Shundo had heard some firefighters at Tassajara say that the doomed crew should never have been on that ridge. But Tassajara wasn’t on a ridge. It was down in a valley, cut through by a creek whose cold waters he planned to soak in when he returned from the peak. That was his habit on the hottest summer days even when there wasn’t a fire.
The night watches, the miles spent running trails in Colin’s Nikes, the smoke, and the waiting were all wearing on Shundo. Yet there was nowhere he’d rather be. He’d talked to his ex-wife on the phone. She’d told him someone had suggested on the blog that they rotate new people into Tassajara to spell those who’d been preparing for the fire. Shundo had shot down the suggestion as nonsense. Why would they leave now, when they’d learned so much about fire, about pumps and hoses and working together like a fire crew? They were in a groove.
After all this time, and with the fire finally in sight, Shundo couldn’t imagine leaving. His ex-wife had teased him, pointing out his attachment. Shundo didn’t deny it. He’d lived in the city and practiced with sirens and homeless people and stinking exhaust. He’d lived at Tassajara and practiced with the biting blackflies and no Internet and no toast—his favorite—for breakfast. But he’d never had a chance before to practice in the realm of fire. He wasn’t sure he knew what that meant, but he knew it meant something. He could feel the energy of the community’s shared concentration beneath his tired feet, the falling away of the inessential, the crucible of the unknown. He could see that the fire was a field test for Zen practice.
In his journal, Shundo had tried to describe a feeling of complete and fundamental integration, the way the residents’ task connected them to the land, to one another, to themselves, to the essence of all things. “We become elemental,” he’d written. What would they become, he wondered, when fire reached the valley? They wouldn’t fight fire; they’d meet it. In one hand a fire hose, in the other the vajra, or diamond, sword of what is called the bodhisattva vow—to save all beings before oneself. It’s a pledge that can never be completely fulfilled, yet anyone who formally takes Zen Buddhist precepts, whether priest or lay practitioner, vows to refuse his or her own liberation from suffering until every other being is enlightened.
One of Zen’s most beloved bodhisattvas is Manjusri, the bodhisattva of wisdom. Often depicted sitting on a lion, holding a sword in his right hand, Manjusri symbolizes insight, a clear-eyed, deep knowing that transcends conceptual and dualistic thinking. Sometimes his sword—used to cut through delusion—is on fire.
But bodhisattvas come in many forms—like the firefighter who gives up his vacation to help his friends prepare for a wildfire. Shundo felt safe at Tassajara in part because Stuart did. “He’d been there and done it before,” Shundo told me later. “We really depended on him.” Unlike the various fire officials who’d given the residents a talking-to, painting vivid worst-case scenarios to scare them, Stuart didn’t seem overly concerned about the road being cut off—he’d driven it many times, and like Shundo and the other residents, he knew that the road was always a risk, fire or no fire. If someone had a heart attack at Tassajara, it would take at least an hour just to get that person to an ambulance at Jamesburg. One time a hiker had broken a femur and had to be airlifted to a hospital. Risk was always present, whether acknowledged or not.
“It’s not pretty, but that should do it,” Shundo told Clark as they finished the wrapping and inspected their work.
Shundo watched his footing carefully on their descent. He’d ground the soles of Colin’s trainers to a smooth, slick finish in the last couple of weeks. Still, the way down went much faster than the way up—the opposite of fire.
When they passed the wrapped solar panels and reached the first patch of shade at the hill cabins, Shundo took a long drink of orange-flavored Gatorade. There were cases and cases of it now at Tassajara, brought in by the fire crews. The residents had pronounced it the official drink of the fire. It had gone warm in his pack, but he drank it anyway, then headed straight for the creek.
The routine nightly task of ensuring that all kerosene lamps are extinguished, called “fire watch” at Tassajara, is an adaptation of a centuries-old practice in Japanese villages. Nonetheless, most Zen temples in Japan have burned to the ground not once but several times. This is due in part to building materials—most temple structures are wooden—and to the traditional use of fire for light and cooking. At Soto Zen founder Eihei Dōgen’s own monastery, Eiheiji, where Suzuki Roshi’s son Hoitsu Suzuki is now the head teacher, the temple gate is flanked by six-hundred-year-old cedar trees, but none of the current structures are more than a few hundred years old.
