Fire Monks

by Colleen Morton Busch

  In fact, having both perspectives is best. Dōgen wrote: “Put your whole attention into the work, seeing just what the situation calls for. Do not be . . . so absorbed in one aspect of a matter that you fail to see its other aspects.” When you wash the rice, see the sand in the rice and the rice in the sand. One aspect of Zen practice is learning not to stick to any fixed view—or sense of situation or self. Zen also teaches the cultivation of “skillful means,” the ability to approach a situation with flexibility and respond appropriately, with an eye toward encouraging awakening, in oneself and others.

  Abbot Steve looked up from the stack of fire maps. “Okay,” he said. “I guess we need to go.”

  He said, We need to go. But inside the contours of his own mind, he started plotting how to stay.

  The meeting lasted five minutes, maybe ten. After the abbot announced his decision, there was a long moment in which no one moved. It was as if they didn’t know what to do next. They had no form for this.

  “Can I go ring the bell?” asked Devin, thinking of the rest of Tassajara’s residents, who weren’t privy to the core team’s conversation. No one said anything, so he said, “I’m going to go ring it,” and left the stone office to sound the railroad bell, the residents’ cue to drop whatever they were doing and report to the work circle immediately.

  “Should we bury the Buddha?” Mako asked.

  “Yes,” said Abbot Steve. “Quickly.”

  Outside the office, Mako asked Bryan Clark, a member of her kitchen crew, to remove the Buddha from the zendo altar. In heavy fire boots, Clark, Shundo, and a summer student ran past the shoe racks onto the strictly shoeless wooden platform that wraps around the building and stepped into the zendo from the rear door, behind the altar. The Buddha faced the other direction, gazing toward the creek, marks of its previous encounter with fire undetectable in the dim zendo light. With wire cutters placed for just this purpose at the back of the altar beside the matches and incense, they snipped the wires securing the statue. It took the three of them to lift the Buddha, carved from a chunk of dark gray metamorphic rock called schist.

  They placed a yoga mat under the Buddha and folded blankets over him at the bocce ball court just after five thirty p.m. Whenever a Buddha is installed on an altar or removed from one, the statue’s eyes are brushed open or closed in a formal ceremony. After gathering whoever happened to be around as witnesses, Abbot Steve performed an abbreviated eye closing. Graham, making a last check of all the pumps, walked by, saw the ceremony in progress, and thought, Good, that’s being taken care of, one less thing to worry about. Abbot Steve wouldn’t remember what he said to the Buddha exactly. Others who were present recalled something like “You’re going to sleep for a while.” But Mako remembered something more—part request, part apology—the abbot saying to the Buddha: “You’ll see what happens here.” Then Kim Leigh and Colin shoveled dirt back into the hole.

  Leigh had seen the plywood over the hole in the bocce ball court earlier but hadn’t realized what the hole was for until he found himself in the middle of the eye-closing ceremony. “It was very quick and urgent,” he told me later. “Lots of energy was flying around, but they took the time to do this sacred thing.”

  Why hadn’t the residents taken the Buddha out to Jamesburg, as they had the other ceremonial objects and statues and the recipe binders? The Buddha should stay put, they’d decided early on. To take him up the road would have felt like removing a ship’s keel. He would be safe at Tassajara, tucked into the earth.

  Letting go of the idea they’d held collectively for nearly three weeks—that they’d be there when the fire came through—the residents enacted the one scenario they’d never discussed or drilled for: leaving Tassajara entirely.

  Ten minutes of orderly chaos passed as the community scattered to attend to whatever individual tasks still needed doing and fetch personal belongings before meeting in the parking lot. In the stone room she and Graham shared, Mako stripped off her fire gear. She put on a pair of sandals, grabbed her backpack, and tucked a distressed, meowing Monkeybat inside a pillowcase, an impromptu carrier. Colin threw his bag in the lumber truck, figuring he would drive it out so it wouldn’t burn—they would need it if they had to rebuild Tassajara. Shundo recovered a small statue of Kuan Yin, the goddess of compassion, sitting on the back of the zendo altar—he’d noticed it there when they went to get the Buddha—and handed it to Stuart’s girlfriend for safekeeping, the statue’s, hers, and theirs. In the parking lot, the resident charged with making sure they were all accounted for consulted her clipboard and directed people to their assigned vehicles. Abbot Steve had radioed her that he wanted to be the last to leave, alone, in his own car.

