After driving up the road with a few others to get another view of the skies to the west, Shundo returned to the student housing area, where residents had held a drill the prior evening after dark, in case fire entered Tassajara from downcreek, at night. Though the scenario was unlikely, the exercise had not inspired confidence. Water pressure from the standpipe system had been weak, even though the ground trends downhill there. The hose lines, the same color as the dirt path, had been difficult to see.
Shundo folded hoses, drained and ready, accordion-style so they’d be easier to handle. His work could be undone that afternoon when the grounds got watered, but he didn’t mind. As with Zen practice, the point wasn’t to create some static state of permanent perfection. The point was to be perfectly ready for whatever comes.
Mako stood in the walk-in, surveying the supplies she had to work with. There was still plenty of food: boxes of lettuce, potatoes, leeks, crates of apples and pears, all labeled with the date they’d entered Tassajara. Her mood was lighter than it had been for days. The night before, when she had come back from the drill, tired and dispirited, Graham had finally talked to her. “I don’t know what to say to you,” he’d said. It wasn’t much, but it was something. It opened the door.
She sensed a shift in him, a soft malleability rather than resistance. And she was right. Remembering the moment later, Graham told me, “One of the amazing things about being in a relationship is it affords you the opportunity to do the opposite of your tendency, to just be able to completely drop the self and say, Okay, right now I’m going to see what happens when I take care of this person, drop off that part of me that wants to go away, withhold, have space, or argue more.”
Water over fire—that was the symbol on the large water tank just up the road that fed the standpipe system. A fire needed to be wet to be subdued. Anger needed to be cooled. But not always. Sometimes a forceful energy is best met with its opposite, other times with its mirror reflection. Fire could be fought with fire—as evidenced by a backburn. And fear, Mako knew personally, could be met with fearlessness.
When Mako was six years old, her best friend’s father molested her. For years afterward, he often exposed himself or masturbated in front of her. From the beginning, however, Mako resolved not to be intimidated. As a young teenager, she deliberately cultivated feeling invincible. She’d tell her parents she’d be sleeping over at a friend’s house and then stay out all night, wandering downtown Baltimore, often alone. “There’d be guys hanging out on street corners, and I was just this thirteen-year-old girl, but I’d walk right through them. I would not cross the street.” It was exhilarating to tightrope between the fear she actually felt and the appearance of fearlessness she projected. “Looking back on it,” she told me later, “it was a façade, kind of like fake it till you make it.”
Eventually, when she was about sixteen, Mako confronted her friend’s father. “I basically told him off, and that was it for masturbating in front of me or anything like that.” The man acknowledged and apologized for his inappropriate behavior. Mako forgave him. One might expect that she never saw him again, but that’s not what happened. The two developed an occasional friendship that lasted into Mako’s young adulthood. When Mako attended a rape survivors group briefly in college, this fact baffled the other women in her midst. Victims generally don’t befriend their molesters, and the fact that Mako did so was viewed with suspicion. But perhaps in an early demonstration of her affinity for Buddhism, Mako was more inclined to let go of harm done than to hold it tightly. Hours spent interviewing Mako left me with the impression that her experiments in fearlessness weren’t just a façade. She possesses a genuine aura of imperturbability.
Which isn’t to say she is invulnerable. Once, Mako was sitting on the front steps of City Center with a friend who made her laugh so hard that she cried. Another friend who lived there walked by. “Mako, are you okay?” she said. “I can’t believe you’re crying. I’ve never seen you cry. I didn’t think you could cry!” The offhand comment stung. “I can always go back to, I’m strong, I’m competent, or something like that,” Mako told me. “But I don’t want to be seen as this person who isn’t vulnerable.”
The fight with Graham had started in part because of her vulnerability. She’d wanted more understanding, communication, mutual aid. Part of her work in their relationship was staying vulnerable, staying with the pain of conflict instead of just refusing to feel it.
