Another firefighter left in 1999 with these parting words: “If you want to live here, you’d better learn to live with fire.”
Diane Renshaw, an ecologist who began practicing at Tassajara in 1978 when the mountains were recovering from the Marble Cone burn, agrees. “Fire is one of the primary ecosystem processes that defines the character and beauty of the Santa Lucia Mountains,” Renshaw told me. And you can’t talk about fire in California, she added, without talking about chaparral, a plant community that is so widespread, it could well be the unofficial state ecosystem.
In the daily status reports issued by the incident management team, there is a designated space for noting fuels involved. For the Basin Complex, the first word was always “chaparral,” followed by timber and “dead loading” from diseased tan oaks. Covering more than seven million acres in the state, chaparral is an umbrella term for a variety of drought-tolerant and fire-adapted plants that thrive in the warm, dry summers and mild, wet winters of Mediterranean climate zones. The chaparral found around Tassajara includes maroon-barked manzanita, chamise, ceanothus, and the distinctive spearshaped blooming yucca, which exists in a profoundly cooperative relationship with a moth that lays its eggs exclusively on the yucca’s white petals and, in turn, pollinates the plant.
What chaparral lacks in height—it grows dense and relatively low—it makes up for in depth. The roots of “old growth” chaparral can work their way through crevices in the bedrock to depths of twenty-five feet or more, where cool temperatures and moisture prevail. Different species of chaparral have different methods of post-fire regeneration. Some resprout, some reseed, some send shoots above the soil from underground bulbs. But all chaparral species are energy-efficient, using available resources wisely. After a fire, chaparral shrubs take advantage of increased available light and soil nutrients.
According to Renshaw, the scientific community has learned much about fire since Smokey the Bear started educating the public in 1944. How fire behaves and the role it plays differs from one ecosystem to another. Within one designated land area, such as the Los Padres National Forest, there are many different plant communities. Conifers such as Coulter and ponderosa pines grow primarily at the higher elevations. Thin-barked Santa Lucia firs favor fire-resistant rocky areas and wet canyons. The steep drainages around Tassajara, especially those that face south, are carpeted with chaparral, while the road is fringed with oaks. Down in the riparian corridor of the Tassajara valley, tall sycamores and alders shade the creek. Big-leaf maples thrive on the lower canyon slopes.
Such ecological diversity makes for a complex fire ecosystem—one that includes some species that do not tolerate fire, others that have developed regrowth strategies to cope with it, and some that depend on a wildfire’s smoke and heat for their survival. In the plant realm: Whispering bells, golden eardrops, and the radiant orange fire poppy bloom only after fires. In the animal kingdom: “Fire beetles” (Melanophila) mate and lay their eggs in the hot wood of burned trees just after the flames have died down.
It’s true that living in the Ventana means learning to live with fire. But learning to live with fire is tricky, because there isn’t one kind of fire. There are crown fires, slow creeping fires, wind-driven fires, stand-replacement fires, smoldering fires. There are fires in chaparral, fires in pines, fires in oak savannas, fires in buildings made of wood, clay, and stone. There is fire in the center of each human heart. Knowing what kind of fire you live with, a Zen student knows, is an endless, constantly changing, moment-by-moment process.
Word of the situation at Tassajara had begun to spread, in part because of media attention. Days after the June 25 evacuation, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, tipped off by an evacuated resident, had driven down the road with a photographer to interview residents. On June 28, a week after the lightning strikes, the published article noted the cooperative efforts of monks and professional crews in the 1977 and 1999 fires and indicated that the residents hoped for a rerun.
The fridge in the courtyard where guests store personal items was full of wine, but the fourteen residents left at Tassajara in late June 2008 went for the Clif Bars and Hansen’s cherry soda instead. With the Fenner Canyon inmate crew digging fireline, the residents’ work schedule had eased slightly. They’d begun to hold meetings around a block of tables pushed together in the dining room so they could consult fire maps and share ideas.
