Thomas already knew that some people in the evacuation convoy had turned around and gone back to Tassajara; Leslie had called his cell phone to tell him. But to his surprise, people in Jamesburg asked him what had happened. Most had little idea, since they weren’t among the core group that had met in the stone office. Nor did they know how those who went back had come to their decision. They wanted to know, Did the request for five to return come from City Center? Did Abbot Haller talk them into going back?
Thomas didn’t know, but he intended to try to get to Tassajara. He wasn’t sure what he would do there, exactly. He’d had no firefighting training. But as president of Zen Center, and as someone who’d lived at Tassajara, he felt he had to be there.
In his interview for the Sitting with Fire documentary, Thomas spoke of Tassajara as a sort of headwaters: “It became a reference point for my life, for every moment of my life.” He’d gone there a confused young man and found himself being turned toward a different way of being, not quite by his own will. For the then thirty-four-year-old, disaffected Thomas, this was a new sensation. After days tending to kerosene lanterns during the work period between guest season and the monastic training period, he’d decided Zen practice wasn’t his cup of tea. But as Thomas was leaving Tassajara, a priest stopped him on the path, bowed, and thanked him for his efforts. Though Thomas didn’t know it at the time, that priest was Sojun Mel Weitsman, then an abbot of Zen Center. And the simple gesture of acknowledgment changed Thomas’s life. A few footsteps later, he knew he’d be back. He eventually spent six years at Tassajara. He met his wife there.
Shortly after Thomas’s arrival in Jamesburg on July 9, the phone rang. It was Abbot Steve, calling from the stone office. “We’ve been talking here, and we don’t think you should come in to Tassajara,” he told Thomas. “You haven’t had fire training. For your safety, everyone’s safety, it would be better if you didn’t come down.”
The room had hushed. People who knew it was the abbot on the line wanted to hear Thomas’s side of the conversation.
“I appreciate your concern,” said Thomas, “but I’m coming in. I’m just stopping in here at Jamesburg. I’m coming in to Tassajara.” As Zen Center’s president, Thomas wasn’t looking for the abbot’s permission. “I think I had a lot of force behind my voice,” Thomas told me later. “Maybe Steve felt that.”
In a tense telephone conference call a few days before, Thomas had pushed Abbot Steve and other senior members of Zen Center’s leadership to ponder some difficult questions: What exactly are we doing here? Are we asking people to fight the fire? And if so, what if the fire comes and somebody dies? He’d been assured that the safety of the students was the first priority, that they’d been told repeatedly that Tassajara could be defended, and they had a place to take shelter if necessary.
“I said, ‘We can’t be asking people to risk their lives to save Tassajara,’” Thomas remembered. “‘I hope that’s what we’re saying here.’”
To Thomas’s relief, everyone on the call agreed: Clearly, no one should risk his or her life for Tassajara.
Abbot Steve talked Thomas into waiting to drive in until they could check fire conditions on the road. Thomas promised he’d stay in Jamesburg until they called with an update.
Earlier that evening, even before the convoy had pulled out of the parking lot at Tassajara, Chris Slymon had posted news of the evacuation on Sitting with Fire: “We do not know how long Tassajara will remain empty but the current red flag warning does not end for a couple of days. Fire crews have told us of strong winds at the ridge. These winds together with the extreme temperatures and little or no recovery in humidity overnight produce ideal conditions for the fire to move faster than we had hoped . . . We appreciate that this news may cause concern but please do not call the Tassajara or Jamesburg numbers as we need the phones.”
When the convoy arrived at Jamesburg, its passengers startled and confused by the turnaround on the road, Slymon didn’t post an update. But someone else put the word out in an anonymous comment on the blog around nine p.m. that night: “For those of you who don’t know . . . There are 5 people still inside Tassajara. The last car turned around and decided to stay.”