She carried a box of potatoes and a box of leeks from the walk-in. She tossed the potatoes into a bowl of water and went to look for a scrub brush. If she had time after making the soup, maybe she could get outside and dig fireline or help tend to the pumps.
On the afternoon of July 6, in high heat but clear skies, Shundo jogged up the trail behind the hill cabins to investigate a report of flames on the ridgeline west of Tassajara. By the time he got to the solar panels, thick gray-and-purple swaths of smoke veiled the ridgeline, but again, no flame. He took some pictures of the skies and airtankers dropping retardant above the junction of Tassajara Creek and Willow Creek to slow the fire’s upstream spread.
The following day, George Haines arrived at Tassajara. Haines had worked thirty-seven years in CAL FIRE’s San Benito–Monterey Unit, from firefighter to chief, before retiring in 2009. He was an engine operator on the 1977 Marble Cone fire and had been to Tassajara before. After taking a tour around the grounds, he told David, Abbot Steve, and the others that it was definitely defendable. “I saw all the work they’d done, the pumps, the rooftop sprinkler system, the fuel reduction,” Haines told me months after the fire. “It was my opinion that it was survivable, and I told them that. I told them it would be ugly, but I did believe it was survivable.”
The residents drilled again on July 7, this time at the flats, with better results. Haines happened to be there for part of it. He was struck by how harmoniously they worked together. Later, he told me he wished he could have them as a crew. “They were a fire brigade. It was impressive. It really was.”
Before leaving Tassajara, he repeated his promise to try to get professional backup. Bolstered by the fact that he had taken the time to come visit, and by Stuart’s assurances, Tassajara’s residents had renewed faith that help was coming. Hopefully it would arrive before the fire did.
Faith. Hope. These are not words frequently heard in Zen. When they are used, they mean something slightly different from the usual interpretation. “There’s nowhere you can actually plant yourself if you recognize that things are completely flowing and changing and the next moment is unknown,” Abbot Steve told me in one interview. “Faith in Zen Buddhism is being willing to live face-to-face with the unknown and have confidence that however that goes is your true life.”
There is an old Zen saying, “Great faith, great doubt, great effort—the three qualities necessary for training.” The phrase points to the dynamic interplay of mind-states and action at the core of Zen practice. It takes a certain kind of faith just to practice Zen. Not faith in something. Faith alone. Faith in groundless, shifting, unpredictable reality.
Just to make our best effort in each moment is Zen, Suzuki Roshi once said. When you have great faith, make an effort. When you have great doubt, make an effort. “Moment after moment, you should say, ‘Yes, I will,’” he told his students, chuckling as he often did during his talks.
On Tuesday, July 8, branch director Jack Froggatt came to Tassajara bearing good news. A fire crew was coming down to wrap the buildings with a brand of reflective, fire-resistant aluminized fabric called Firezat. “They’ve got fifteen rolls,” Froggatt told the abbot and director. “You can tell them where you want it.” The crew was from Indiana. Firefighters from all over the country had flocked to California in response to the governor’s call for help.
David and Abbot Steve looked at one another, mirroring surprise. Ken Heffner had said something when they met in Jamesburg about people wrapping buildings and evacuating and coming back to find the structures intact. But
they’d gotten the impression that the wrap was prohibitively expensive.
“That’s great, Jack. And what would that cost us?” asked Abbot Steve, eyebrows arched.
“No cost,” said Froggatt. “And if the fire comes through while they’re here, well . . .” The implication was that the Indiana crew would be able to help fight the fire.
By noon, David was showing the crew bosses around Tassajara and prioritizing buildings since they didn’t have enough Firezat to cover everything. They chose structures that were on the periphery or next to steep slopes and dry brush—or that were particularly vulnerable, like the shop, with its lumber stacks and propane tanks. One unlucky squad headed up the eighty stone steps to wrap the birdhouse and the other hill cabins, while others worked in semishade, wrapping the backside of the founder’s hall and the abbot’s cabin. They didn’t wrap the central buildings—the zendo, kitchen, dining room, or stone office—or the bathhouse. Abbot Steve drafted a letter to Heffner on the office computer while the crews worked, reinforcing Tassajara’s extensive fire preparations and the fact that residents did not plan to leave. He thanked Heffner for his part in sending the Firezat.