“The spirit is good and the group very solid,” noted David Haye, who goes by his Dharma name Shundo, in his journal. A forty-four-year-old expat Brit who was previously the fire marshal and work leader at Tassajara, Shundo had left at the beginning of June to be head cook at City Center in San Francisco. He was one of the four who’d arrived at Tassajara to help with fire preparations just as the student evacuation caravan was pulling out on June 25. Among the small group now charged with protecting the monastery, he felt glad to be on the team, if also a bit guilty for the privilege.
It made sense for Shundo to be there. As a former fire marshal, he could show new resident fire marshal Devin Patel the ropes. A cyclist and runner, he knew every hiking trail within a ten-mile radius. And many of the others who’d remained at Tassajara were his peers. Shundo sat his first practice period in 2002 along with David and Mako. Having “come up through the ranks” and been on senior staff together, they shared a strong connection, Shundo told me more than a year after the fire, his English accent softened by years spent abroad.
Typically, every summer day at Tassajara brings new arrivals and departures. During the fire preparations, the number of residents at Tassajara hovered between fourteen and twenty-two. But sometimes the total number of people there, including firefighters and volunteers, fluctuated dramatically. When the inmates arrived, David had recruited four students who’d stayed near Jamesburg to return to Tassajara to help with food preparations for the additional sixty-five people. Anyone David asked to return had to be physically capable and willing to stay for the fire’s arrival.
By the morning of Saturday, June 28, the remaining senior staff members had identified a group of nine who would stay if yet another paring down became necessary. “As soon as we were down to fourteen,” David told me later, “the question came up: How are we going to organize? Who is going to make decisions?” Normally, decisions that affect residents fall to the senior staff, temple officers who meet briefly every morning before work meeting. But half of the senior staff had been evacuated. Those who remained settled on a group of six residents, made up mostly of senior staff, to function as a decision-making team. This “core team” included David, Mako, Graham, Colin, fire marshal Devin, and Shundo.
Late in the morning on June 28, a CAL FIRE battalion chief appeared at Tassajara, saying that all “nonessential” people should pull out. With a fire map spread out on the hood of his truck, he pointed to the fire’s creeping eastern perimeter, nearing the Church Creek divide north of Tassajara, and beyond it, the road. The prior evening, a visiting safety officer and Jon Wight, the captain of the Fenner Canyon inmate crew, had emphasized to residents the liability of Tassajara Road. Wight had said the road would be “extremely dangerous” as the fire approached. No one would be able to travel on it, either to enter the valley or to leave. Now, having personally observed how prepared residents were, Wight came to their defense. In the end, the chief didn’t pressure residents further to reduce their numbers. For the time being, all fourteen would stay.
At this point, fire could come from any direction. And yet, observed Shundo, “it looked like the fire was building up and getting closer, and then it seemed to peter out. There was a definite dip.” The firefighters clearly had intended to impress upon them that this was serious business. But the fire was still three days away—as it had been estimated to be for more than a week, earning it the name the Three-Day-Away fire among Tassajara residents.
On Sunday, June 29, David walked into the kitchen and told Mako that the Fenner Canyon inmate crew was packing up. They would be gone befo
re lunch.
“What do you mean they’re leaving?” Mako asked, arms crossed, big eyes opened wide. She and her skeleton kitchen crew had just made enough three-bean salad to feed nearly eighty-five people. “I thought they were supposed to stay for a few days. We’ve got so much food.” The town truck that had brought in kitchen helpers had also ferried in extra supplies in anticipation of feeding the firefighters.
“I thought so, too,” David said, shrugging.
The Fenner Canyon inmate crew had accomplished a lot in a couple of days—mostly digging trenches on the steep northern slopes for firebreaks—but inmates and monks had not had the kind of time they’d had during the 1999 fire to forge a bond. This time, the inmates slept in sleeping bags on the concrete deck at the pool. They didn’t work together with residents so much as in parallel. One inmate told Mako he was a Buddhist, but there were no boots lined up on the zendo shoe rack as there had been in 1999. There was still so much work to do, and the zendo was mostly empty.
