He got to City Center at lunchtime and was bombarded with questions. “There was so much relief to hear what was going on. That’s when I really sensed how much people felt excluded. For people in the city, it was all playing out in their imaginations.” Often, with limited information, they imagined the worst.
Shundo had been one of a select few inside events at Tassajara. But now, back in the Bay Area fog belt, he was also outside. And he had to imagine, to worry.
It was Thursday, July 10, nearly three weeks since the June lightning strikes. The red flag warning issued by the Monterey Bay office of the National Weather Service (NWS) had predicted that a ridge of high pressure would build over California, that low daytime humidity and poor overnight moisture recoveries in the region, combined with gusty winds, would create moisture recoveries in the region, combined with gusty winds, would create “explosive fire growth potential.”
But by the morning of July 10, the fog approaching the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was also drifting onshore farther south, in Monterey Bay, in a more typical summer pattern, when spiking temperatures suck cool, moist marine air inland at lower elevations. Weather observers in both coastal Monterey and the interior Salinas Valley noted the presence of fog and a temperature dip in their July 10 daily logs. Abbot Steve felt the fog’s cooling influence when he drove up Tassajara Road on his morning patrol.
Forecasters at the national Storm Prediction Center and local NWS offices, and incident meteorologists and fire behavior analysts in fire camps, make their best effort to predict weather and anticipate its potential effect on a fire. When meteorological warnings are missed, catastrophes happen. Firefighters can die because they didn’t get a weather report.
“Weather is the wild card,” says NWS forecaster Chris Cuoco in Fire Wars, a NOVA documentary. Cuoco knows well just how critical weather information can be on the fireline. In 1994, he sent out an urgent red flag warning that was never received by firefighters on the South Canyon fire in Colorado. Winds created a chimney effect and fourteen young people died because they were someplace they probably would not have been had they heard the forecast.
“We have National Weather Service personnel out there with their trucks and equipment on fires now, people with PhDs. And these guys are usually right,” Stuart told me. Though relative humidity did drop into the single digits on July 10, the predicted high winds and temperatures that played so heavily in Stuart’s decision to evacuate Tassajara never materialized over the Santa Lucia Mountains. For the first time in days, the weather turned in the firefighters’ favor.
With Dharma Rain running—and people around the world visualizing the monastery bathed in a protective mist—Tassajara itself felt more like a rain forest than a sauna. For now, the threat of severe weather conditions had died down, but the intense heat of the past few days had helped the fire gain momentum. It continued moving toward Tassajara, burning through the dried-out forest with nothing to stop it—no broad river, no rain. Cooler conditions may slow a fire, but they don’t put it out.
The names of the five inside Tassajara were announced on the Zen Center’s Web site and the Sitting with Fire blog on the morning of July 10. Slymon also posted news that the fire was approaching the road “along a broad front” but hadn’t yet reached Tassajara. “They do not plan to fight the fire and they are receiving a steady flow of requests not to try to do anything heroic,” he wrote.
So what did it mean, not to try to do anything heroic? In the weeks leading up to the fire at Tassajara, even as the residents drilled and learned to handle the hoses, the assumption was always that they wouldn’t engage the fire directly. They’d keep the pumps running and the buildings wet and put out spot fires where they could, but they wouldn’t try to stand up to a forest fire. They’d size up flames they could do something about and flames they ought not get in the way of and act accordingly. But simply being willing to put themselves where no firefighters would seemed a courageous leap to many.
Slymon’s early morning post on Sitting with Fire on July 10 drew dozens of comments instead of the usual handful. One of the first came from Jane Hirshfield. She’d left Tassajara in the second evacuation at the end of June after offering her experience in the 1977 Marble Cone fire to guide the fire preparation efforts. Now, with the fire closing in on Tassajara, in the midst of orchestrating her elderly mother’s move out of the New York City apartment she’d lived in for forty-six years, Jane checked the blog every spare minute from her home near San Francisco. “There was a radar beam between my heart and that canyon.”