Before Froggatt left that afternoon, he programmed frequencies for the branch of the fire he directed into Stuart’s walkie-talkie. “So you can stay in touch,” he said. The command frequencies Froggatt shared would put Stuart in contact with the people making strategic decisions, while the tactical channels would keep him abreast of action on the ground.
The mandatory evacuation for Big Sur had been lifted. Residents returned to their homes without the threat of arrest. The fire worked its way east toward Tassajara through the forest, but the arrival of the Indiana crew indicated that maybe Tassajara would have some professional help after all.
The only one with mixed feelings about the crew’s arrival was Mako. When David told her that they would be staying, it meant she somehow had to make the Thai dinner she’d planned—with butterscotch pudding for dessert—feed twenty more mouths.
On Sitting with Fire, people had begun to debate the wisdom of residents’ staying in the valley during the fire. “If the fire services do not feel safe enough to fight the fire there and they are highly experienced professionals, how is it believable that a small group of volunteers ‘can ride out the fire safely if it arrives’?” wrote one blog reader, referring to a July 5 post by Slymon.
Having seen the Los Angeles Times article that quoted fire marshal Devin Patel saying, “You can’t actually burn down Tassajara. Fire can never touch Tassajara’s heart,” Devin’s father posted a message to his son: “I am proud of what you are doing. Please take very good care of yourself. I love you.”
The improvised cyber sangha stretched across oceans and national borders. In Toronto, Graham’s parents, Walter and Joanne Ross, relied on the blog for updates between reassuring phone calls. One of those calls was on the afternoon of July 8. Graham told his parents that if worse came to worst, they had a “safety zone” in the rock-walled stone office, stocked with food, water, first-aid supplies, and an oxygen tank—at the time, no one had thought about the tank’s potential to explode if the stone office caught on fire. Mako was fine, Graham told his parents, they were both fine. If anything, they were impatient for this fire to come.
Graham’s confidence comforted his parents, but they couldn’t always expect to hear his voice, even when there wasn’t a wildfire to prepare for. Tassajara has three phone lines—a radio phone and two satellite lines. The radio phone is unreliable, the satellite connection staticky and subject to an awkward transmission delay. A demanding monastic schedule and the fact that up to 120 people shared just three phone lines meant that even under ordinary circumstances Graham didn’t call Toronto as often as he would have liked to. The Rosses didn’t try to talk Graham out of staying, in part because he reassured them that Tassajara was safe but also because they knew they couldn’t persuade him.
But two of the nineteen residents at Tassajara on July 8 did evacuate that day. In the case of one of them, a loved one’s concern ultimately convinced her it was time to go. And David had requested that those who didn’t want to be there for the duration leave now so willing people could be brought in to replace them. Neither of the two residents who departed on July 8 were comfortable with the fact that those making decisions on their behalf hadn’t established a clear trigger point for evacuating all of Tassajara. “For their own sense of safety, some people wanted us to clearly delineate the point at which we’d all leave. A lot of us on the core team felt that it was hard to say,” David told me later. “We wanted to respond to events as they arose rather than draw a line in the sand.” How could they make a decision now about a moment they didn’t yet know?
In Zen, “don’t-know mind” is the only kind of mind that is true. When you practice don’t-know mind, you let go of the need for knowing and acknowledge how little you can ever actually know. This is hard work. Humans don’t particularly want to admit the limitations of highly developed cognitive function. But not knowing and knowing are actually not so far apart. Like faith and doubt, they’re intertwined. “Not knowing is most intimate” goes an oft-quoted teaching from a ninth-century Zen master.