  Stuart had positioned his Toyota pickup at the top of the parking lot so cars could queue behind him. The fire captain’s countenance had shifted from extreme frustration to provisional relief. Just before six p.m., five cars had lined up behind Stuart’s truck: Shundo had four passengers in the Isuzu. Behind him were Tassajara’s two Suburbans. The first one, driven by Graham, held five passengers, including Mako and Devin. The other also held five, plus a driver. Colin tailed the second Suburban, alone in the lumber truck. Abbot Steve stood beside his Honda CR-V, last in line. Including Stuart and his girlfriend, the resident with the clipboard counted twenty-one heads. Everyone was present but the director.

  “David, where are you?” she asked over her walkie-talkie.

  After a brief delay, he answered, “I’m on the phone with Paul.” Paul Haller, Zen Center’s other abbot.

  Some in the cars thought, Must this conversation happen now? A few speculated that Haller, who had installed the standpipe system after the Marble Cone fire, might try to talk David out of leaving. Haller could be a fierce teacher, in the confrontational style of the old Zen masters. He’d once shouted at Shundo in a student-teacher interview that Shundo was wasting his time—and Shundo is not the only one with such a story. Haller grew up poor in Belfast, Ireland. His Dharma name, Ryushin, means “Dragon Heart/Mind.”

  After a few minutes, the resident responsible for counting heads raised David again on the radio: “David, we’re all waiting for you.”

  “I’ll go get him.” Mako set Monkeybat on the front seat and jogged to the stone office in her sandals. Abbot Haller had ordained both her and Graham, giving them the same Dharma name, Unzan, or “Cloud Mountain,” though unintentionally. She wanted to talk to Paul herself, to make sure he knew what was happening. She and her teacher had had many pre-dawn dokusans, one-on-one encounters in which teacher and student, sitting cross-legged on the floor facing each other, a bit too close for comfort, discuss the student’s practice or some aspect of the Dharma. Again and again, by flicker of candlelight, Haller had shown Mako to herself, helped her touch what in Zen is known as “big mind.”

  Big mind is an awareness that includes all existence inside its own. From cells viewed through a microscope in a neurobiology lab to trees torching in the Ventana Wilderness to satellites arcing through space, capturing images of fire thousands of dark miles away—all are recognized as the self, and the self as threaded to all existence. With Haller’s help, Mako had learned that Zen wasn’t just mind tricks, as she’d once thought. It wasn’t about fooling yourself or anyone. It was about facing the reality that we are not separate from anything in the world. Not from fire, not from one another, not from our own minds. All things arise and cease together.

  But what she wanted from her teacher now was one of his fierce shouts. She wanted him to do something, say anything, so they wouldn’t have to leave Tassajara.

  After the core team meeting had ended in the decision to leave, David had sat at the desk where for weeks he’d called an ever-changing list of information lines and fire management contacts. He’d dialed the Jamesburg house and told Leslie James they were evacuating, and no, he didn’t have time to explain. Then he’d grabbed his radio and walked to his cabin to get his duffel. When he’d realized that the green bandanna he used
to shield his lungs from smoke was still in the stone office, he’d doubled back to get it—and to make sure they hadn’t left behind anything essential. The phone rang as he walked in the door.

  “David, why are you leaving?” Abbot Haller’s Irish vowels, the rich register of his voice, resonated over the patchy phone line.

