Fire Monks

by Colleen Morton Busch

  On Sunday morning, July 13, three days after the fire’s run through Tassajara, a CAL FIRE crew came to do what’s known as “mop up.” They untangled and rolled hoses, cleared rockfall debris, and toppled dead trees, as they had on their way down on the road. “You were very brave,” they said. “We were rooting for you.” Also on that day, Abbot Steve’s wife e-mailed a copy of Tom Meyer’s San Francisco Chronicle “Fire Monks” cartoon, a playful rendition of the encounter between Zen mind and a wildfire. Tassajara’s story meant something to people who had no knowledge of the place or particular interest in Zen. The phrase fire monks perfectly encapsulated the vital interplay of action and contemplation. “But we’re also earth monks and water monks and air monks and wind monks,” noted Abbot Steve later, “and something completely prior to that in some ways, even more elemental.”

  On Monday, July 14, Colin made pancakes for breakfast. The five finally returned the Gandharan Buddha to the zendo altar. First, they unwrapped the statue and set it on a bench draped with a towel. Abbot Steve steadied the Buddha while Colin brushed loose dirt from crevices. Then, with a combination of care and brawn, four of them carried the statue back across the work circle and hefted it onto the altar, facing the creek.

  On Tuesday evening, they held a simple reawakening ceremony. Abbot Steve symbolically “opened” the Buddha’s eyes with a small brush. The five chanted, then they sat zazen. Afterward, Mako propped her camera on the zendo steps again, and the priests posed in the work circle as they had earlier, in the same formation, this time wearing robes. Since David had sent his hand-sewn okesa to Jamesburg, he wore only a simple black robe and his rakusu, the small robe both priests and lay-ordained practitioners wear that hangs by straps around the neck. Had he been a little too attached to keeping his robe in good condition, he wondered? Did sending it out to Jamesburg betray a moment of doubt in those first few days of the fire, about whether they would indeed be safe in the valley?

  At dawn on Wednesday, July 16, six days after the fire’s arrival, Abbot Steve drove up the road unescorted, carrying a box of food to Jamesburg—a reversal of the usual flow of supplies. He’d been at Tassajara for two weeks instead of the few days he’d intended. He stopped frequently to take in the scale of the devastation. In the early morning light, the valleys would normally be green dipped in gold, with majestic, dense scrolls of living trees laid out along the sides of the mountains. Now the mountains were desiccated, brittle, the color of bone and dust. Barren, but inexplicably beautiful. What he felt, looking at the transformed landscape, was closer to immensity, to wonder, than grief.

  When the abbot passed the bathtub and came to the place on the road where he’d felt a blast of heat-stoked wind on his patrol the morning the fire came in, he stopped the car again. The fire had crossed the road here. Brownleafed sycamores and scorched bay and madrone trees on both sides formed a vanished trellis of fire. How long after I was right here, he wondered, did it cross the road? He stopped at Ashes Corner, where the five had turned around on July 9. The frenzy of heat and noise there, when they’d decided to go back to Tassajara, had smoothed into morning’s peace. But clearly, the fire wasn’t over. Plumes of smoke knit the sky overhead.

  A few hours later, when Abbot Steve arrived at Green Gulch Farm and walked into the dining room, he was greeted with applause. That evening, he gave a talk in the zendo and answered questions, commenting that his robe smelled like smoke, a smell he now found “quite comforting.” He told the assembly that Leslie had encouraged him to get clearance from Jack Froggatt before driving out of Tassajara. “I said, ‘He’ll forgive me if it doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s better to just go ahead. If you ask, then he has to say no.’”

  “So, the road is still closed officially,” Abbot Steve told his audience, “although the road itself is open and quite drivable.” It was just like what the Korean priest had said a few days before the fire arrived, having driven past the closure signs at the forest boundary with a group of Buddhists who wanted to see Tassajara: Yes, road closed, but also open!