Still, crew captain Jon Wight recalled sadness and frustration when their orders came to pull out on June 29. It was the second time he’d been told to leave Tassajara. The first was only an hour after they’d arrived on June 27, but he’d argued with the commander and received permission to stay. He’d originally been told his crew was going down to Tassajara to ride out the fire. The residents had welcomed his crew with warmth and respect. “Driving away,” Wight said later about leaving, “I won’t say I cried, but I wanted to. I had such a good feeling about the type of people they were and the way they treated us. I felt like we were abandoning them.”
Later that morning, firefighters and monks gathered in the courtyard, circling around a large upright boulder. A student who’d returned after the resident evacuation to help in the kitchen had made cookies for the inmates. He distributed a brown paper bag of cookies to each of the men. “Just be careful when you bite down,” he announced, unable to resist, “there’s a tiny metal file in each cookie.”
The inmates laughed, though their wardens weren’t amused. After that, everyone took a group picture in the parking lot—orange suits clustered in the middle, flanked by uniformed crew leaders and wardens, and monks in work clothes. The monks thanked the firefighters for their hard work. Wight assured them that another crew would be on the way if the fire moved closer. Then the engines pulled out, and the residents were left alone.
Four
IN THE SHADOW OF ESPERANZA
It is hard to know what to do with all the detail that rises out of a fire. It rises out of a fire as thick as smoke and threatens to blot out everything—some of it is true but doesn’t make any difference, some is just plain wrong, and some doesn’t even exist, except in your mind, as you slowly discover long afterwards. Some of it, though, is true—and makes all the difference.
—NORMAN MACLEAN, Young Men and Fire
Sunday, June 29, eight days after the lightning strikes
At Jamesburg, the phone kept ringing. The far-flung sangha called for updates and with offers to drop everything and drive into the valley to help. Chris Slymon, Sitting with Fire’s creator, broadcast a thank-you, saying, “We are unable to accept any offers to help work at Tassajara as we cannot increase the number of people we have staying down there.” The post’s larger font drew attention to the unwritten message: Do not come to Tassajara. He suggested that those who wanted to help could open their homes to the displaced.
Some could not be so easily dissuaded. One Zen student who had lived at Tassajara in the 1980s decided to drive down Tassajara Road. Videocamera in hand, he shot footage destined for YouTube of smoke-churned skies above Tassajara and interviewed eighty-five-year-old local Esselen “Grandpa” Fred Nason, who just a few days earlier had ridden his horse in front of a fleet of bulldozers rehabilitating old firelines from the 1977 and 1999 fires, to safeguard Native American sites in their path.
But few ventured past the closure signs at the Los Padres National Forest boundary. For many, checking Sitting with Fire regularly was enough—or was the only option. Slymon passed along whatever he knew to readers hungry for information about what was happening down at Tassajara.
As the month of June drew to a close, he summarized the situation. The Indians fire was “almost-but-not-quite controlled,” but the Basin Complex fire was burning out of control, extending its northern, southern, and eastern perimeters. “The current plan for controlling the fire to the north and east,” reported Slymon, “involves the construction of a large box within which the fire is allowed to burn and within which they work only to protect structures such as Tassajara . . . There are many scenarios for protecting Tassajara that vary with the direction in which the fire approaches.” The one constant was unpredictability. Fire behavior, and firefighting strategies, couldn’t be set in stone because they depended so completely on weather.
“Well, life goes on (toilet paper and tissues),” he wrote, speaking of supplies still being driven in to Tassajara for the resident fire crew, “and life changes (electrolyte powder, oxygen and hoses, hoses, and yet more hoses).”
Talking about the weather may be a euphemism for conversation with a lack of substance, but nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to wildfires. Weather makes or breaks fires. Big fires create their own weather. When firefighters and civilians die in wildfires, weather plays a pivotal role.
