Fire Monks

by Colleen Morton Busch

  Chief Haines had the legal codes on his desk. In California, a private property owner has the right to light a backfire on his or her land if there is imminent danger to life and property. “I’ll stand behind you in a court of law if need be. Be sure you ignite from a high point,” Haines said, “and keep a clear path of egress.”

  Over the phone, he walked David through the technique. David relayed instructions by walkie-talkie to Mako and Graham up at the hill cabins, then left the office and stationed himself at the base of the stone steps to the cabins with a hose to protect their way down.

  Up on the hill, Graham took an emergency flare attached to a metal pole and tipped it into the dry grass between the first hill cabin and the main fire. Ordinarily when fire crews light backfires or backburns, they use special handheld drip torches filled with a mixture of gas and diesel to deposit flames onto the ground. Lacking actual drip torches, the five at Tassajara had raided the abbot’s car for flares and fashioned homemade flares on sticks with duct tape and whatever materials they could find in the shop. They’d joked about making drip torches from wine bottles left by guests and lantern wicks. But a car flare would do.

  The fire sounded to Graham like a 747 coming in for a landing on the top of Hawk Mountain. Flames threatening the cabins were only fifty feet away, below the solar panels, burning downslope through the low grasses and chaparral. “We were given the impression that fire doesn’t burn downhill,” Graham told me later. “It drops stuff, and that stuff lights on fire and burns back up. But I was seeing fire burn downhill. It was burning up, it was burning down, it was burning horizontally.”

  From what he knew about backfires, which wasn’t much, he had a vision of how one ought to look. “I think of a backfire as lighting a big swath of fire that burns right into the main fire,” he said. But his backfire didn’t look like that. It burned here and there where he’d put fire on the ground, but it didn’t form a solid, moving mass of fire. Because they’d run Dharma Rain all night, everything was fairly wet up by the hill cabins. And Mako stood nearby with a hose, spraying down the eaves.

  Abbot Steve watched from down below in the work circle. He saw fire sweep around the cabins and reach for the shoulders of the slope, threatening to cut off Mako and Graham from the path down. Over his walkie-talkie, he pleaded with them to come down. Mako heard but stayed put, wetting down the cabins and keeping an eye on the distance between Graham and the approaching flames. I’m not one of your daughters, she thought. If it was just Graham up here, would you be telling him to drop it?

  That morning, after returning from the Overlook Trail, Mako had walked by the pool pump and called Graham on her walkie-talkie, asking if she should start it. They’d planned to start Dharma Rain around noon, and it was about that time. When Graham had answered in the affirmative, Abbot Steve had radioed that he ought to help her, not knowing that Mako had trained Graham on the pump in the first place. “The fact that I’m a woman might have made Steve feel protective,” she told me later. “It’s understandable. But at the time it just pissed me off.”

  When the wall of flame crested the Overlook ridge at twelve forty p.m., she’d started hosing down the hillside and wooden deck behind the stone office, following her first instinct to protect their safe zone directly below that ridge. “I was ready and waiting, but it just kind of trickled over. I remember feeling like, there’s nothing happening over here. Things are happening over there. I need to go!” Around one p.m., she’d walked around to the front of the stone office, seen Graham up on the hill, a canopy of fire behind him, and climbed the path inlaid with stone steps to help.

  “Mako, Graham!” Abbot Steve tried again. “Please come down from there! Do you see the fire moving toward the steps?”

  Fear sharpened the abbot’s voice, seeing that their exit from the burning hillside could be cut off. But it was more an urgent request than an order. The couple looked at each other, knowing the backfire wasn’t a success but that they’d done what they could with what they had on hand. The rest of Tassajara needed tending to.

  Mako set down her hose. As David wet the area around her, she descended the set of eighty stone steps back to the work circle. Graham ran straight down a firebreak built by the inmate crew.