About an hour after Slymon’s morning update, Jane posted a message encouraging readers of Sitting with Fire to get on the phone and call their senators, representatives, anyone who might be able to get resources to Tassajara. “I’d also like to say (perhaps going out on a limb here) something I am not hearing articulated—support for the decision of the five to return. I think their presence makes much more likely that further assistance will come from CAL FIRE, and I think their going back in to Tassajara is nothing short of awesome. . . . I trust their judgment, and I trust that the safety zones at Tassajara are well sufficient to keep them free of harm.”
The night before, after word had gone out that everyone had evacuated, the phone had started ringing at Jane’s house—those who’d been there in 1977, now in their fifties and sixties, were calling to say, Did you hear? Tassajara’s empty! Jane spoke to Ted Marshall, the resident fire chief at Tassajara and her partner at the time of the Marble Cone fire. If it weren’t for the fact that Marshall had had a recent heart attack, he’d have gone down to Tassajara himself. “A howl went up in many hearts,” Jane said later. “I thought Tassajara would be lost.”
When Jane opened her laptop on the morning of July 10 to see what news it held, what relief, what gratitude, she felt upon seeing that five had gone back. She was also stunned. Five? Only five? That’s not enough! She wasn’t surprised, however, to find out who they were. Each of those five would have been on her list if she’d been charged with deciding who stayed, who went. And not because she’d seen them fight fire before and trusted their expertise. She’d simply watched the four who were there at the start step forward and ask, What’s actually happening here? How can I respond? They didn’t need to know all the answers to act. Each had shown a suppleness of mind, learned on the meditation cushion, that could be brought to bear on any circumstance.
It was this suppleness, Jane suspected, that had motivated them to turn back. “It’s a quality of being so present, so fully in the moment, that mammalian self-concern simply vanishes. You’re not worried about yourself. You’re too busy being part of the moment, taking care of it, responding to it. That’s not exactly courage, it’s something else.”
Over the course of the morning, Jane monitored Sitting with Fire. Blog readers chimed in with encouraging words and wishes for the safety and well-being of Tassajara and the small group of people protecting it. Many of the posts came from former students, guests, and members of affiliated Zen communities. Some who posted, however, like Mike Morales, had heard of Tassajara only at the start of the fire, from media coverage.
Morales, former firefighter and the founder of Firefighter Blog, had steadily voiced concerns about whether adequate resources had been assigned to the Basin Complex fire. He’d been watching the situation at Tassajara, too, and reading Sitting with Fire.
In the late morning of July 10, Morales posted an entry on his own blog entitled “The Battle for Tassajara Hot Springs.” Unless the weather changed unexpectedly, he speculated, the five remaining at Tassajara could expect the fire to test their preparations. “The fire looks to be within .5 mile or closer to them at the moment. I don’t want to second-guess Basin Complex fire command and I won’t, but it seems to me this compound deserves some resources. The monks and other residents have cooperated fully with fire representatives and have prepared the grounds carefully, even under supervision to an extent. The Center serves as a spiritual center fo
r many. The occupants are decent guardians of the land and need help.”
Morales also made a prediction—later, he’d call it a challenge: “I personally believe the cavalry will come riding to the rescue before things really heat up.”
Jane e-mailed Morales, asking if he had any contacts in active fire service who might be sympathetic to Tassajara’s situation. She wouldn’t have called preparing for the fire a “battle,” but she agreed with Morales’s prediction that help was on the horizon. Based on her experience in 1977, she had no reason to doubt that. But she also wanted to make sure help arrived.
You didn’t just sit around waiting to be rescued. You did everything you could to be rescue-worthy. The cavalry might ride past Tassajara if it didn’t stand a chance. “If this happens,” she’d told the residents in June, meaning if Tassajara was to be saved, “it will happen because we do it.”
At half past five in the morning on July 10, Mako lay in bed for a moment after waking, imagining she could hear the wake-up bell. Sometimes the creek offered a jangling rattle that sounded just like it, or a knock that could be mistaken for the mallet striking the wooden han outside the zendo, as if it had absorbed the sounds of the valley and could play them back.
