Fire Monks

by Colleen Morton Busch

  On the evening of July 2, the residents met in the guest dining room at Tassajara. Abbot Steve invited them to share how they felt about their situation. Everyone wanted to stay. Some even expressed impatience for the fire to arrive. The Basin Complex had grown almost ten thousand acres in a mere twelve hours, to more than sixty-one thousand acres. Full containment was expected to take a month. Low fog and clouds moving overland from the ocean had kept the fire in check, but temperatures were expected to soar in the coming days, creating conditions less favorable to firefighters and more favorable to fire.

  The residents didn’t know it yet, but ten miles west, the fire had already flared, jumping the dozer lines and prompting a mandatory evacuation in Big Sur that displaced fifteen hundred residents, shuttered twenty businesses, and shut down a thirty-mile stretch of Highway 1.

  Five

  GREAT FAITH, GREAT DOUBT, GREAT EFFORT

  When you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind . . .

  You should do it completely, like a good bonfire.

  —SUZUKI ROSHI, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

  Thursday, July 3, twelve days after the lightning strikes

  The air horn sounded, a strange, shrill tone piercing the valley. Then came the planned announcement over the radios: “Fire at the hill cabins!” The residents converged on the equipment shed below the zendo to practice suiting up in jumpsuits, boots, hard hats, goggles, and waist packs for carrying water, a radio, and fire shelter. Then they split off—the pump crew running to pumps at the creek and the pool to charge the standpipe system, the hose crew lugging hoses up the stone steps and rolling them out. The ready-for-anything crew stood by, an extra set of hands, ears, and eyes.

  They perspired in the heavy cotton CDF coveralls—hand-me-downs from Stuart, well insulated but less resistant to radiant heat than the Nomex firefighters wear now. Their goggles fogged, and they had to resist the temptation to pull them off. A dry, steely thirst thickened in their throats. Shundo gave the signal that the hose crew was ready, both arms raised like a referee’s on a touchdown, and the pump crew opened the lines. CAL FIRE captain Stuart Carlson wasn’t around during this drill by the hill cabins—he’d left Tassajara briefly to take his son home and host a Fourth of July party—but the residents backed one another up on the hoses as Stuart had taught them: one person at the nozzle and a second just behind or halfway down the hose length. Over the radio, lookouts flagged the flames: “Roof of hill three! Spotting between the solar panels and the birdhouse!”

  It was just a drill, a test of the residents’ readiness. Except for the withering heat inside their fireproof gear, none of it was real, but it made Tassajara fire marshal Devin Patel proud to watch how everyone mobilized. “That was a very sweet time,” he told me more than a year after the 2008 fire. “We bonded as a community.”

  A Tennessee native, Devin had been surprised, and not exactly excited, to be given the position of fire marshal. Typically, the part-time job involved testing fire extinguishers and smoke alarms weekly and holding the occasional training or drill. In the early part of the summer, before the fires, it had been hard to recruit people to train on the various fire crews. He’d held only one or two drills. But since the start of the Indians fire, Devin had been attending senior staff meetings, even though he wasn’t actually on staff at Tassajara. Now he found himself supervising the fire preparations. “I was walking around doing this management thing, which was funny, because I’d just learned what people should be doing. I was just one step ahead.”

  At a meeting that afternoon in the dining room, two weeks after the lightning strikes, Devin didn’t say much. In addition to him, the group included many members of the core team—director David, head cook Mako, plant manager Graham, head of shop Colin, and fire scout Shundo—as well as Leslie James, who was down from Jamesburg, Abbot Steve, and fifty-six-year-old former USFS firefighter Kim Leigh. Leigh often came to Tassajara during work periods to do painting projects, and David had called him to ask for his help preparing for the fire.

  Most of the residents present at the meeting were senior staff. Most were priests. Most had been at Tassajara for a lot longer than Devin’s one year. Both Shundo and Mako had served as fire marshal. “They were all pretty active problem solvers. There was a lot of discussion,” Devin told me. “I definitely hopped in when I had an idea, but I was the quietest one.” At twenty-eight, he was also the youngest.