  The remaining four at Tassajara savored their time together, alone in the still-smoking valley. It wouldn’t last long, they knew. Students and volunteers would be brought back once the road opened, to help clean up and see what could be salvaged of the summer guest season. A bond that was already there before, from having lived and worked side by side for years, was now reinforced with the strongest material available: human connection through adversity.

  “There was something magical in the days after the fire even though we were exhausted,” David told me later. He sensed a penetrating quiet in the valley. “This traumatic thing had happened, this cleansing, tumultuous event which left the mountains ready for something else. It’s like sitting in zazen with some big emotional experience. If you sit through it, there’s this sense of relief, even if you still feel the pain. There’s an aftereffect of settled stillness and resolution, a sense of nourishing something new to rise from the ashes.”

  Gradually, in the days after the fire’s passage, David began to publish accounts on Zen Center’s Web site and Mako uploaded her photos to Flickr, bringing the fire story to Tassajara’s wider circle of friends and supporters. Lane Olson, Abbot Steve’s wife, watched Mako’s video of fire on Flag Rock on her office computer and felt the first rush of fear for her husband’s safety. “That’s when I panicked,” Olson told me later—when it was already over but she saw the ferocity of the advancing fire front with her own eyes.

  On Thursday, July 17, exactly a week after the fire passed through Tassajara, David posted this report on Sitting with Fire:A haze still hovers in the valley, despite what seems like a fairly constant breeze. Without the foliage on the mountains, it seems to be windier down in Tassajara. There’s a hint of fall to the trees remaining on the hillsides, as many of their leaves are turning brown since being scorched. Ash continues to accumulate on the grounds and buildings. The sound of rock slides is heard frequently throughout the day and night. Already the lesions marking the fire’s entry into Tassajara are being slowly veiled by falling oak leaves, suggesting that nature’s healing process has begun. Deer are continually spotted on the grounds enjoying the green vegetation, and the squirrels only seem to grow fatter on the spoils of the compost shed treasure.

  I’ve been able to write up an account of the events of July 9th, the day of the third evacuation and leading up to the morning of the fire. I hope it will help to clarify the many questions people have had about how it came to be that only five people remained at Tassajara. The exercise of writing this account has helped me to better understand—and to allow a newfound spaciousness for—how we all respond to the ever-changing conditions of each moment with the best effort we are able to make at the time. The decisions we make may not be the “right” ones, but they are simply the best decisions we can make in the moment before us. . ..

  For days after the fire’s passage, a doe and her two fawns feasted on the garden, now open where the fence had burned away. But on the morning of July 19, Colin and Graham found the doe crumpled at the base of an intact section of fence. Colin guessed she’d broken her neck running into the fence after getting spooked by a falling rock.

  Colin grew up farming and hunting. His grandparents raised cattle, goats, sheep, chickens, and a couple of peacocks. In his teens, he’d wake up early, pack breakfast, and go out to his hunting blind. “There was nothing to do but just sit and watch. Those were some of the most peaceful moments I had as a kid. The deer would come and I’d realize I was supposed to shoot.” Eventually he gave away his rifle. Hunting had been an excuse to rise before dawn and just be amid the sounds and smells of the world waking up.

  Graham helped Colin load the doe’s body into the lumber truck. They lifted her together, Colin holding her front haunches and Graham her tail end. Then they drove her up the road to bury her in the open air. This didn’t bother Colin terribly. He’d handled many dead animals before. But for Graham, it was a new experience. “I felt
really bad for Graham,” Colin told me later, recalling the pained expression on Graham’s face. “He seemed heartbroken.”

  Graham, Mako, and Colin left Tassajara for the first time in a month later that day, driving to Carmel Valley Village for dinner at the Running Iron. David stayed behind to keep an eye on Tassajara along with the first evacuated resident to return after the fire, who brought Monkeybat with her.

  On the drive back in to Tassajara, Graham told me, the valleys looked like little cities, lit up here and there with flame. For the next few days, the fawns returned to the garden, but after that, he didn’t see them again.

