Fire Monks

by Colleen Morton Busch

  But then he thought: Or not. He could also trust that he’d done his best and let it go.

  That evening after supper, Abbot Steve held the first of several community meetings in the dining room. They pushed aside the tables, sat in a circle, and shared what the fire was like for them, wherever they were, so that they might know something of one another’s experience. Now the community that had been blown apart like the cottony wisps of a dandelion seedpod would try to reconstitute the whole bloom.

  Some evacuees shared feelings of deep gratitude for everyone’s efforts, both close to and far away from the fire, and reverence for the fire-dependent natural world they were part of and inhabited. Some shared painful feelings of displacement and disorientation and worries about plans to reopen the guest season. What’s the rush? they asked. Can’t we have a little more time to heal ourselves and this place before we throw open the gates?

  Some evacuees were still upset, like the creator of the Sitting with Ginger mock blog—named for the monastery dog, evacuated with the residents on June 25. When it was his turn to speak, the former defense attorney challenged the wisdom of the breakaway decision the five had made to turn around and told Abbot Steve he believed they’d made a mistake. You may have saved Tassajara, he said, but you forsook the sangha, the community, more important than any building.

  Abbot Steve took in the feeling that came with being criticized as well as his gratitude that the student felt free to express himself honestly. The abbot had opened the circle with his explanation for why they’d turned around on the road. He didn’t repeat it. The group merely moved on to the next person in the circle when the angry resident finished speaking. “I realized a long time ago I can’t convince anyone of anything,” Abbot Steve told me later.

  Tassajara’s director, who’d done so much talking during the fire, didn’t have much to say now. David felt protective of something he couldn’t quite articulate, a simplicity, an essentialness expressed in the skeletal silhouettes of trees and the exposed slopes.

  As he listened, he was surprised to find himself feeling unsympathetic. People complained about how hard it was to miss the fire, and he thought: But you also had three weeks of vacation! People spoke of painful feelings of displacement and exile, and David couldn’t help but recall the years of being punted from one temporary home to another. A small voice inside him snipped: You want to know what real displacement is? “Later, I realized that some of the decisions I made during the fire contributed to people experiencing something similar to what I experienced as a child—though conditions were different and this displacement may have saved their lives,” he told me. His own disregarded pain had made it difficult, he now understood, to take in theirs. “People wanted to hear from me, as director, how things came about, and they wanted to talk about the impact the decisions had on them, but I didn’t want to explain or justify. What the fire taught me was: Stay with the essential. A lot of this was, ‘Let me tell you my story.’”

  David was grateful to Steve for leading the conversation. David knew it was important. But for him, the burned wilderness expressed all of their grief and gratitude with a dignity beyond words.

  Much that the residents had done to prepare for the fire needed undoing to welcome back the guests. Tassajara needed a top-to-bottom cleaning. They drained the pool, tracking footprints in the soot as they scrubbed away the slimy layers. They pried protective boards off windows and eaves, wiped ash from every horizontal surface, rolled fire hose, sorted out undamaged wood, curtains, cushions, and linens, and redistributed lanterns. They began repairs on damaged structures. They sat zazen, chopped vegetables in the kitchen, and resumed the everyday tasks of monastic life. No more leftovers from the walk-in or MREs—the extras were stashed away—the head cook had meals to plan, mouths of monks to fill again.

  The camaraderie that marked the early hours of fire preparations returned. “We weren’t on crews,” one evacuated student said. “I talked to people I’d never spoken to before.” The resident whose San Francisco apartment had burned down washed dishes and turned compost for ten days straight without complaint, delighted just to be useful, to contribute in a tangible way to Tassajara’s recovery.

  For some others, the work fueled lingering resentment. First they’d worked their muscles raw doing fire prep. Then they’d been kicked out. Then they were asked, Can you come back and work again? Some residents didn’t return after the fire. They’d made other plans during the long wait for the fire’s arrival.

  There was a calmness, a regal feel, to the landscape, a quiet and dramatic vitality. The air smelled of crushed leaves and wood smoke. By late July, tender new shoots sprouted from the bases of burned trees. Bright green ferns unfurled from ashes in the Cabarga Creek bed. As the land began to mend itself, the sangha worked together and tried to heal. “I had this dream my first night here,” said one young resident-evacuee in an interview for the Sitting with Fire documentary. “The roots of the trees were cracking underneath the soil. Maybe that’s what’s actually happening.” It was what had happened with the shop woodshed, ignited when fire had smoldered underground and traveled along a root to the structure. “But for Tassajara, the community, it’s also like that,” she continued. “We are trying to reestablish our sense of community.”

  On July 25, David, Mako, and Graham finally left Tassajara for vacation. On that day, in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in Northern California, something horrible happened—just the kind of mishap Jack Froggatt had feared. National Park Service firefighter Andrew Palmer bled to death when an eight-foot-long, twenty-inch-wide sugar pine branch fell on his leg, shattering his femur and severing his femoral artery. It was his first day on the fireline. He was eighteen years old.

  More than a dozen firefighters carried Palmer down a steep dozer line to a place sufficiently level for a Coast Guard helicopter to set down a litter. Other helicopter pilots had refused to make the pickup, citing too much smoke in the air. Ultimately, it took three and a half hours just to get Palmer to a hospital.