  David wanted to hear from each of them. What is your personal commitment to staying? What factors do you need to take into account in considering whether or not to stay? They went around the room, raising concerns about whether they had the right number of people at Tassajara now, or the right individuals, and about the possibility of a firestorm in the valley.

  “I feel safe,” said Devin when it was his turn, “unless an expert tells us otherwise.”

  It was an opinion many in the group shared. David wanted to leave behind a thorough written record of the Basin Complex fire, like the ones he’d been reading from the Marble Cone and Kirk Complex fires. Sometimes he had trouble deciphering his own slanted handwriting, so after the meeting he typed up his notes on the stone office computer.

  “The consensus of the group,” he wrote, “was that despite the unknowns, we had a lot of confidence in our safety here should the fire pass through, and therefore were all willing to stay.... This was, of course, as long as Stuart or Kim or other firefighters themselves felt the situation was safe enough to stay. If they said leave, we’d leave.”

  While everyone else was out digging fireline and raking leaves, Mako had to cook dinner. She loved being head cook, but as a former fire marshal—and one who had filled the position so thoroughly—she struggled with the juxtaposition. She knew how the pumps worked, where all the standpipes were. Though her body had begun to tire from the physical strain of kitchen work, she wanted to be outdoors, preparing Tassajara alongside everyone else, including her partner, Graham, who as plant manager was charged with safeguarding the water supply, the pumps, the communications systems, and the solar array.

  On the one hand, Mako knew that there were cooking fires and wildfires and that both deserved equal respect and attention. It was important—vital, in fact—to fortify the monks for their labors. “But there was also this feeling, everyone’s doing the necessary work, and I’m in the kitchen,” Mako said later of the weeks leading up to the fire’s arrival. There wasn’t anything to do about the feeling necessarily, except to watch it come up.

  Mako couldn’t remember who or what had started an argument between her and Graham, but exhaustion was the likely cause—the duress of nearly two weeks spent in a continuous state of alertness and preparation, waiting for the fire to come. For Mako, there was the added edge of being confined to the kitchen while Graham got to move around and do the “necessary” work. A friction between them had built until it generated enough heat to flare into a full-blown conflict.

  When Graham and Mako met in 2003, they had discovered a mutual interest in the martial art aikido. They had much in common. Both had spent summers unleashed in the wild, rural environments of their grandparents’ homes—Graham in one of the last remaining old-growth red and white pine stands in Ontario’s Temagami region, Mako in coastal New Jersey. Both had a deeply rooted, ongoing interest in studying the mind.

  Yet it wasn’t unusual for the couple to find themselves in disagreement. There were times when they’d been up most of the night in a fight and still had to go to the zendo in the morning. At Tassajara, a couple in conflict is in conflict in the middle of a very intimate space, with nowhere to go to get away.

  As head cook and plant manager, Mako and Graham hardly saw each other during the day under normal circumstances; their days off overlapped only once every three weeks. They’d catch up at night, back in their cabin. But sometimes the couple deliberately spent time apart. During a practice period sesshin—lasting anywhere from five to nine days and conducted mostly in silence—it
wasn’t unusual for Mako and Graham to live separately or at least carry the silence of the intensive back to their living quarters. “When we’re in sesshin we don’t really talk to each other,” said Mako. “Sometimes we don’t interact at all.” Such strictures were more for Graham’s sake than hers. “He needs more time alone and more space to himself than I do,” she said the summer after the fire. “I’m pretty extroverted and have never sought after quiet. It’s kind of weird that I’m in a Zen monastery.”

  During the fire, they were often too tired to talk at night. Sometimes Mako would want to connect, and he would just want to read or need to sleep.

  They were both under pressure. “It was smoky down here, so we were constantly not getting enough oxygen. And we were so thoroughly tired,” Mako told me later. It was a different kind of tired from the tiredness that comes during sesshin. They hadn’t had a day off or been out of the valley in weeks. “Graham got snippy and irritable,” she recalled. Something he said, or didn’t say, got under her skin. She reacted. “He got defensive. I got angry. It escalated from there.”