  With the Basin Complex fire still far from completely contained, a new incident commander rotated into position on July 19. Before flames had reached Tassajara, retired firefighter Mike Morales had blogged that he believed the cavalry would come riding in. Afterward, he’d posted a scathing indictment of the USFS response, or lack of one. Sixteen helicopters and six fixed-wing aircraft had stood by, Morales wrote, while five monks spread out around Tassajara to try to save it. Noting that the morning incident status report on July 10 listed Tassajara as a value at risk and confirmed that some residents remained at the facility, Morales concluded, “Clearly someone in the Forest Service decided to pull the plug on Tassajara. . .. Firefighters did not turn their backs on these folks, the suits comfortably situated in offices far away did.”

  Attempts to speak with Los Padres National Forest deputy supervisor Ken Heffner neither confirmed nor disproved Morales’s claims. “If the Forest has a response,” Heffner answered by e-mail, “it will be in writing.” But a written response never materialized. My Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request eventually yielded a paper trail that shed scant light on why crews were sent to Tassajara in 1977 and 1999 to fight fire, but in 2008 the monks were left to face a wildfire alone.

  Nearby structures that are similarly isolated—such as the Pico Blanco Boy Scout Camp, where Stuart earned his merit badges as a boy—did receive support on the ground during the Basin Complex fire. “Why did they save the Boy Scout camp and not the Zen Center?” Morales asked me later. “Did they write it off from the beginning because who really cares about a bunch of Buddhists? If it was a Civil War memorial, they would have had that place surrounded.”

  Eighteen months after the fire at Tassajara, branch director Jack Froggatt told me that the choice not to keep firefighters in the Tassajara valley was collaborative, but not his call: “The decision was made at a higher level.” Members of the incident management team told me that they debated the issue at length. But the incident commander ultimately in charge on July 10—the one who denied CAL FIRE unit chief George Haines’s personal request for support—a fire management officer with the Stanislaus National Forest named Jerry McGowan, also declined to be interviewed. The only glimpse of his rationale comes from his Key Decision Log (KDL), obtained by FOIA request. “By wrapping the structures no firefighting resources would be required for protection,” IC McGowan noted. When considering the “downstream” cost implications of this decision, McGowan wrote something he probably never expected to be read: “Politically correct thing to do.”

  There are many hands on the hose in the management of a fire. All it takes is one crimp to stanch the flow or start a tug-of-war over who is responsible—not just logistically and financially, but legally. Now evidently worried about the very real possibility of litigation against them, incident commanders have grown reticent. Like IC McGowan, they are reluctant to discuss their decisions after the fact, outside of the team. Froggatt consistently defended the decision not to put a crew at Tassajara, but he lamented that in general, firefighters can’t learn from their mistakes if no one is willing to talk about a mistake in the first place for fear of being sued, or even to consider that a mistake may have been made.

  The KDL is intended to track the complexity of decisions made on fires, but a paper trail takes you only so far. It can’t capture the many split-second, gut-level calls firefighters make on a fire. It doesn’t answer one critical question: Why was Tassajara abandoned? To those affected so significantly by IC McGowan’s decision not to put fire crews at Tassajara during the Basin Complex fire’s passage through the valley, the decision log doesn’t suffice as an explanation or do much to build trust.

  In Mike Morales’s eyes, IC McGowan made a mistake. An overabundance of caution—or blatant bias—led to a bad call. And Morales doesn’t think this sort of abandonment is rare. From his blog: “Clearly here in the U.S. we are entering a new era where federal firefighters are backing away from directly attacking wildfires. Firefighter safety is cited as the main reason, but whatever the reason, it’s becoming clear homeowners will be forced to begin taking matters into their own hands.”

  In a Zen practitioner’s mind, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. Dōgen advised the head cook: Do this all with your own hands. Take care of what is yours to take care of. This is what the Tassajara monks did during a wildfire because it’s what they do every day. Some help would have been nice, but when no help came, they didn’t dwell on it—during or after the fire.