Especially during the tumultuous fifteenth-century Onin War in Japan, many temple fires were started intentionally—by monks in rival sects. While contemporary Buddhism in the West carries strong pacifist sensibilities, in medieval Japan warriors meditated in the morning, then headed off to battle with sharp swords in their belts. Zen found a home among the samurai. Says G. B. Sansom in Japan: A Short Cultural History: Zen encouraged “a useful type of practical wisdom, and thus no doubt made it easy for clever Zen teachers to deal with military men who like simple answers to difficult questions.”
In one legendary sixteenth-century episode, the abbot of a temple near Mount Fuji sheltered enemy troops of the warlord Oda Nobunaga and refused to turn them over when Nobunaga demanded it. In retaliation, Nobunaga forced the monks into the gate tower and set it on fire. The abbot is said to have turned to the monks and offered these words from the Blue Cliff Record, a compilation of koans, or teaching stories: “Calm meditation doesn’t require peaceful surroundings. If the mind is clear, fire itself is cool.”
But just as wildfires sweep the forest and promote new growth, temple fires created opportunities for sculptors, builders, and those skilled in art restoration. Despite the loss of relics, and sometimes lives, newer structures often surpassed those that preceded them. Creation and destruction are not leagues apart. They are, rather, in league, arising together. And Buddhism’s own edifices, no matter how glorious, are not free from impermanence.
Yet it would be a mistake to think that acceptance of impermanence and the practice of nonattachment, another guiding Buddhist principle, requires allowing a monastery threatened by fire to burn. “There’s nonattachment,” Abbot Steve told me after the fire at Tassajara, “but there’s also not turning away. Nonattachment doesn’t mean you separate yourself from things.”
At the core of Zen is the practice of taking care. It starts with your own body and extends outward to all phenomena and beings—to the sangha, or community, the temple objects, buildings and grounds, and, ultimately, the land and its natural processes, including fire. It’s a particular kind of caring, free of rigid expectation, free even of hope.
Not to say the residents at Tassajara didn’t hope to save it. They did. Tassajara is a living record of Zen in America. Suzuki Roshi’s generous spirit supports every floorboard, peeks from behind every door. To lose the place where he walked around laughing and encouraging, the buildings where he shared the teachings that have touched so many lives, would be heartbreaking.
But hope can be held too tightly. Zen cultivates a mind that doesn’t tether itself to any fixed view or perspective—the belief that the buildings at Tassajara must be saved or, by contrast, that physical structures aren’t important and worth saving. Hope is fine, as long as it doesn’t lead to inflexibility. “When you’re living in the present moment, you’re not so involved in hope or invested in a particular outcome,” said the abbot. You do what needs to be done simply because it needs to be done, accepting that your actions may not bear the fruit you intend—and that this does not render the actions themselves fruitless.
A clever Zen teacher might say that standing back and letting the monastery burn belies a kind of attachment to the idea of nonattachment, that trying to save it when it could all burn anyway is true nonattachment. In trying to save Tassajara from the fire—or your own life from disaste
r—you can’t be sure you will. In fact, you can lose everything you love in a moment. And that’s not a reason to give up. If anything, it’s a reason to turn toward the fire, recognizing it as a force of both creation and destruction, and to take care of what’s right in front of you, because that’s all you actually have.
Around one thirty p.m. on July 9, residents and the members of the Indiana fire crew gathered in the shade for a group photograph in front of the gatehouse. Shundo, fresh from his dip in the creek, handed off his camera to someone else to take the picture, which looks like a post-vacation snapshot. The mood is relaxed, collegial, as if they’d just finished an expedition together and were now back at home base, celebrating. No one in the photo knew how quickly and dramatically things were about to change.
