Fire Monks

by Colleen Morton Busch

  The student whose San Francisco apartment had burned down returned to a temporary home at City Center, with six small boxes containing his entire worldly possessions and fresh memories of the sounds of his neighbor banging around in the hallway, attempting to escape the burning building. He felt helpless, useless, and resolved to get back in to Tassajara as soon as he could.

  For Judith Randall, a member of the senior staff who hadn’t been asked to stay, the time at Jamesburg was the hardest part. As the zendo manager, or ino, the fifty-nine-year-old priest had sat morning and evening zazen while most residents worked outside. Sometimes she was the only one in the meditation hall. She had carefully removed ritual objects, statues, scrolls, and portraits from the zendo, founder’s hall, and abbot’s cabin. Randall had coordinated the morning’s evacuation at Tassajara, directing residents to their assigned cars, then she’d purposely driven the last car out with only one passenger so that she could pick up the stranded if there were any breakdowns on the road. It wasn’t until she arrived at Jamesburg and was confronted with the question of where she wanted to go that the full weight of the evacuation had hit her. She couldn’t think. Eventually she drove to San Francisco to be near her teacher, taking a van full of evacuees.

  On Sitting with Fire, there were pictures, links to official fire reports, satellite images, Google Earth maps of fire activity—a wealth of information for anyone curious about what was happening at Tassajara. “The short story is that Tassajara is currently threatened by two wildfires,” read Slymon’s first post, published the afternoon of the resident evacuation. The Indians fire did not seem to be moving their way, but the Basin Complex fire continued to mount a direct threat, burning south and east toward Tassajara.

  Which meant it was also burning toward Jamesburg. The day after the resident evacuation, Jamesburg was put under an “advisory” evacuation. This first of three alert levels warns residents to prepare for possible evacuation. The next, “voluntary,” is a more forceful recommendation to leave. The final level is “mandatory.” Residents are told to evacuate immediately—as Tassajara was on June 25. Though California residents cannot legally be forced to leave, even in a mandatory evacuation, the language conveys a sense of urgency and authority to strongly encourage them to do so.

  The Basin Complex fire was under what is called “unified command” within the ICS, which meant that fire management decisions, while ultimately the responsibility of the incident commander, included input from the USFS, the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, and CAL FIRE, the state firefighting agency. From June 23 to 25, the twice-daily status summaries from the incident management team were consistent, predicting a threat to Tassajara in the next twelve-hour period and fire spread toward Tassajara Road thereafter. The Basin Complex fire’s acreage continued to increase—20,600 acres had burned by the evening of June 25. Containment estimates hovered at a mere 3 percent. Incident Commander (IC) Mike Dietrich had his hands full in Big Sur, where sixteen homes had just been lost.

  On June 26, IC Dietrich told a reporter for KAZU, an NPR affiliate in Monterey: “This country is straight up and down and brushy and very unsafe.” Since it was likely that the Indians and the Basin Complex fires would also merge and become one fire, Dietrich explained, “that’s a strategy that we’re looking at.” The “strategy” under consideration seemed to be: Do nothing and let the fire dictate its course. “There’s no good place in the middle of the wilderness to fight the fires,” IC Dietrich said. In 1977, the Marble Cone fire had spread through the Ventana despite significant efforts to contain it. This time, Dietrich and his cohorts on the incident management team planned to let the fire burn inside a big box drawn by the old 1977 “dozer lines”—wide firebreaks cut by bulldozers.

  Thirty-one years after the Marble Cone fire, the incident commander on the Basin Complex fire invoked that fire as a strategic model for how to fight this one. Indeed, there were many similarities. Like the Basin Complex fire, the Marble Cone fire was lightning ignited. It was an aggregated fire—the result of several smaller fires that burned together. At 178,000 acres burned, it was the biggest fire the state of California had ever seen. Estimates of the combined acreage for the 2008 Basin Complex and Indians fires were approaching that record figure.