  It was July 3, their anniversary, and by day’s end they weren’t speaking to each other.

  As of July 4, two weeks after the lightning strikes, the Basin Complex fire had not resulted in any fatalities. However, a volunteer firefighter had suffered a fatal heart attack while working a fireline in Mendocino County. And two bulldozer operators were injured when their machines rolled. Often it’s not fire that directly threatens the life of a firefighter. It’s a rolling rock, a falling tree, a truck tipping over a road edge, too much smoke, an overdose of adrenaline that stops the heart.

  But what does happen when a firefighter gets caught in the flames? This is one of the questions author Norman Maclean took up in Young Men and Fire, reconstructing the race uphill between a wildfire and fourteen smoke jumpers in Montana’s 1949 Mann Gulch fire: “First, considerably ahead of the fire, you reach the verge of death in your boots and legs; next, as you fail, you sink back in the region of strange gases and red and blue darts where there is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink into the main fire that consumes, and if you are a good Catholic about all that remains of you is your cross.”

  Norman’s son, John Maclean, uses plainer prose in Fire and Ashes to describe firefighter fatalities in a 1953 fire in the Mendocino National Forest in California: “An advance wave of superheated gas entered their mouths and noses and seared the delicate tissues of the nose, mouth, and esophagus involved in breathing, which ceased to function. Deprived of oxygen, the men quickly fell into unconsciousness and died within seconds.” It wasn’t the fire that killed but the furnace blast of air that accompanied it.

  As a firefighter, Stuart had seen what could go horribly wrong. What firefighters call a “slide tray” of haunting images sometimes kept him awake at night.

  Once, he’d lit an escape fire on a deer trail to save his crew. “Just like Young Men and Fire,” he told me, referring to the Mann Gulch blowup in which the foreman, Wag Dodge, lit the grass ahead of the main fire raging upslope toward his crew to create a safe, burned-out zone. Dodge survived, as did two other firefighters who managed to outrun the fire, but most of the crew perished. They’d thought their foreman had gone mad, adding fire to fire, and many ignored his command to step into the burned area and lie facedown on the smoldering earth while the main fire passed.

  Wag Dodge’s quick, lifesaving thinking has long fascinated firefighters. Escape fires became standard practice after Mann Gulch. But others outside the firefighting world have been drawn to Dodge’s story as well—historians, songwriters, scientists, poets, and those merely curious about his startling access to insight, to knowledge he didn’t know he had until it materialized at just the right moment and saved his life. While the fleeing firefighters clutched at the driving thought that they had to run to stay alive, Dodge was able to stop running and open his mind to the wide field of possibilities, from which the solution to his problem dropped into view. Both Dodge’s example and current neuroscience attest that a pliant, nongrasping mind is the hallmark of insight. It’s also a fine description of the mind in zazen: relaxed yet alert, flexible and porous.

  When Stuart ordered his young crew—they were California Youth Authority wards doing time for crimes committed as minors—to follow him into what has come to be called “good black,” they did. Helicopters dropped water on their heads. But Stuart didn’t tell this story at Tassajara. He wanted to instill confidence in the residents. And everything he saw and heard led him to believe this fire was going to come backing down slow and tame.

  When a new incident management team for the Basin Complex fire rotated on duty July 2, the branch director assigned to the area drove down to Tassajara to look around and meet the residents. His name was Jack Froggatt.

  David introduced the two firefighters. “Stuart’s an old friend of Tassajara. He taught us everything we know,” he said. Then he left them alone to talk.

  “How long you been with Kern County?” Stuart asked. Froggatt’s T-shirt said “KERN COUNTY FIRE.”

  “Since ’84.” Froggatt looked to be in his fifties, strong and fit, the gray hair more a testament to a long career in a field of risk than a concession to aging.