But it wasn’t the wake-up bell. There was no one at Tassajara to ring it. They’d gone from eighty-something to twenty-something to just five people, with the last drop a precipitous one. No one who remained needed the bell to wake up, if they’d slept at all.
If she listened closely, she could detect something that wasn’t creek sound: Dharma Rain, draping a watery veil over the rooftop. They’d decided to run the system all night. And she heard the engine throttle of the five-gallon Mark 3 portable pump serving as a backup for the malfunctioning permanent pump near the stone rooms and as a supplement to the pool pump.
The head cook yawned herself awake, stretching her limbs. Her wrists had hurt before the fire ever started, from washing and lifting large pots. She had cramps in her feet and calves, the beginnings of plantar fasciitis. Her body needed a break, and instead she kept asking it to do more.
Graham stirred but didn’t open his eyes. Mako swung her legs over the side of the bed and shivered when the soles of her feet hit the cold slate floor. She got dressed, gray pants and a brown short-sleeved T-shirt, and slipped into her clogs on the porch. Because they’d run the sprinklers continuously since the prior evening, the valley was damp, misty, even cool. Mako pulled on a sweater and walked to the kitchen to make everyone breakfast.
The skies behind Flag Rock and Hawk Mountain no longer looked like volcanoes as they had the night before. Backlit by the rising sun, the peaks were tinged with a mellow reddish gold. It would be another couple of hours before the sun climbed over them and poured into the valley, heating everything up. Maybe it was already waking the fire.
She flipped on the light in the kitchen, smelling metal, wood, spice, grain, and the trace of something human, the yeast of bodies working in collective effort. During the winter interim, when there might be just a handful of people on retreat at Tassajara, she and Graham usually left to visit one of their families. She couldn’t remember ever being at Tassajara when there were so few people here, or being the only woman. It felt odd—not pleasant or unpleasant, just peculiar.
She poured some milk into a stainless steel pitcher and started washing fruit to make a smoothie. She heated water for tea and coffee. She found some cereal in the upper shack and scooped it into wide plastic bowls to set out for their breakfast. Ordinarily cold cereal was an infrequent treat at Tassajara, but they’d been eating a lot of it since the start of the fires.
In his Instructions for the Zen Cook, Eihei Dōgen quotes an old expression, “The mouth of a monk is like an oven,” and tells his disciples to remember this well. An oven makes no distinction between what goes into it, simple or complex, prepared with common or rare ingredients. It accepts everything equally. Elsewhere, Dōgen introduced the similar teaching of the cultivation of “parental mind”: an attitude of care and concern for everything one encounters—appetizing or unappealing—akin to a parent’s tenderness toward a child.
It’s called parental mind, but anyone can access it, as Mako did when her parents’ marriage ended. Helping her mother navigate the divorce, Mako began to feel compassion for the Japanese woman who’d left her culture and country and moved to America, changed her name to Patricia, and given her kids Western names, but who had never formally learned English. It was then that Mako changed her own given name, Lisa Jane Voelkel, and took her mother’s Japanese name, Masami, shortened to Mako, which means “True Grace.”
Nowadays Mako didn’t see her mother much, once a year at most. They’d traveled to Japan together a few years back. While Mako wanted to visit temples and be fitted for priest robes, her mother wanted to shop. Patricia Voelkel dreamed her daughter might be a doctor or professor. Instead, she was a thirty-six-year-old monk, childless, with mostly unused degrees and a few boxes of possessions. There wasn’t much overlap in their lives. At the moment, her mother was in Japan. Mako hadn’t told her about the fire, not wanting to alarm her.
Mako’s mother had renounced many of the outward markers of her identity when she married Mako’s American father. Later, Mako recalled, her mother had felt deprived and cheated; she’d mourned the identity as something lost. But practice had showed Mako that the more she clung to a sense of self as something to guard and protect, the more she felt obstructed. Happiness came in loosening your grip, letting your solid identity—your expectations and assumptions about who you are—go into the oven’s mouth and burn up in the fire of practice.
Or in a wildfire.