  For Tassajara residents, too, the 1977 Marble Cone fire provided a gauge for what to expect. One of the first things David had done after the lightning strikes was to read the Marble Cone fire log. Tassajara had been ordered to evacuate in 1977 as well. After initially following those orders, residents had made covert trips into Tassajara at night. One group had even driven through a roadblock while some students distracted the officers posted there. A couple of days after being told by the USFS not to expect help, hotshots—the gritty elite of firefighting—had arrived at Tassajara.

  Hotshots hike extreme terrain on foot, carrying thirty-five-pound packs, chainsaws, and other tools to do the backbreaking work of digging a trough of bare earth to catch flames and stop their spread through fine surface fuels like grasses, twigs, pine needles, and leaf litter. They also light backfires to consume fuels and create a safety zone—an area that has burned won’t burn again.

  At Tassajara, when the main fire was still off in the distance, the hotshots lit the hill behind the monastery, across the creek. They disappeared either up- or downstream to continue their work as a crew of residents extinguished spot fires from drifting embers inside Tassajara. Once that large area had burned, there was less chance of a firestorm in the canyon, and a group of residents returned to prepare for the main fire’s arrival. Jane and Leslie rode in the last vehicle to return to Tassajara from Jamesburg before fire closed the road.

  For two weeks in 1977, Zen students cut firelines and set sprinklers on the roofs of the central buildings. From time to time a fire crew arrived, took baths, ate some of that truckload of peaches, then hiked upstream. When the Marble Cone fire finally burst into the canyon over Flag Rock one August afternoon after several weeks of lingering nearby, a small fire crew was at Tassajara. The crew boss invited then abbot Richard Baker to do the honors of igniting a backburn on the slope across from the stone office. The monks who worked alongside firefighters to defend Tassajara became known as the Tassajara “cool shots.”

  Reading the Marble Cone log in 2008 gave David reason to believe that help was coming, eventually. The record also provided a glimpse of what to expect after a fire passed through—as well as what couldn’t be expected but could happen anyway. At the end of August 1977, the skies above Tassajara were still smoky and spitting ash. That fall and winter, hundred-year rains streamed down the charred watershed and flooded Tassajara. The creek turned chocolate brown and swelled several feet. Some twenty-five hundred sandbags were placed around buildings, and a few hundred creekside trees were felled to prevent damming. Tassajara Road, which had been closed for days during the fire’s passage, washed out in six places. Food and supplies had to be ferried across impassable areas on garden carts and wheelbarrows. The students worked through the winter and spring practice periods to protect Tassajara from the post-fire floods. Then, on the final day of the spring 1978 practice period, the zendo—the original zendo, the one that was a bar before it was a meditation hall—burned to the ground.

  The fire started in the middle of a ceremony in which the abbot answers a question about the teachings from each member of the sangha. Both questions and answers indicate understanding. Within a few minutes, fire engulfed the building where Suzuki Roshi had given his talks, seated in front of the old fireplace converted into an altar; where before that, whiskey had warmed the bellies of hunters; where even before that, an Esselen Indian might have made a meal of acorn mush over a campfire.

  A monk visiting from Japan tried to dash back into the burning building to save the two-thousand-year-old stone Gandharan Buddha statue on the altar, probably smuggled on a donkey cart from inside the borders of present-day Pakistan or Afghanistan before Zen Center purchased it from an American art dealer. �
��First I stopped him,” Jane told me. “Then I changed my mind. We walked back in together and half the ceiling was burning, so I pulled him out again.” The next day, the two sat staring at the remains of the zendo. “I’m sorry I didn’t let you go in at the beginning to get the Buddha,” Jane said to the Japanese monk.

  The monk looked at her, then pointed at the old altar. “Buddha,” he said. He pointed at the ashes: “Buddha.” Then he pointed at Jane. “Buddha,” he said again.