  The firebreak let Graham out on the dirt road that leads from the work circle out to the bathhouse and flats area. The road is flanked on one side by the steep lower slope of Hawk Mountain, on the other side by the creek. He walked toward the flats, where he’d watched roiling smoke less than thirty minutes before. Now, looking upstream from the bathhouse, toward the flats at the far western edge of the Tassajara valley, he saw so many spot fires that he didn’t know where to begin. The bathhouse fence on the women’s side was burning. Fire fringed the tree trunks and flashed on the uphill side of the dirt road. Seeing this, Graham hesitated—he didn’t want to get cut off from central Tassajara. Debris clattered constantly downhill, rocks like giant, rough-hewn hockey pucks.

  Because of the smoke, he couldn’t see past the tent yurt. Had it all burned when the head of the fire swept through? He stopped near the large sycamore tree in front of the bathhouse. A dozen small fires encircled its trunk. Though the area had been cleared repeatedly, more leaves had fallen, and the fire had found fuel. He needed to put out the burning fence on the women’s side of the bathhouse, but flames stood between him and that fire. Because the building was flanked by the creek on one side and the road on the other, the residents had chosen not to wrap it. Graham reached for his radio. “The bathhouse is on fire.”

  He picked his way through patches of burning grass and shrubs toward the nearest standpipe to turn it on, putting one foot carefully in front of the other. He pointed the attached hose at the closest flame, a burning bush at the base of the sycamore.

  Even with his goggles on, his eyes watered. The smoke found the smallest opening. His bandanna filtered some of it, but not enough. He could taste smoke, smell it, feel it filling his nostrils, coating his throat. He felt dizzy, sick to his stomach. Then the coughing started. At first he covered his mouth with his elbow, a relic of zendo decorum, where you cough into your sleeve to preserve both the silence in the zendo and, if you are ill, the health of those near you. But soon the coughing took over. It wasn’t the kind of cough you could cover. It was a sputtering, full-body spasm.

  Smoke inhalation causes more deaths from fires than burns do. In the most serious cases, the fire sucks up all the available oxygen, leaving none to breathe. But the chemical by-products of fire can also do great damage, interfering with respiration at the cellular level. Too much carbon monoxide, a toxic gas released during incomplete combustion, can cause loss of consciousness and death. Hydrogen cyanide is another gas often found at poisonous levels in firefighters and civilians who have succumbed to smoke inhalation. Though typically of more concern to structural—as opposed to wildland—firefighters, hydrogen cyanide exposure can cause fatal respiratory arrest.

  Still coughing, Graham peered through the smoke, trying to see if the yurt was burning. A fresh fist of nausea punched his stomach. It occurred to him that he shouldn’t be alone. If he passed out, which seemed increasingly possible, he couldn’t fight fire or even keep himself safe. He couldn’t tell whether he’d been at the bathhouse for five minutes or five hours. Where was everyone? Hadn’t he called for backup? He realized then that he’d merely announced that the bathhouse was on fire and assumed he wouldn’t be the only one to respond.

  He asked for help on the radio, his words broken by fits of coughing.

  Mako copied immediately: “We’re on our way. Over.”

  She and David looked for Graham on the men’s side of the bathhouse, closer to central Tassajara, first. The air was soupy with smoke, bent by the heat of the fire, and they couldn’t find him. Mako reached for her radio: “Graham, where are you?”

  “I’m at the bathhouse.” He sounded as if he were holding his breath.

  “We’re at the bathhouse!” she cried.


  Eventually, Mako found him on the far side of the building. Through his goggles, Graham’s eyes were rimmed red. He looked pale, even under a coating of fire grit.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  He handed her the hose, walked away, sat down in the middle of the road with his head in his hands, and coughed until he didn’t need to cough anymore.

  Forty-five minutes after speaking with David, Leslie James dialed the number again for the stone office. “Answering machine,” she told the others gathered around the table in Jamesburg, and replaced the phone in its cradle, her lips tugged together.

  It seemed a good sign that the machine was picking up. It meant that at least one phone line was still intact. It also meant they weren’t in the office to answer. This bit of deduction reassured: They weren’t hunkered down in the middle of a burnover, they were probably out fighting fire. But it also disturbed: They were out fighting fire.