  “We were always getting sent down to the Kern when I was a crew captain,” Stuart told Froggatt, referring to the river sometimes called the Killer Kern. The waterway originates in the Sierra Nevada range near Bakersfield. “One of the fires was in a canyon. It was the steepest climb I’ve ever done with a fire crew.” Stuart gestured to the acutely angled, rocky slopes towering over Tassajara. “You should feel right at home here.”

  “Glad to have you as a resource,” said Froggatt.

  The feeling was mutual. Stuart had never met Froggatt before, but he’d met Froggatt’s country. And that told him much about Froggatt. He was a veteran, an old hand at rough country. But he didn’t swagger around or try to bully anyone. He listened. He asked questions. He seemed, Stuart told me on several occasions, to appreciate what Tassajara is about.

  Until he read a status report from the incident management team that noted the threat to Tassajara, Mike Morales had never heard of the place. After reading more on local blogs, the former CAL FIRE captain who retired early owing to an injury started following the story of the monks’ fire preparations. He wrote about the efforts at Tassajara on his site, Firefighter Blog.

  Morales had been tracking the California wildfires since June on his blog. Chief among Morales’s concerns was the lack of resources. “This is the widest spread of resources I can recall,” he wrote on June 22, the day after the lightning strikes. Two days later, he observed that there were still only 380 personnel assigned to the Indians fire. “Under normal circumstances CAL FIRE would have 1,500 people swarming this fire.” When the number of personnel on the Basin Complex fire jumped to 1,000 on June 29, Morales still wasn’t impressed. “All considered this is a very small army for a fire this size. Troops are scarce statewide so it’s improbable this one will ever get adequately staffed.”

  Three days before the lightning strikes in June, Casey Judd of the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association had testified for a Senate oversight committee on the readiness of federal land management agencies—such as the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees national forests like the Los Padres. Judd told the committee that the agencies were not sufficiently prepared for the 2008 fire season. Federal fire programs were increasingly under the management of people with little or no expertise in wildland fire, said Judd, and funds meant for fire preparedness and fuels reduction had been diverted to nonfire programs and projects.

  These trends may explain in part why there didn’t seem to be enough firefighting resources to go around in the summer of 2008—that and the extraordinary, unanticipated burden of more than two thousand wildfires. But Morales argued that the Ventana Wilderness deserved better. “If the fires meet in the middle on their own, I have no problem. If the fires are bei
ng directed to meet, I suggest the forest is a victim of mismanagement.” Even after the number of firefighters assigned to the Basin Complex fire doubled in late June, Morales lamented that “two thousand firefighters is about a quarter of the manpower they need to make a dent.”

  As the projected acreage for the Basin Complex fire continued to climb in early July, Morales consulted GeoMAC, an Internet-based fire-mapping application, alongside topographic maps he’d spread out on his desk. GeoMAC occasionally hiccuped and showed spot fires burning in the Pacific Ocean, but simple geographic common sense told him that if the fire grew, it had to grow inland, away from the coast, toward Tassajara.

  “As the week progresses,” he wrote on the Fourth of July, “firefighters will find themselves working away from Big Sur proper and farther into the Ventana Wilderness.” And they would do so in brutal heat. Temperatures for the beginning of the following week were forecast to bust ten-year records. “Folks at the Tassajara compound,” he warned, “have renewed reason for concern.”

  On July Fourth, an NBC Nightly News crew drove down the road, filmed Tassajara residents clearing leaves and testing out Dharma Rain, and interviewed Abbot Steve. The footage aired the following evening as part of a larger report on the California fires, particularly those threatening Santa Barbara and Big Sur.

  That evening, at a festive dinner of pizza, ice cream, and fizzy drinks in the dining room, David allowed himself two slices of pizza. He tended to gain weight in the summertime at Tassajara, when leftover guest food was available at the back door of the kitchen for endless snacking. Cherry scones. Pecan pancakes. Double chocolate cookies. He knew well the false comforts of food. When he was ten years old and living with his father again, he had weighed 152 pounds.