In the photo, David squats in the first row, in front of Abbot Steve, who stands behind him. Stuart sits on the grass with his legs out straight, boots crossed, at the opposite end of the front row from David, with his arm around his girlfriend. The core team is scattered around, monks interspersed with firefighters—a bit hard to tell apart unless you know the people. Only the abbot and the director, at the edge of the group, wear hipparis. Members of the Indiana crew, which included a couple of women, wear dark pants and T-shirts, like most of the residents.
“When other crews came,” Mako told me later, “they looked like they were about to jump into the wilderness and fight fire, but the Indiana crew didn’t look like that at all.” They weren’t wearing heavy-duty fire gear. They didn’t have radios, maps, and other firefighting accessories strapped to their packs. They wore sunglasses and baseball caps, not goggles and hard hats.
Earlier, when the Fenner Canyon inmate crew had arrived at Tassajara, one of the firefighters had looked around and asked Shundo, “Where are the monks?” The inmate was confused because they weren’t in robes.
Whether priest or student, Tassajara residents generally put on formal robes between two and three times every day in the summer. A priest’s robe called an okesa, sewn together in an intricate patchwork pattern inspired by rice fields, wraps around the body and over one shoulder. Newly ordained priests spend months learning how to do things they used to do with ease, such as bowing, now swaddled in a lot of extra fabric. Some senior priests, like Abbot Steve, wear brown robes to signify that they have received Dharma transmission—reception into the lineage of Zen teachers and authority to pass on the teachings. But it had been weeks since anyone had changed out of work clothes; a few hadn’t entered the zendo at all. Their work and their meditation were preparing the grounds for fire. Wearing robes while doing heavy labor is not a sensible choice, and Zen is at its core a practical path.
That morning, a reporter and photographer from the San Francisco Chronicle had come down the road. The reporter seemed interested not only in the fire, but also in the practice of the monks. In the published story, he quoted one resident’s comment likening clearing brush for a firebreak to the practice of zazen, “where you clear the mind from external thoughts burning through.”
While the Chronicle reporter waited for a chance to talk with Abbot Steve, absorbed in conversation with branch director Jack Froggatt, the postlunch repose of the group portrait transformed into an orderly haste. The Indiana crew had been instructed to evacuate immediately. The fire had reached the preestablished trigger point of the confluence of Tassajara and Church creeks and now had an easy path to Tassajara Road.
Froggatt explained the news to Abbot Steve only after he’d initiated the Indiana crew’s departure.
“So they won’t be staying for the fire after all,” the abbot said matter-of-factly.
Froggatt shook his head, a deflated expression on his face. Months later, he told me that he may have implied that there was a possibility the crew could get stuck in Tassajara and be able to help. “But we wouldn’t be there by choice,” he insisted. “I was told that wouldn’t happen.” As their minimal gear evidenced, the Indiana crew wasn’t a hotshot, or Type 1, crew—with the most rigorous physical requirements and training; they were a Type 2 crew, drawn from a mix of federal, state, and local government agencies. Froggatt himself had seen the terrain around Tassajara from a helicopter, when there was a lot less smoke in the air. There was no place a pilot could safely set down to pick up people in a medical emergency. So he’d ordered the crew to pack up their gear.
When Froggatt said it was time to go, the Indiana crew immediately stopped stapling up the Firezat wrapping. They left behind fragments of unused material and half-wrapped buildings, including the gatehouse where they’d just taken the group portrait. “They grabbed their backpacks and tools and they were out of here in what seemed like ten minutes from the time they got that order,” Abbot Steve said later.
After the Indiana crew left, Froggatt stuck around, planning to escort the satellite technician back up the road when repairs were completed. The Chronicle reporter checked in with his office on the radio phone, the one operational phone line. His boss told him to get out of the valley, but he and his photographer didn’t leave right away. They wanted to document the scene unfolding at Tassajara, perhaps struck by the calm that pervaded despite the sudden departure of the firefighters. The reporter interviewed Abbot Steve as residents practiced rolling out hoses in the work circle area.