Within the hour, a Zen student who had attended a meeting about the evacuation at City Center in San Francisco responded with an attempt to allay fears. He reminded blog readers of the fire preparations that residents had completed and the training they’d received—and noted that “these are long-term, senior practitioners making these decisions.” But the word was out: Five people had gone back in to Tassajara in the midst of an evacuation just as the fire was heating up and drawing close. Only two were named—the abbot and the director. Worried friends and family responded with frustrated posts like this one: “If I cannot find out where my son is another way very soon, rest assured, I WILL call. PLEASE contact the families of those who stayed, & tell the evacuees to call home.”
Back in the stone office, the five who’d returned to Tassajara identified their immediate priorities and established a schedule for night patrols. It quickly became clear that they would be spread thin. “I remember making the recommendation that we keep ourselves in the central area, given how far the flats is. It would be so easy to get cut off,” Colin told me later.
After David called Jamesburg to float the possibility of a few more able-bodied residents sneaking back down the road, Abbot Steve called Abbot Haller. The five also discussed the complex web of conditions that had led to Stuart’s sudden push for evacuation and their own decision to return. “Stuart didn’t want to see anyone get hurt. He had made a decision about the twenty-two of us that were here,” David told me later. While the abbot shared Stuart’s concern for the residents’ safety, “Steve made a decision about the total well-being of Zen Center. He was holding a larger picture.”
They ate well that evening, a dinner planned for four times as many people: pasta with avocado, cherry tomatoes, and asparagus, and strawberry shortcake for dessert. The mood was purposeful as they set about wrapping the stone office door and windows with leftover Firezat. They’d discovered by then that only one of the two satellite lines switched earlier that day was actually operational, and David didn’t know what lay ahead of them, but in some ways it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they had not abandoned Tassajara. He felt a sense of relief, a communion with the unknown. Making this effort felt right. He had faith in their ability to be fully present for whatever showed up.
That didn’t mean there weren’t also moments of great doubt.
For David, one such moment came while on patrol, standing on the bridge over the creek bed named for Tom Cabarga—a 1977 resident who foresaw the potential for the then-unnamed stream that flows past the zendo to surge to flood levels the winter after that year’s wildfire. It was just past dark, around nine o’clock, when David looked up Cabarga Creek and spotted a mountain of flame through the trees.
At approximately the same time, Colin was up the road at Lime Point, watching the fireworks below. It glowed a beautiful, terrible orange, as if the sunset had spilled from the sky into the valley. And this upside-down sunset sounded like a blast furnace.
“This line from Jaws came into my mind,” he recalled later. “It’s the first time Roy Scheider sees the shark. He’s so stunned he backs into where the captain is and says, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’” We’re no match for this fire, Colin thought. We don’t stand a chance. “But we’re trapped at that point. The one thing they hammered into us over and over again was, When it gets down to it, don’t get on the road. If you get trapped in a chimney, you’re burned. We’d had our chance to leave.”
An hour later, Mako and Graham drove less than a mile up the road on patrol before they had to turn around because the surrounding mountains looked like active volcanoes, spouting flames. They called Jamesburg to tell Thomas: Do not come in over the road tonight.
Abbot Steve called his wife, Lane Olson, after dinner. As concisely as h
e could, he told her about the day’s unexpected events. Ever since Abbot Steve had arrived at Tassajara, he’d been updating her on their preparations. And she’d been following the blog.
When I spoke with Olson months after the fire, she described her husband as “an amazingly capable person. He’s just so stable. It’s that Mennonite farmer background. He never panics.” She recalled how he and his brothers told gruesome stories of near-miss accidents on the farm. Their father had lost part of two fingers, and a younger brother had to extract his own foot from under a piece of heavy machinery. Once, worn out from a day’s work, Abbot Steve fell asleep while driving and woke up as his brother jerked the wheel. The car spun around several times before they regained control and continued down the road, hearts pounding but unharmed. “Farmers are a lot closer to death than the rest of us,” said Olson.
So are Zen students, Olson knew, a practitioner herself. Everything changes: Every living thing must also die. Everything is connected: Life and death are completely intertwined, never separate. Pay attention.