  Whenever we talked, Abbot Steve blamed no one for how events unfolded during the fire at Tassajara. He understood that fire officials made decisions they needed to make, just as he made those he needed to make. When I asked him whether or not Tassajara would consider hiring a professional crew when the next fire comes, as more than one firefighter recommended to me, he smiled and said it wasn’t likely. “I think we’ll always reserve final decisions to our own leadership, not pass that on to someone else.”

  In the 1977 fire, then abbot Richard Baker decided early on that residents would work to save Tassajara, and the community followed his strong lead. Over the decades, Zen Center has shifted to a more democratic process of group discussion and consensus seeking. Still, many felt that an abbot’s presence during the 2008 fire was essential—some even wondered why one hadn’t gone to Tassajara sooner. For Jane Hirshfield, the question of authority and leadership in a crisis was one of the most interesting aspects of the fire’s unfolding. Could David, as director, have made the same decision on the road to turn back, taking others with him? Jane thought it might have been more difficult—the abbot’s voice is the one already entrusted to speak from a place of deep practice.

  At the same time, she quickly added, “In a crisis, anybody can be abbot.”

  Given a sense of responsibility and appropriate authority, both by the sangha and within oneself, anyone could take the kind of decisive lead that Abbot Steve did.

  Zen fosters self-reliance and trains you to be your own boss. But the practice also points to something beyond the ordinary notions of these terms. Taking responsibility includes letting go. You accept the consequences of your actions even as you realize that your actions completely depend on the totality of circumstances in any given moment.

  Two weeks after the fire, residents began to return to Tassajara, though a backburn operation jumped a fireline and delayed their first attempt, sending them back to Jamesburg. On July 24, Shundo drove to Tassajara with Abbot Steve for the first time since the July 9 evacuation.

  “It doesn’t look so different,” Shundo observed as they climbed to Chews Ridge.

  “Just wait,” warned the abbot.

  Then they reached the ridge. The view opened onto mountains scraped clean, bare except for the wisps of leafless trees and a carpet of ash, black-andtan slopes, a hazy sky still busy with smoke. A member of a USFS fire crew waved their vehicle down to warn them that his crew was cutting dead trees along the road ahead. He cautioned them to proceed slowly and keep their eyes open.

  “Past China Camp, in the chaparral, the moonscape really started,” Shundo wrote in his journal. “It looked like England in winter, bare trees, dark earth. A beautiful starkness to everything. Hazy and smoky below, the rocks standing proud . . . The Wind Caves were barren and brown, the Pines completely devastated, sticks standing, the trail clearly visible for once, windi
ng up the valley.”

  At Tassajara, Shundo ran into Mako and David first—“big hugs, no need to say anything”—then headed for the baths to rinse off the travel dust, along the way embracing several others he hadn’t seen since their evacuations. “I could already feel how different I was being here,” he wrote. Reading his own words later, Shundo speculated that he’d meant he felt different at Tassajara from the way he’d felt in the city, but also that he felt different at Tassajara now compared with before the fire. Both closer to it and more distant.

  At dinner the night Shundo returned to Tassajara, the residents were back to eating at individual tables. There were simply too many of them now for one big table in the center of the room—more than forty of the approximately sixty-five residents who evacuated had returned. But Shundo detected a fissure between those who’d stayed to prepare for the fire and those who’d left in the June 25 evacuation. Those who had stayed behind had never executed the tiered evacuation they’d spent so much time talking about, but here they were, organized according to how long they’d stayed or how quickly they’d gone, each drawn most easily to those in their tier, who shared their level of experience. He’d observed the same tendency in himself in the city, where he’d sought the reassuring company of others who’d been close to the fire preparations.

  He’d spent the two weeks prior to returning to Tassajara after the fire “feeling like the fifth Beatle,” unraveling the energy around the preparations he’d participated in only to evacuate at the last minute. He still felt a bit out of step—like Devin, he could have been there but wasn’t. But as Shundo sat next to Graham that evening in zazen in the stuffy zendo they kept closed up, preferring heat to smoke, he had an insight. He could spend the rest of his life turning over all of the little moments that had led to his decision to continue driving up the road away from Tassajara on July 9, longing for an experience he had missed.