  Leslie had conceived her oldest daughter during the Marble Cone fire. Now sixty-one and a grandmother, she preferred her current role as Tassajara’s communications point person to lugging hoses. Based on her knowledge of how the 1977 fire had unfolded and, later, the 1999 fire that almost reached Tassajara, Leslie had felt sure of the safety and defensibility of the monastery. During the three weeks since the first evacuation, she’d had a phone to each ear from six in the morning until ten at night. Over and over again, she’d reassured anxious callers: Don’t worry. The fire is going to come in slowly. We have plenty of water, a safe place to retreat to. When the five had turned around at Ashes Corner the prior evening, she’d felt mostly relief.

  But Mako’s call later that night, describing fire like a volcano, had pierced Leslie’s confidence. For the first time, she’d thought: Maybe something could go really wrong here.

  First of all, the fire wasn’t coming in slowly. According to David, it had swept around them like a stampede of wild horses.

  “Don’t fight the fire,” she’d urged him. “Don’t do anything stupid. Just be safe.”

  Leslie, Sitting with Fire blogger Slymon, and several evacuated residents sat around the dining table in the corner of the office, a long, narrow room just off the kitchen in Jamesburg—breathing, not saying much. Leslie found herself praying. To whom, she wasn’t sure, but definitely praying. Jack Froggatt had already stopped by with mostly worrisome news: more hot weather and fire across the road in several places. They’d recited a chant for protecting life, several times. Now, there was nothing to do but wait for word in the heavy midday heat.

  Zen Center president Robert Thomas sat at a nearby desk, punching numbers into a second phone. Since their last contact with Tassajara, he’d been working his way down a list, reaching out to Zen Center’s political connections to plead for help. Governor Jerry Brown, then attorney general, had helped procure resources for Tassajara in the 1977 fire during his first tenure as governor, but he wasn’t on Thomas’s list. A friend of Zen Center who knew Brown personally from his visits to Tassajara in the 1970s with then girlfriend Linda Ronstadt had offered to make that call. Thomas had already called every number he had for the USFS and CAL FIRE. He’d spoken with Los Padres National Forest deputy supervisor Ken Heffner as the fire roared into Tassajara. Heffner complained to Thomas that the monks had put him in a bad situation by refusing to evacuate; he’d made it clear they weren’t going to provide firefighting resources to protect Tassajara. Thomas could tell Heffner was under pressure, but he raised his own voice in reply: “You should do the right thing and send some help in there, whether it’s water or people!”

  When the phone rang in Jamesburg, Leslie leaped up. “Tassajara,” she answered. She kept her voice low so as not to disturb Thomas, who was on another phone call, though a helicopter churned overhead and made it hard to hear.

  “There’s five still there now,” she told the reporter on the other end of the line, one of many calling that morning to check on the status of the monastery and the monks. She glanced at her husband, Keith Meyerhoff, who fought the 1977 fire and who has driven the stage back and forth to Tassajara for about twenty years. His mouth was set in an uncharacteristic frown, his eyes downcast. He got up from the table then and left the kitchen. She’d find him later, lying down in bed, not sleeping.

  “We don’t know. We’re waiting to hear,” Leslie said when the reporter asked what the monks were up to in there. It was an odd sensation for someone used to being a ready source of information, adept at sorting out the daily logistical puzzles that come with running a monastery located in the wilderness, at the end of a fourteen-mile dirt road. She didn’t have answers to the reporters’ questions. She didn’t know anything.

  The bathhouse had never seemed so big before. Mako sprayed the scattered fires around the entrance and the section of engulfed fence on the women’s side. If that fire spread, it could potentially demolish the whole creekside structure, with its wooden benches, sundeck, and steamroom.

  After Graham recovered, he had left to attend to the pumps. David had stayed on the men’s side of the bathhouse to prevent the fire from spreading in that area and protect their only path back to the central area, but eventually he left the area, too, heading downcreek to put out spot fires at the opposite end of Tassajara, near student housing. Mako found herself alone.

