing, I went through my own fire of sorts—or rather, the fire I'd waited for finally arrived. In 2006, my husband had been diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer called multiple myeloma, in an early, slow-growing, “smoldering” stage. For three years, we monitored his disease, watching for signs of progression but holding off on treatment—a passive approach typical with smoldering myeloma. When the cancer kicked into high gear in 2009, the year after the fire at Tassajara, and John started treatment, I felt relieved, even as I realized how little I could share of his experience, how much less I could control. Waiting for the moment of action, it turned out, was harder than meeting it when it arrived.

So I understood how it must have felt for the monks waiting for the fire. I knew myself the power of actually meeting something, not being before it or behind it but simply
in
it. When cancer spreads, when the fire finally arrives, there is no question where your life is at that moment. You become a fire monk.

 

 

By the start of the summer 2010 guest season, the compost shed
and flats area woodshed at Tassajara had been rebuilt. Dozing one afternoon at the pool, I awoke to the sound of rocks skipping down the hillside and slamming into the wooden barrier fence built to receive them. There was a new pool bathroom and birdhouse cabin, each lovelier, in some ways, than the structures they replaced. Someone had propped the plaque that used to rest in the old oak tree's branches against the side of the new birdhouse on a ledge. “The entire universe is the true human body / the entire universe is the gate of liberation,” it still proclaimed, a crack running diagonally across from one burned edge to the other.

Dharma Rain—“the thing that saved our bacon, hands down,” as Colin once put it—had been dismantled, the piping and connectors stored in the shop. The fire shed had been restocked and a portable satellite phone purchased for emergencies. All new buildings had metal roofs. A weather station antenna measured temperature, wind speed, and humidity hourly from the top of the stone office. Plans for refurbishing the standpipe system and installing a permanent set of rooftop sprinklers were in the works.

David had moved back to San Francisco and taken on the position of Zen Center secretary—one of four officers of the temple, in charge of communications. Graham was halfway through a two-year tenure as head cook at Tassajara, and Mako had become the new director. She kept Monkeybat's ashes in a small ceramic bowl on her altar—the cat died in the spring of 2009 and was cremated out at the flats. Colin had returned to Texas. Abbot Steve came to Tassajara for short visits or to lead a summer workshop, always pausing at Ashes Corner on his way in and out.

That July, I watched the summer residents lay hoses in their first fire drill, slightly awkward in their gear. They took the exercise seriously—it was not the real thing, but everyone knew it
could
be.

 

 

Each time I arrive at Tassajara, I listen for the creek, for the first
moment when I hear its rush through the valley. The creek is the voice under every other at Tassajara, and in this story. Purely just itself, never an idea of itself, it flowed through the whole fire event, through each of Tassajara's fires—past, present, and future. It flowed through the hoses and the Dharma Rain sprinklers. It revived tired bodies and filled every bowl of soup or cup of tea sustaining each human thought, feeling, and action. Named for a place it cannot stay, the creek is always there—the constant teacher and perfectly humble hero of
Fire Monks
.

In this book, I have tried to evoke the many lessons of the 2008 fire at Tassajara—about the basic safety of the valley and the importance of preparation; about the need to rediscover our relationship with wildfire; about recognizing impermanence, being one's own authority, and finding away through instead of a way out; about the effort and courage it takes just to pay attention. “Don't chicken out!” Suzuki Roshi said to his students during long sesshins. This isn't the antithesis of firefighter Stuart Carlson's motto, “When in doubt, chicken out.” It's more like:
Whatever comes, turn toward it
.