  Haller had once been director of Tassajara. It was his job then, just as it was David’s now, to take care of Tassajara’s guests, staff, and grounds. It was a simple enough question, and David understood where it came from. Haller had first come to Tassajara as a resident just after the Marble Cone fire in 1977. He knew of the legendary commando trips students had made from Jamesburg under cover of nightfall to resupply, refuel pumps, and remove valuables, in the days before a small group had returned to stay and fight the fire. During the weeks of preparing for the Basin Complex fire, Haller had told David on more than one occasion, “They can’t force you to leave, you know.”

  Now, Haller’s question was deeply disturbing: Why were they evacuating? They had planned to be here. They had never planned to leave. So why were they leaving?

  “I don’t know,” said David. “I don’t know myself.”

  A voice came over David’s radio again, requesting that he come to the parking lot. David asked Haller to hold on and set the phone aside to say he’d be right there.

  He typically loathed being late—and rarely was. Now, he refused to be rushed. In fact, all awareness of time had fallen away. The hours of the morning had slid into the hours of the afternoon, and he couldn’t account for them. They’d waited weeks for this fire. Now it was here and he didn’t understand why they were leaving. He couldn’t explain it to Haller, because it didn’t make sense to him.

  David picked up the phone again. “I mean, how did this happen?” Haller asked.

  “Stuart ordered it,” said David. “He says it’s not safe to be here anymore.”

  “Ordered it,” echoed Haller, turning over the words.

  “We had a meeting. We decided—Steve made the final call, and I guess we all agreed—that we should follow Stuart’s recommendation.” Even as he chose the word, David realized a recommendation isn’t an order. Had Stuart ordered them out? It had felt like an order, but by what authority? And they hadn’t really agreed so much as deferred to the two experts in the room—one in fire, the other in the Buddha’s practice.

  “I see,” said Haller. He could hear within David, by nature diligent and conscientious, an unspoken conflict between doing the right thing by Stuart and doing the right thing by Tassajara.

  “I think that as director, David felt an enormous responsibility,” Haller told me later. “Tassajara is the jewel of Zen Center. And here he is, holding a pivotal role in its survival.” While David’s memory of this phone conversation is scant, lost to the tension of the moment, Haller recalled that they agreed that Stuart needed to do what he was doing even though it seemed contradictory. “We respected it. But we weren’t fully persuaded by it.”

  Just as they were ending the call, Mako burst through the door. “Let me talk to Paul.”

  David promised to call Haller back as soon as the caravan reached Jamesburg, handed Mako the phone, and slung his bag over his shoulder. A blast of warm air greeted him when he opened the stone office door. It was warmer than it should have been at almost six p.m., even on a hot July evening.

  Feeling slightly queasy, he put one foot in front of the other, but his body resisted the motion of going forward. Some part of him knew that it was time for evening service—for chanting, bowing, and making offerings of food and light so that all beings might be nourished and awakened. But there would be no evening service. He hadn’t been inside the zendo in weeks. He had packed his priest robe and sent it up the road.

  He walked the gravel path beside a patch of lawn bordered with lavender, rosemary, sage, and thyme. He ducked under wisteria vines twisting through the trellis, passed the flat bronze bell that calls residents to meals, and climbed the steps to the work circle. Tassajara seemed hushed, strangely empty. From the time Zen Center had purchased it in 1966, except for a few hours during the 1977 fire, there had always been someone at Tassajara. Even in the depths of December, when many residents took a two-week break between monastic practice periods, a few always stayed, and former residents often came to practice again in the profound quiet of the winter canyon.

  David looked up into a charcoal gray and orange sky, then glanced at the zendo to his right, at the empty shoe racks on the wraparound wooden platform, the motionless, silent bell and drum. When he was six years old and driving away from the children’s home with a temporary family, the sky overhead seemed to contain every kind of weather. He remembered storm clouds and lightning, bright white clouds and patches of blue, even a rainbow. He had vowed to himself then that someday he would find his true home. He had, eventually—not in a place, but in the practice of paying attention.