  Once the fence fire on the women’s side of the bathhouse seemed to be out, she pulled a hose attached to the closest standpipe toward the yurt, which was smoking on its backside. The hose wouldn’t reach, but just then Abbot Steve arrived carrying a shovel. He had heard the call for help on his walkie-talkie. He went around behind the yurt, an area thick with sticky burrs and poison oak, and directed Mako where to aim: “Over to the left! Now over to the right! More to the right!”

  The tent yurt’s days were already marked. Tassajara planned to dismantle it and build an expanded retreat center in its place. Hoping the poison oak smoke wouldn’t stick to their lungs, they set out nonetheless to save it. It was there now, the next thing to demand their attention.

  Abbot Steve pried a burning wooden step away from the yurt deck with the shovel and dragged it through the dirt to where Mako could hose it down. Then he headed to the bathhouse, where a burning stump near the fence threatened to ignite the structure again. He entered the women’s side and emerged with a bucket of water he’d dipped into the outdoor plunge. He doused the stump, then filled his bucket again and returned to the yurt to wet the remaining steps, while Mako arced the one hose attached to the bathhouse standpipe around the yurt’s backside, guessing from the smoke where she ought to aim.

  The irritation she’d felt earlier with his protectiveness had evaporated. The abbot and the head cook worked together seamlessly, a sort of water-bearing tag team moving between the yurt and the nearby bathhouse and a small, freestanding bathroom, putting out the same fires again and again. The bathhouse fence and sycamore stump fires kept reigniting, like trick birthday candles.

  Fire heats, wind moves, water wets, earth is solid. Abbot Steve had studied these lines from the eighth-century Harmony of Difference and Equality Sutra in a recent practice period, teaching that each of the elements has its place in the universe and in our bodies. How vibrantly alive those words were now!

  Each of the myriad things has its merit, expressed according to function and place. Fire wasn’t a malevolent force bent on destroying life. Fire’s life was simply to burn. The flames kept coming back, but he didn’t feel anger. He saw the fire as simply a coming together of various elements. Not a thing-in-itself, but a constantly-coming-into-being-with. “There actually isn’t any fire,” he told me later without a shred of irony.

  To say there isn’t any fire is to remember the importance of an open and pliant mind. Right then, Abbot Steve just knew there were places he didn’t want this particular fire to go, and he was going to draw a line and try to protect those places with water, which contains and wets, and earth, which covers and supports.

  After leaving the bathhouse, David patrolle
d between the cabins in the central area and along the creek, putting out spot fires on the other side of Tassajara Creek so that they couldn’t jump to the backside of the cabins. Fiery logs and broken tree limbs tumbled down the steep hill below the Overlook Trail and continued to burn wherever they stopped, lodged against a boulder or a tree.

  Eventually he walked all the way to student housing, at the far downcreek end of Tassajara. One well-placed spark and these old, ramshackle buildings, once an actual barn and stable, could go up as quickly as the zendo did in 1978. The barns were far from luxurious, but they deserved equal attention. David hosed down the surrounding area, putting out drifting embers beyond Dharma Rain’s reach. He was grateful for his hard hat as rolling debris slammed into the buildings and he heard what sounded like a rock slide farther downcreek.

  Once the area seemed stable, David headed back upcreek, passing Graham on his way to refuel the pool pump. Back in the central area, David stopped at the stone office to check the answering machine in case it offered good, though unlikely, news—a water drop or a fire crew on its way.

  Around three p.m. in San Francisco, a crowd gathered around Abbot Haller’s desk, including treasurer Greg Fain, Zen Center secretary Dana Velden, and a few others. Ironically, the landlines at City Center were down, so David had called Velden’s cell phone with an update.

  When he’d phoned earlier in the afternoon, they’d been sitting on the floor on meditation cushions. Velden had put her phone on speaker and placed it on a zafu in the middle of the circle, so that everyone could hear David describe the fire’s three-pronged advance: “It’s coming over Flag Rock. It’s coming over Hawk Mountain. It’s coming over the Overlook. There’s fire everywhere. I’ve got to go!” They’d stared in silence at the phone on the cushion after David hung up, trying to take in what they’d just heard.