Given her confidence in her husband—and her trust that whatever decisions he made were the best decisions in the moment—Olson wasn’t terribly worried. It wasn’t until she checked Sitting with Fire and read the concerns others were voicing that she started to get a sense of the very real danger and to wonder, Are they safe? Is this going to be okay?
Abbot Steve’s patrol shift was from three a.m. to seven a.m., so after talking to Olson, he went to bed and tried to sleep a little. Now that they numbered only five, he would be without a partner. He awoke a few hours later. In the hazy, half-moon, middle-of-the-night darkness, he made several trips up the road, driving beyond the bathtub between Lime Point and Ashes Corner. “At that point, I could see the whole face of the mountain in front of me was on fire,” he said later. “And down below Lime Point—quite a ways down—was in flames. Then the wind shifted, and I felt a hot wind and thought I had better turn around.” Because they’d seen how it could linger in an area for days, he thought the fire might still be a couple of days away from Tassajara, but that it had probably crossed the road farther up.
He went up the road again just after sunrise, around six a.m. on July 10. He drove as far as Lime Point. He thought he saw a fog bank to the west, and the sky was peaceful, a muted watercolor of cloud and smoke and dawning light. The airtankers and helicopters weren’t flying yet; it was pleasantly, surprisingly quiet. “Fire was just down the slope from Lime Point, below the road, fifty yards down. It still hadn’t crossed over into the Cabarga Creek watershed,” he told me.
But before Abbot Steve could update Thomas in Jamesburg to say he still didn’t recommend traveling on the road, David radioed from his communications post in the stone office.
“They can’t get in. There’s a CHP officer at the forest boundary. He’s got a gun, and he says no one is going down the road.”
Ten
RING OF FLAME
A patch-robed monk is like a snowflake in a red-hot furnace.
—Blue Cliff Record, CASE 69
Thursday, July 10, nineteen days after the lightning strikes
Robert Thomas woke around four a.m. on the floor in the living room at Jamesburg, having slept maybe four hours. His eyes felt gritty, his limbs stiff, his mind full. The night before, after he’d gotten word from Tassajara that there were flames near the road and he shouldn’t attempt to drive it, he’d spent a long time talking with Leslie James and a few others, sifting through the options. The house was quiet and they’d had to keep their voices low—most of the people who’d evacuated Tassajara that day had gone to bed early. It was still dark and quiet when Zen Center treasurer Greg Fain’s watch alarm went off. Fain had arrived in Jamesburg around eleven p.m. the night before. Along with Thomas and two others, he’d planned to rise before daylight to try to make it over the road.
Leslie was awake, so she came out to the living room to talk with them before they left for Tassajara. “I think we had a longer conversation than we wanted to,” Thomas told me later. “Light was starting to come at the edge of the sky, and I felt like we’d have a better chance if it was completely dark.”
They talked about what they’d say if they got stopped. Thomas wanted to keep it friendly and low-key. They wouldn’t say they were officers of San Francisco Zen Center or former residents of Tassajara. They weren’t wearing robes or anything that identified them as priests. Fain’s signature eyeglasses with thick black rims and white cowboy hat made him look more Buddy Holly Meets the Lone Ranger than monk.
Fain and Thomas left Jamesburg at approximately four thirty a.m. It would be just the two of them. The others had decided not to go. They drove about three and a half miles up Tassajara Road before they got blasted by a spotlight on a CHP vehicle parked horizontally in front of the Los Padres National Forest boundary.
“Stop!” an officer’s voice boomed. “Stop your vehicle!”
They stopped, got out, and walked toward the officer, who had stepped out of his cruiser with a hand on his pistol, as if to remind them that whatever their business was, he had the final say.
Instinctively, they put their hands up to show that they were empty. “We’re just trying to get back to Tassajara,” said Thomas, squinting in the spotlight’s glare, trying to step out of it, though he couldn’t. It seemed to cover everything.