Breakfast was ready. Mako carried what she could to the stone office. The fire could be anywhere, she thought. Right now flames could be flickering up the trunks of trees. Or it could slow down again and hang out nearby for three more days. Mako didn’t think it would. She got on the walkie-talkie and called everyone to take this opportunity to eat what the warmth and light of the sun and the cool, damp earth had together made. Because who knew when the next meal would be.
The morning might have felt cool to Mako, but when the five gathered for breakfast in the stone office, it was already approaching 80 degrees Fahrenheit up on Chews Ridge. Typically, it is pleasantly cool in the early hours during the summer. The monks often wear long-sleeved layers until midmorning.
The group discussed their priorities for the morning as they ate, then dispersed around Tassajara, taking care of whatever needed attention. Mako hiked up the hogback to scout the fire. Colin loaded up a garden cart with refueling supplies and tools and covered it with Firezat so they could wheel it around Tassajara to the various pumps. “We had fifteen gallons of gas in there,” he told me later. “That would have been colorful if the cart caught fire.” Graham checked the fuel levels on the pumps, topped them off where needed, and rechecked his backup supply of extra parts and tools in case any part of Dharma Rain or one of the pumps malfunctioned. Abbot Steve lay down to rest, as he’d just come off patrol. David checked their supplies in the stone office, made calls, and retrieved the latest information on the fire.
Overnight, the fire had gained a little more than 400 acres, bringing the total acres burned to 90,114. There were still nearly a thousand firefighting personnel on the east zone—the majority of them from CAL FIRE. The fire was definitely not sleeping in. Crews worked to contain a spot fire outside the control lines—the “big box” fire managers had drawn around the Basin Complex—just a few miles south of Tassajara. The morning report from the incident management team noted more spotting, “torching” trees, and “slopedriven runs”—signs of active fire behavior, unusual during cool morning hours—and aggressive fire spread toward Tassajara Road.
There was fire in pretty much every direction except directly east of Tassajara, so the five still couldn’t be sure from which orientation it would come. All they could do was continue what they’d been doing for weeks: stay ready. Not for a
certain kind of fire, a fire they could anticipate, but for whatever kind of fire showed up.
A feeling prevailed of battening down the hatches on a vessel tacking into rough weather. Even the birds were quiet—having either hunkered down or, in the case of the canyon wren pair nesting in the eaves of the founder’s hall, left their nests. The group at Tassajara didn’t fret because there were only five of them, though it was clear now that’s all there would be for a while. They just did the next thing and the next thing, continuously. They did what they could and didn’t dwell on what they couldn’t.
Around eleven a.m., Mako and Colin hiked up the Overlook Trail, which loops up and around the steep backside of Tassajara, to scout the fire. The day before, a few people had carved out the beginnings of a fireline up there, but the trail was still narrow most of the way and laced with poison oak. The wind blew strong but indecisive—angling the July-dry grasses covering the slope one way, stopping abruptly as if taking a breath, then flattening them in the complete opposite direction. A dark plume of smoke churned above Flag Rock, directly across the Tassajara valley from where they stood.
Mako took a quick video. Playing it back for me later, Colin noted the sound of the portable Mark 3 pumps beneath the gusting wind and remembered how pervasive the sound had become. In the moment, he hardly noticed it. His attention was focused on the heat and the crazy wind, the fire sucking itself into the valley. He remembered the look on Stuart’s face when he talked about the forecasted wind speeds as a turbo engine for the fire.
The plume over Flag Rock shifted as they watched, from purple to charcoal gray to black and back to purple again. It was not one color but all of those colors, boiling together. They’d already seen another dark plume to the northwest, close to the summit of the Tony Trail. Normally, Lime Point is an obvious white band in the road from the Overlook, but they couldn’t even see it. The road was muzzled in smoke. Beyond that veil of smoke and farther up Tassajara Road, MIRA observatory’s caretaker Ivan Eberle was on his roof around then, photographing four-hundred-foot-tall flames advancing toward MIRA despite 10–15 mph headwinds.
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