  Because of problems with the emergency water pump after the floods that followed the Marble Cone fire, the resident fire crew at Tassajara in the spring of 1978 wasn’t able to get water on the zendo fire in time. They’d saved Tassajara from a wildfire only to lose its most significant building the following spring, probably because of a faulty pilot light on a propane gas refrigerator. No one was injured, yet nothing was left of the zendo but fragments of stone walls. Drums and bells melted in the flames. The Gandharan Buddha toppled from the altar. Some who were at Tassajara at the time, like resident fire crew head Ted Marshall, recalled that the Buddha shattered into pieces, none larger than a teacup. But Roger Broussal, the restorer who worked on the statue at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, told me it had split into several large chunks, and pieces of schist had stripped away “in layers or sheets, almost like shale.”

  After the new zendo was built, the Buddha was placed on the altar, on a pillow with red and gold accents, where he has sat for three decades. Two feet tall, with a chiseled, slender torso, he’s a fit Buddha, not rotund or androgynous. His eyes are half-lidded, the left eye set slightly higher than the other by the original sculptor’s hands. Aside from chips in his right ear and knee—some pieces were lost forever in the zendo’s ashes—there is little evidence of the damage. His lips press together in a hint of a smile.

  Within twenty-four hours of the resident evacuation on June 25, linked lengths of PVC pipe zigzagged across the dining room roof at Tassajara in a white, angular web. In 1977, David had learned, students used garden hoses, sprinklers, and blankets to keep the roofs wet. This time they constructed something more complex yet elegant. When they turned on the jury-rigged sprinkler system for the first time and it worked, drawing water through the standpipe system from the twenty-thousand-gallon spring-fed water tank up the road and showering it over the rooftops, plant manager Graham smiled and said, “Ah, Dharma Rain.”

  When CAL FIRE captain Stuart Carlson arrived that afternoon, he admired what Tassajara’s residents had already accomplished—the rooftop sprinklers, the firelines, the cleared ground around the solar panels and cabins. He’d been headed to the Sierra Nevada mountains for a weeklong backpacking trip when he got a call asking him to come to Tassajara to advise the residents and help them prepare for the fire. “I’m on my way,” he said. He brought his eighteen-year-old son with him.

  Stuart had been coming to Tassajara for years to give first-aid training and assist in fire safety evaluations and drills. He first arrived as a Zen student in 1987—but his connection to meditative practices predated that. When he was growing up, Stuart was introduced to meditation by his godmother, a member of the Franciscan order, and later to Zen by a brief encounter in the San Bernardino National Forest in the 1970s with poet and natural world spokesman Gary Snyder, who once worked as a fire lookout. Snyder read his poem “Control Burn”—“Fire is the old story. / I would like, /with a sense of helpful order, / with respect for laws / of nature / to help my land / with a burn, a hot clean / burn”—and Stuart’s ears pricked up.

  Having grown up in rural Santa Cruz County, he’d been in the woods his whole life. His first and favorite family dog was a coyote his father had nursed back to health from a gunshot wound. He spent summers at Pico Blanco Boy Scout Camp near Big Sur, racking up merit badges. When Governor Jerry Brown created the California Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1976, Stuart was among the first group hired. He wanted to “heal” the forest. He worked at Pico Blanco on a CCC crew during the 1977 Marble Cone fire.

  “My poor mom got a house full of Vikings,” the fifty-three-year-old youngest of three boys told me when we talked at Tassajara in June 2009. He’d returned to Tassajara the summer after the fire to give his annual first-aid training. A drizzle had turned into a downpour and we’d sought shelter in the student eating area. The kitchen crew chopped vegetables nearby at two long tables.

  “We were all surfers, wandering around with dirty bare feet on her white carpets,” Stuart recalled with a sympathetic laugh. Both of his parents were activists, though his father’s politics were considerably more radical than his mother’s. His father was an animator at the Walt Disney Studios and a founding member of the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Guild during the House Un-American Activities Committee era. From his father, whom he described as “a hard-core labor man and true conservationist in the Teddy Roosevelt mode,” Stuart inherited the desire to take care of others, even at risk to himself.