On the morning of July 9, eighteen days after the lightning strikes, David launched Google Earth on the stone office computer. They’d had nothing like this during the Marble Cone fire, he knew from reading the logs. Phone communication had been knocked out for weeks. The only information they had on the fire came from what they could see with the naked eye. That fact made it all the more amazing now to David that he could zoom in on an image of Tassajara and see new fire detections picked up by satellite or infrared-sensitive pilotless planes called drones. Clusters of red dots scattered over the ridges northwest of Tassajara, marked by a yellow thumbtack. Of the ten new detections in the last twelve hours in the Church Creek valley, the closest appeared to be about a mile from Tassajara Road. David counted fourteen ignitions up Tassajara Creek and eight in the Willow Creek drainage, south of Tassajara.
Don’t-know mind doesn’t mean willful ignorance. It was better to know where the fire was, that it was making its approach. They still didn’t know which arm of it would reach Tassajara first. They just needed to stay calm, alert, and ready for anything. Add “Think clearly” and “Act decisively” to those imperatives and, taken together, they make up one of the Ten Standard Orders every firefighter has to know by heart.
Six
FIRE IN THE CONFLUENCE
When we know something and rest in that knowing we limit our vision.
We will only see what our knowing will allow us to see. In this way experience can be our enemy.
—ZOKETSU NORMAN FISHER
Wednesday, July 9, eighteen days after the lightning strikes
By the morning of July 9, the Basin Complex fire had charred more than eighty-six thousand acres—an area roughly the size of sixty-five thousand football fields—at an estimated containment cost to date of nearly twenty-eight million dollars. The six a.m. report from the incident management team noted “poor overnight humidity recovery” as a cause for concern, the lack of moisture in the air likely to add more blackened acres.
Around nine a.m. that morning, Shundo Haye and Bryan Clark set out for the peak of Hawk Mountain. It was already stifling—too hot even for Shundo, who usually relished Tassajara’s heat. On the shadeless, steep trail that climbs fifteen hundred feet above the solar panels, his heart thumped, his legs dragged, his fingers stiffened and swelled. “It was the hardest climb we’d done,” Shundo told me later.
At the top, through the haze, they observed a fat plume of smoke rising from the ridge separating Church Creek and Tassajara Creek. They stood looking at it for a while, catching their breath. Neither stated the obvious—now the fire had only to work its way down into the Church Creek drainage and make an uphill run on the opposite slope to reach Tassajara Road. But how long would that take? This fire wasn’t in a rush, or at least it hadn’t
been for the past couple of weeks.
After a minute or two, Shundo’s heartbeat calmed and his breath no longer came in gulps. But he felt as if he’d run a marathon—in a pair of borrowed sneakers; he had somehow neglected to bring his own to Tassajara and wore Colin’s old cross-trainers.
Their mission that morning went beyond scouting. They’d carried up some Firezat for covering the radio phone antenna, one of Tassajara’s few links to the outside world. The signal traveled by line of sight from mountain to mountain, but there wasn’t a clear line of sight in the Ventana. The ridgelines intersected and bisected one another at eccentric angles. The radio phone’s functioning had always been patchy at best, but they would do what they could to protect it.
Graham had announced at the morning work meeting that a repairman was arriving later that day to switch the satellite phone—the source of Tassajara’s other two phone lines—to a different signal source. “The forest is on fire,” he’d said straight-faced, “so they thought they’d come do some maintenance.” The timing couldn’t have been worse, but if they didn’t make the switch now, they’d lose the satellite link entirely. Tassajara would be even more isolated than it already was.
Shundo and Clark took the rolled remnants of Firezat from their packs, covered what they could of the radio phone antenna, relay box, cable, and replacement battery boxes on the ground, and secured it with tape. By necessity, the antenna stood in a prominent, vulnerable place, poking up from an exposed ridgetop. If fire stormed uphill, as it had in the Esperanza fire, the wrap would do little good.
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