  Before they left for some time off, Colin and Mako had talked about all the things that could have gone wrong at Tassajara that didn’t. What if they’d lingered longer on the Overlook Trail? What if Graham’s radio had failed and he hadn’t been able to call for help from the bathhouse? What if one of those rock bombs dropping down from Flag Rock had hit someone or the shop’s four hundred gallons of gasoline had caught fire? What if the pumps had failed or a major pipe had burst, taking down Dharma Rain? What if someone had been seriously burned—or suffered a heart attack? At the time of the fire, Mako was the only one with any current wilderness first-aid training. What if she’d suddenly had a real victim on her hands, someone she knew and cared for? Even if she could stabilize her patient, fire had rendered the road impassable. Would a helicopter have been willing to land in the narrow valley for a rescue? An old helipad on the hogback ridge, built in the 1970s, had never really been used. Safety officers for the Basin Complex fire had just looked at it and shook their heads.

  What if someone had died saving Tassajara? Would that have made it a mistake to stay?

  With more than forty years of practice guiding him, Abbot Steve won’t weigh what didn’t happen. Just as he learned a long time ago that he can’t convince anyone of anything, he’s rid himself of the temptation to deal in potentialities. Even as he could imagine the infinite ache of losing a son or daughter, brother, sister, or friend, he said, “It’s not so helpful to judge it good or bad. Was it an appropriate response? That takes it beyond good and bad. . .. It is what it is. In any kind of action you take, you accept the karma that comes with it”—even though the effects of your actions can’t be predicted. When five priests turned around on a smoky, windy hairpin turn on Tassajara Road to meet the fire alone, it was just a moment, not good or bad, an action connected to the past and future by spider’s silk, its consequences yet unknown.

  People may try to distinguish a meaningful death from a meaningless one�
��a preventable one, like young Andrew Palmer’s. But Zen doesn’t hold to such divisions. Death is just death, a transformation. “Death could be construed as a disaster. Birth, another kind of disaster, or anything unexpected that ruins our plans,” Abbot Steve observed.

  In a talk at Tassajara after the fire, his voice low with residual fatigue, Abbot Steve spoke about the particular suffering of “might have been.” If you feel some regret for something, he said, it is your responsibility to engage that feeling. Only you can tend your own mind. He himself regretted that he hadn’t taken the time at the turnaround point on the road on July 9 to call everyone together and announce the five’s decision to return. “I could have done something there to better communicate,” he said almost two years after the fire.

  On July 27, the Basin Complex fire was declared 100 percent contained at a total of 162,818 acres. Estimated suppression costs to date topped $78 million. Combined with the Indians fire, burned land exceeded 240,000 acres—the third-largest tally in California history.

  On August 3, David read a statement at the temple gate to relaunch the guest season: “What, I ask, has the fire taught you? What, during these past weeks, have you discovered in the blaze of your own being that is beyond all displacement, beyond all destruction . . . ?” The first stage from Jamesburg in more than a month shuttled down Tassajara Road. The kitchen fired up its ovens and the cabin crew made beds for a few dozen guests—a smaller group than usual, yet still too many for some of the students. Though air quality had vastly improved, a smoky haze still settled over the valley in the mornings and evenings, and occasional winds transported smoke toward the monastery from the surrounding wilderness that still burned.

  Shortly after guest season reopened, David was on the telephone behind the stone office, the same place he’d been sitting when lightning struck, starting the fires that became the Basin Complex. Looking around, he realized everything was arranged just as it had been before. The picnic tables in the student eating area, with jars of hot sauce and salt and pepper shakers; a pile of newspapers, folds worn from being opened and closed, on the round table near the phone; turn-of-the-century photos of Tassajara hanging on the walls. Physically, Tassajara looked the same. And yet, he knew, everything had changed, was constantly changing, each moment a complete transformation. Even when we don’t see it. The fire had made that truth undeniably clear.

  For days after the fire, a smoldering log or gently smoking pile of leaves would suddenly ignite. The birdhouse ruins had burst back into flame eleven days after first burning. In the same way, the fire’s effects continued to smolder, lighting a flame of realization or recognition, revealing a teaching.

  The fire was not just flame, David said in an interview a few weeks after the fire. It was “everything that came together during that time frame and that continues to come together. It was the firefighters helping us. It was the wilderness that was burning. It was every member of the community who came forth to meet the moment. It was the smoke in the area, the ash falling down, our fears and concerns for each other. It was how we supported each other, and it was everybody who really, even for a moment, thought about Tassajara” and what was happening for the affected communities and the wilderness around them.

  Whenever someone approached one of the five directly to express their gratitude, as happened on many occasions after the fire, their practice became, How can I receive this? Mako often heard guests whisper, “There she is, she’s one of the five.” Sometimes Graham gave the gratitude back: “I’d thank them for thanking me.”

  When Jane returned to Tassajara the next summer and saw David as soon as she came through the gate, she bowed. “You’re probably sick of talking about it, aren’t you?”

  He smiled. “I am.”