“Road’s closed.” The officer was alert, awake, his voice crisp and clear. “Nobody’s getting by me.”
Fain tried then: “Officer, we really need to get to Tassajara. We left and now we’re just trying to go back.” It was true, if slightly slanted. Neither Thomas nor Fain had lived at Tassajara for several years. But Fain had helped install Dharma Rain in June before he had to return to the city to attend to Zen Center’s finances.
The officer shook his head. There wasn’t a flicker of interest in his face. “You’re not going in, guys.”
“We just want to—”
“Nope. Turn your vehicle around and go home. We’re not having a conversation about this.”
Their faces pale and white in the spotlight, Thomas and Fain looked at each other, bewildered, for what seemed like a long time. Then they turned around and went back to their car. “I remember feeling kind of small and helpless,” Thomas told me. “But anything we would have said wouldn’t have worked with this guy. As far as he was concerned, it was over before it started.”
Day finished shrugging off night as they retraced their route to Jamesburg. Fain stewed behind the wheel, struggling to accept the fact that they weren’t going to get into Tassajara, that five people, including the abbot, were alone down there.
“Well, I guess that gets us off the hook,” said Thomas, trying to inject some levity to counter their dejected mood.
Much as he was disappointed, Thomas found himself accepting the situation. “We’d spent so much time the night before deliberating. Then we get there and there’s really nothing to talk about. It’s just not an option.” The truth was, he didn’t know how helpful he could have been in Tassajara. “Part of me just felt like I was doing what I should be doing,” he told me later. “But another part of me didn’t know why I was doing that, or that I could offer much.”
When the officer said no, those divisions fell away. It’s clear now, Thomas told himself, I’m going to support Tassajara from Jamesburg.
Shundo woke up in Jamesburg just as Fain and Thomas were returning. Fain wanted to get back to the city—with Zen Center’s revenue from Tassajara choked off by the fire, he had work to do as treasurer. Shundo arranged to ride with Fain back to San Francisco.
The night before, after the Jamesburg house grew quiet, Shundo had mulled over the evacuation, how what happened seemed like random chance but also bore the familiar imprint of his personality. He wasn’t one to question authority. It had never occurred to him that when final evacuation orders came, someone might stand up and say no.
Looking back, Shundo felt he would have made the same decision to carry
on even if he’d participated in the conversation at Ashes Corner, but it was hard to say for sure. If he’d ridden with Graham and Mako, that might have shifted his inclination to follow Stuart’s lead. Instead, Stuart had thanked Shundo in Jamesburg for backing him up.
When David had called Jamesburg to ask whether some people would be willing to come back in, Shundo had had another chance to return. He hadn’t taken it. “If you wanted to have a strong response or formed group, then we should have had a different thing happening at Ashes Corner, not just some people deciding to go back in,” Shundo said, describing his thinking at that moment. Shundo had chosen not to return to Tassajara, yet he knew five people was not enough. Never mind fighting fire, how were they going to manage being up all night and all day scouting and patrolling?
Before Shundo left Jamesburg the morning after the evacuation, he talked with Jack Froggatt, who stopped by to brief Jamesburg on current conditions. “He repeated the likely weather, which made everything worse, said there were fires at three places on the east side of the road now, and said it would be four days minimum before anyone went in. I resigned myself to going back to the city,” Shundo wrote in his journal.
They left Jamesburg around ten a.m. The field at the base of Tassajara Road had been converted into a helibase. “It looked like a circus or fair setup, with a big sign at the gate,” Shundo told me, and helicopters and fire vehicles parked here and there. As they headed west toward Carmel Valley Village, they saw signs everywhere, handwritten expressions of gratitude for the firefighters tacked to trees and telephone poles.
Eventually they descended into the Salinas Valley’s lush growing fields dotted with migrant workers, then merged into the unruly stream of freeway traffic. A few hours later they arrived in San Francisco, and Shundo felt glad to be in the fog zone for once.
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