Most recently, and most directly relevant to the Basin Complex fire’s management, was the 2006 Esperanza fire in Southern California. Ignited by an arsonist and stoked by hot, dry, October Santa Ana winds, the wildfire killed five USFS firefighters defending an empty, half-built residence on a ridgeline west of Palm Springs.
As is usually the case in tragedies, several factors lined up to create the conditions for devastation. There was a temperature inversion in place that morning. When fire entered the canyon below the octagon-shaped house where the firefighters of Engine 57 had stationed themselves, superheated flames—1,200 degrees Fahrenheit—punched through the inversion layer. A twenty-four-thousand-foot plume acted as a chimney, drawing winds into the fire downwind of the house and blowing walls of flame up the canyon at speeds of 50–70 mph toward the house. Flames wrapped around the angled sides of the structure, leaving the crew nowhere to hide. The extreme heat and winds created an “area ignition”—all combustible material in the area caught fire simultaneously, without needing to come in contact with flames. The firefighters’ Nomex, flame- and heat-resistant clothing that chars at 824 degrees Fahrenheit, disintegrated.
The captain of Engine 57 must have determined that the spot, perched on the rim of a steep canyon, was safe. So what went wrong?
The Esperanza fire made its fatal run up a steep drainage. The 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana and the 1994 South Canyon fire in Colorado had already provided grave examples of what could happen in that kind of terrain. In addition, crews on the Esperanza fire—there were several engines in the area—had trouble reaching one another on the radio because assigned frequencies were overwhelmed by radio traffic. They resorted to using unassigned frequencies, where those managing the fire couldn’t hear them.
In the world of wildland firefighting, the firefighter who arrives first at a fire usually names it and assumes command of the incident, at least initially. Who is ultimately “responsible” for a fire depends on who owns or manages the land where the fire starts or spreads to. The Esperanza fire start, and the accident site, were in CAL FIRE’s area of responsibility. A CAL FIRE engine arrived first, at just after one in the morning. As the fire burned into the San Bernardino National Forest, the CAL FIRE battalion chief functioning as incident commander requested U.S. Forest Service support. Five USFS engines, including the doomed Engine 57, were dispatched within a half hour.
According to an investigation conducted by the USFS and CAL FIRE, unified command for the fire was established (and radio broadcast) at three ten a.m. An independent federal inquiry three years later, however, found that unified command wasn’t
put in place until after the fatal burnover. Either way, here is the bitter irony of Esperanza: Five USFS firefighters, not mandated by their agency to provide structure protection, died defending an empty residence burning within the jurisdiction of CAL FIRE, whose mission clearly includes protecting property.
Esperanza means “hope” in Spanish, but this was no hope-giving event. Rather, it seeded doubt and an abundance of caution. Why did our men die? fire commanders had to ask. And there was no good answer. No good response but to refocus on firefighter safety going forward. Basin Complex IC Mike Dietrich spoke at the memorial service for the Engine 57 firefighters when he was still fire chief for the San Bernardino National Forest. In 2008, it’s unlikely that Dietrich or any other firefighter had forgotten the stricken faces of family members at those firefighters’ funerals.
The USFS firefighters who’d come to Tassajara since the start of the Basin Complex fire mentioned the Esperanza fire often. We can’t put our men down here, they’d say. Not with one road in and out. Not to protect structures.
It got under CAL FIRE captain Stuart Carlson’s skin. “They kept on saying we lost these firefighters on this fire in San Bernardino County. So what they were saying is we’re not doing structure protection. Well, they’ve lost a lot more people doing wildland firefighting throughout their history, so why are they doing wildland firefighting?”
There were ways in which Tassajara evoked Esperanza. The steepness and remoteness of the terrain. The access issues. But there were also key differences. The burnover in Southern California had happened on a ridge—a dangerous place to be during a wildfire. Tassajara is situated in a riparian corridor. Fire would have to work hard to descend into the relatively moist Tassajara valley anywhere near as hot and fast as it had swept up the ridge on the Esperanza fire.
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