“We’ll be moving more vigorously than usual,” Abbot Steve said, hands on his hips, not a shred of detectable doubt in his voice. “And we’ll be watching those tendencies to get overexcited. We’ll stay calm and alert. We’ll be ready.”
Fire is not a stranger, he went on, smiling, seemingly unperturbed by the sudden loss of hands on deck. “We’re not really fighting the fire. We’re meeting the fire, letting the fire come to us.” Instead of confronting the fire as an enemy, he explained, they would “make friends with it, tame it as it reaches our boundaries.”
Colin drove the Isuzu up the road and pulled over at Lime Point, just below where he’d seen the cloud that turned out to be smoke on the day of the lightning strikes. That was nearly three weeks ago. It seemed like the right thing to do now, as the last crew of firefighters pulled out of Tassajara—to get his own eyes on the fire. And it had the added benefit of getting him out of talking to a reporter.
At one time, Colin had wanted to be a writer himself. He wrote short stories as an English major at the University of Michigan but dropped the habit when he began to sense that he was hiding out behind his own writing. “I didn’t even need a Twelve Step program to quit,” he told me with a wry smile the summer after the fire.
Colin didn’t need a Twelve Step program to end what he calls his relatively short “drinking career,” either, a time that overlapped his military service. He sobered up on the road after realizing he’d probably die in a motorcycle accident or kill someone if he didn’t dry out.
In the Marines, he took heat for being too much of an individual. Now he’s a Zen priest and lives in a community where the self’s very existence is called into question. At first, he didn’t make a connection between being a soldier and being a monk. Slowly, he saw the resemblance. “Both are about letting go of the self. One wants to crush it. The other just wants to release it.”
At Lime Point on July 9, the clouds overhead offered a kaleidoscope of fire color: red and purple, orange and black. For weeks, the fire had simmered just shy of the confluence of Tassajara and Church creeks, in the Tassajara Creek drainage. Now smoke trails spiraled from farther downstream. The fire had crossed into Church Creek. It had already burned an area where there are caves etched with handprints and drawings of the Esselen Indians.
Farther up the road, looking west toward that area, there is a massive sandstone formation weathered into the shape of two hands pressed together as in prayer. The same image, held in high esteem by the Esselen, adorns the interior walls of the caves. Tassajara residents call the site gassho rock, after the hand gesture that is also a staple of Zen.
But Colin didn’t drive any further. He’d seen all he needed t
o see.
“I thought, This thing’s taking off,” he told me later, standing at Lime Point, the brim of his baseball cap pitched down to block the midday sun. He also thought: Stuart should see this.
Throughout their fire preparations, it had seemed important that the same people do the scouting. Consistency was critical to properly measuring the fire’s progress. Shundo hiked; Colin drove up the road—when he wasn’t boarding up windows and eaves with plywood to keep sparks from entering and igniting a building or helping Graham troubleshoot the pump near the stone rooms that had been acting up. But as Colin looked through his binoculars and tried to see anything but smoke, he remembered what the fire captain had told him: “The difference between a professional firefighter and you is I know what to be afraid of.”
On his way back to Tassajara, Colin met the departing crew from Indiana on the road. He’d begun to suspect that some of the firefighters flowing in and out of Tassajara were sightseeing more than anything else, but these men and women, like the inmate crew, had done real work. “The cabins were wrapped up like Christmas presents,” Colin recalled. Their engines pulled over at a wide spot so he could pass. Hands reached out the windows, waving. It was a strange sensation, to keep going in the opposite direction from those who knew what to fear.
Around two p.m., while Colin was up the road, Shundo hiked over the hogback ridge on the west end of Tassajara, above the flats. Visibility was poor from there, so he jogged partway up the Tony Trail. He saw plenty of smoke. It was hard to tell where it was coming from exactly, but he wasn’t particularly alarmed. He’d seen similar smoke plumes most afternoons, when the fire rose up with the day’s heat before dying back down again at night. The departure of the Indiana crew troubled him more.
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