  “Thank you” was all she said. “For me it was a big moment,” she told me later, “to be able at last to say thank you to each of them.”

  People wanted to express their gratitude. After the fire, nearly half a million dollars in donations poured in to Zen Center. People who visited Tassajara wanted to look into the eyes of those who were there through the heat of it and say, Thank you. It was challenging to be on the receiving end of the outpouring, but it was also difficult not to be. Sonja Gardenswartz, the ten-year resident who hadn’t been allowed to stay, interacted often with guests in her position as guest manager. “I don’t know” was all she could truly say in response to their curiosity and questions about the fire. “I wasn’t there.”

  A few days after the fire passed through Tassajara, she had left Jamesburg to cook for several Tassajara retreats being relocated to Mayacamas Ranch, a retreat center near Napa. Gardenswartz lived at Tassajara for another year after the fire, but in 2009 she moved to Green Gulch Farm, feeling the need for a change. “Time has moved on, and renewal is always taking place,” she told me. “I am a participant in that renewal.”

  Long after Tassajara’s residents thought they were done with evacuations, another advisory came. In the fall of 2008, two official reports by teams of soil scientists, hydrologists, and other post-fire assessment specialists predicted “extreme” risk of flooding and life-threatening rock and mud slides. The reports cautioned that Tassajara would be unsafe to inhabit during the upcoming winter rainy season. The fall practice period, led by Abbot Paul Haller, started nonetheless as scheduled in late September, but all participants and visitors had to sign waivers acknowledging their acceptance of the danger.

  For Mako, the threat of being washed away in a flash flood was much scarier than the fire. Later, she laughed about it, recalling one official’s recommendation that residents walk around with something tied to them so bodies could be found. There was a lot of gallows humor that practice period. At the work circle I attended in November, David announced that light rains were expected that week, and by the way, he still needed waivers from a few people. Someone made a joke about the killer rain in their midst.

  They held it lightly, the danger they were in, but they also did something about it. Using some of the funds from the post-fire donations, Zen Center hired Tassajara’s neighbor up the road, Little Bear Tom Nason (Grandpa Fred Nason’s son), to fortify Tassajara for the rains that could pour down the now denuded hillsides, with little to slow or absorb them, for the next few years. While the residents went about their intensive practice—meditating in the zendo, working around the grounds, sewing robes, and studying sutras—a work crew placed sandbags and built retaining walls and trenches to divert water and mud away from structures and public areas.

  The first winter rains were gentle. The hillsides sloughed rocks and soil, and the creek ran dark with silt. But then, on Christmas Eve day, a quiet time when Tassajara is between monastic training periods and former residents can return to practice, the unexpected happened. “Everyone has been looking to the skies for signs of impending danger. Rain, snow, wind,” wrote Slymon on Sitting with Fire. “And so, on Sunday the earth moved to remind us that it too can cause problems.” The quake was east of Salinas, but they felt the house shake in Jamesburg.

  On a clear spring morning a year and a half after the fire, David settled onto his cushion, arranging his robes. He closed his eyes and breathed in the deep silence of the zendo, penetrated occasionally by throat clearing or a muffled cough. This wasn’t his first talk as shuso, or head student, during the spring 2010 practice period led by Abbot Steve. David had already given two talks, and he had eighteen pages of typewritten notes for this one, which he placed on a lectern in front of him. So why did he have this tight feeling inside, this suspicion that there was something wrong with the words he’d carefully prepared?

  After the opening chant, an evocation of gratitude for the Buddha’s teachings and the ability to hear and “taste” them, David opened his notes and began to read. Typically, Dharma talks are not read, but he always prepared his. He didn’t want to risk having all thoughts drain from his brain while a roomful of people waited for him to speak—and not just to speak, but to say somethi
ng perceptive and inspiring.

  He’d entitled this third shuso talk “Surrender.” He started it by confessing his own “addiction to control”—citing as an example his desire to manage “the quality of care” the monastery and guests received from students. As he read on, he felt a strange disconnection with the material, a dislocation from his listeners, many of them good friends. But about ten pages in, he reached the section about his practice of “don’t-know mind” during the fire. Something broke loose in him. He began to weep.

  During the 2008 fire, he’d felt deeply responsible for the safety and confidence of others and acutely aware of how little he could actually control. But as he gave his shuso talk—twenty months later—he finally felt “the full weight of don’t know, of truly having nothing to rely on,” for assurance that Tassajara and its residents would survive the fire.

  David felt the attention sharpen in the zendo as he spoke, the upright antennae of bodies tuned to his words. He sensed that people wanted him to talk to them in an unscripted way, about what was happening right now. For several minutes, he couldn’t speak at all. He sat still, but inside he was falling. No wings, no parachute, no ground even to land on. Yet he felt as though he had to continue, for the sangha. He reached for his notes and resumed reading.

  David felt raw for days after the talk. “At the time I didn’t realize that it was the sangha’s turn to carry me,” he told me later, “and I wasn’t ready to be that vulnerable.” In the end, the experience schooled him on his own topic. You can’t make surrender happen. You can only let go. In fact, “there can be no ‘you’ in wholehearted surrender,” David said.