  This moment is home. In a sense, it is the only true home you will ever have. And still, David thought, Tassajara is the place where this practice lives. How many people had come here and walked away changed, touched by the stillness and silence, the possibility of living differently, with an unguarded heart? The transformation had something to do with the place where it happened, this remote, narrow valley. Could they really leave it now to burn?

  The sprinklers rained on the rooftops. The residents had done everything the experts had told them to, preparing Tassajara so that when the fire came, they’d be safe and ready. They’d designed and installed Dharma Rain. They’d raked. They’d swept. They’d dug fireline. They’d drilled and briefed and debriefed. They had planned to stay and meet the fire. Now, after weeks of Stuart’s consistent confidence and despite the fact that Abbot Steve had said he couldn’t imagine leaving Tassajara under any circumstance, both waited for him in the parking lot with the rest of the evacuees.

  His radio squawked again: “David. Mako. Are you coming?”

  He could hear Mako’s footsteps behind him, faster than her usual purposeful stride. He pushed the talk button: “Yes.” He would go, even as every molecule of his being protested.

  Mako caught up with him, arms swinging at her sides. David sensed that her haste had more to do with wanting to talk to Graham than with any desire to leave Tassajara. Like him, Mako hadn’t said much during the evacuation meeting. But he didn’t need to hear her say it to know that she didn’t want to go. At Tassajara, you learn how to read your fellow practitioners through your senses. You know the sound of their footsteps on the floorboards of the zendo, the way they open and close a door, the clicking sound their jaw makes when they chew. You know them the way you know family—perhaps more completely. Your eyes have learned to see and your ears have learned to hear, without filters or labels.

  David walked out the gate, to the line of idling vehicles. At the end of each summer guest season, the residents held a gate-closing ceremony, reading the names of all the people who had worked at Tassajara over those months and supported the practice. But there would be no closing ceremony today, no time to mark everyone who had come to help since the fires first started a month before. Airtankers droned overhead. He felt the fire’s closeness. He glanced back and wondered, Would he be the last to see Tassajara as it looked now?

  Eight

  THE LAST EVACUATION

  Human life is messy. It’s out of our control. It’s like we’re walking around in total darkness with a little speck of light which is called “right now.”

  —LESLIE JAMES

  Wednesday, July 9, six p.m.

  A line of vehicles queued up behind Stuart Carlson’s car at Tassajara. The residents had made their decision—in part because of a decision they’d made earlier: to heed the counsel of the expert in fire and evacuate. That didn’t stop it from feeling, in the moment, like a terrible misstep. For many in the line of vehicles pointing up the road, it wasn’t even their choice; they were merely following the lead of others.

  Dav
id was supposed to get into the Suburban with Mako and Graham, but he tossed his bag in the backseat of the abbot’s car instead. “Did you want to talk to Paul?” he asked.

  Abbot Steve shook his head. “I’ll talk to him later.”

  Over the walkie-talkies, a resident took a final head count, calling out names and asking for confirmation.

  It pained David to answer yes to his name as Abbot Steve shifted the CR-V into gear. Both abbot and director initially kept their thoughts to themselves, yet each was aware of a shared backward pull as the car moved forward. Both sensed that they had much to talk about and that it was good they were in the car together. Yet they wanted to take their time, to go at their own pace, not at the urgent clip set by Stuart.

  The vehicles ahead churned up dust. They drove slowly, in rare radio silence, closing windows and waiting for gritty clouds to clear. Manzanita bushes and hardy scrub oaks gripped the road’s steep shoulder. These plants had taken seed and clung to life with fierce tenacity, using whatever earth and light and water they found to survive. But fire would mow them down in minutes.

  A month before, fire had cremated the body of a long-term Green Gulch Farm resident and friend of Abbot Steve’s who’d died. Abbot Steve had been at Tassajara leading a retreat and missed the ceremony. His friend’s death had been expected. But if you really took to heart the words of the Heart Sutra, chanted daily in Soto Zen temples, no death could come as a surprise: “Form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form. Sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness are also like this.”