  In 1984, a few years after signing up as a seasonal firefighter with the California Department of Forestry (CDF), now known as CAL FIRE, Stuart found out his girlfriend was pregnant. He applied for a permanent position for financial stability but, like many firefighters, got hooked by the “esprit de corps and feeling of family” as well as the sense of being useful to his community. He was promoted to captain in the early 1990s. As station captain at Soquel Station, near Santa Cruz, Stuart oversees a four-person engine crew. He’s responsible for the upkeep of equipment, vehicles, and the station itself, budget management, and the training and supervision of firefighters.

  “I’m hard on them at first,” Stuart told me. “It’s easier to be a jerk and then a nice guy later on.” It’s not so easy to imagine Stuart playing tough. He’s gregarious, with a warm, tenderhearted demeanor. He has soft eyes, wavy hair, a flirtatious smile, and a quick, slightly nervous laugh. He studied traditional Japanese karate for years but is more surfer than black belt, agreeable and amiable by nature.

  Under the surface, though, there’s the pain Stuart has seen over a firefighting career that’s spanned thirty years. The worst are the tragedies close to home, the people he knows—like the local teacher whose rayon nightgown brushed against a gas burner on her kitchen stove and burst into flame. “Even her hair burned off her head,” recalled Stuart, who was first on the scene.

  Stuart’s had a few close calls himself during his career, but they weren’t on his mind when he showed up at Tassajara with his son—and plans for his girlfriend to join him over the weekend. He wasn’t going there in any official capacity. “The Forest owned the fire,” he told me.

  The Forest—the Los Padres National Forest and the USFS—“owned” the fire because it was on their land. Stuart works for CAL FIRE, and even though the agencies cooperate on fires in mutual aid agreements, Stuart readily admitted that the USFS and CAL FIRE don’t always get along. In part, the friction is a result of a difference in mission, especially when it comes to structure protection. “The Forest Service is a land management agency, a resource management agency. We’re a resource protection agency. We’re a fire department. Structure protection is what we do.”

  That might mean dashing into a burning building, but it also means preparing structures so they aren’t fire hazards in the first place. It means clearing brush so that when a fire moves through, the only fuels available to it aren’t anywhere near buildings. Grunt work, most of it. But Stuart knew the work ethic of Zen students. They made his most gung ho firefighters look lazy. Given the prep work that residents had done already and the creek’s constant water supply, they were in a good position to make a stand and defend Tassajara. It would take only an engine or two to back up the monks.

  Fire season was off to a running start. Three major fires had raged in Stuart’s home county of Santa Cruz already, and it was only June. Stuart sensed it was going to be a wild season. After a dinner of squash-and-mushroom casserole, roasted vegetables, and pear crisp that first night at Tassajara, he went to bed early, lulled t
o sleep by the creek.

  On June 27, the day after Stuart’s arrival, sixty-five firefighters descended into Tassajara to help cut firebreaks. Members of a CDF/CAL FIRE inmate crew from Fenner Canyon, the men worked for a dollar an hour and a day off their sentence for every day worked on a fire.

  “Hey, Captain Carlson!” one of them cried out, recognizing Stuart from his days leading a California Youth Authority crew.

  Some of the inmate firefighters couldn’t scrub the look of bewilderment from their faces. Many had grown up in the inner city and had never seen a landscape anything like this. But it wasn’t the first time a prison crew had found themselves at the monastery.

  In 1999, when the Kirk Complex fire threatened Tassajara, both inmate and professional crews dispatched to assist the residents were prepared to spend weeks at Tassajara if the road closed. Some staffed the kitchen, helping to turn out meals that featured tofu, or “white Spam,” in lieu of meat. Firefighters helped out with cabin repairs, soaked in the hot plunge at the bathhouse at day’s end, and hung their laundry on the line. When zazen instruction was offered to the firefighters, rows of battered leather boots lined the zendo shoe racks.

  Subdued by early rain, the 1999 fire never made it to Tassajara. Their last night at the monastery, firefighters moved from their tents into guest rooms. The next morning, as they prepared to pull out and clouds gathered overhead, a crew captain protested, “It wasn’t supposed to rain!” Gaelyn Godwin, director of Tassajara at the time, wrote later about the bond that developed between firefighters and monks and caught the media’s interest—a bond of mutual kindness, concern, and generosity.