Fire Monks (10 page)

Late in the morning on June 28, a CAL FIRE battalion chief appeared at Tassajara, saying that all “nonessential” people should pull out. With a fire map spread out on the hood of his truck, he pointed to the fire's creeping eastern perimeter, nearing the Church Creek divide north of Tassajara, and beyond it, the road. The prior evening, a visiting safety officer and Jon Wight, the captain of the Fenner Canyon inmate crew, had emphasized to residents the liability of Tassajara Road. Wight had said the road would be “extremely dangerous” as the fire approached. No one would be able to travel on it, either to enter the valley or to leave. Now, having personally observed how prepared residents were, Wight came to their defense. In the end, the chief didn't pressure residents further to reduce their numbers. For the time being, all fourteen would stay.

At this point, fire could come from any direction. And yet, observed Shundo, “it looked like the fire was building up and getting closer, and then it seemed to peter out. There was a definite dip.” The firefighters clearly had intended to impress upon them that this was serious business. But the fire was still three days away—as it had been estimated to be for more than a week, earning it the name the Three-Day-Away fire among Tassajara residents.

On Sunday, June 29, David walked into the kitchen and told Mako
that the Fenner Canyon inmate crew was packing up. They would be gone before lunch.

“What do you mean they're leaving?” Mako asked, arms crossed, big eyes opened wide. She and her skeleton kitchen crew had just made enough three-bean salad to feed nearly eighty-five people. “I thought they were supposed to stay for a few days. We've got so much food.” The town truck that had brought in kitchen helpers had also ferried in extra supplies in anticipation of feeding the firefighters.

“I thought so, too,” David said, shrugging.

The Fenner Canyon inmate crew had accomplished a lot in a couple of days—mostly digging trenches on the steep northern slopes for firebreaks—but inmates and monks had not had the kind of time they'd had during the 1999 fire to forge a bond. This time, the inmates slept in sleeping bags on the concrete deck at the pool. They didn't work together with residents so much as in parallel. One inmate told Mako he was a Buddhist, but there were no boots lined up on the zendo shoe rack as there had been in 1999. There was still so much work to do, and the zendo was mostly empty.

Still, crew captain Jon Wight recalled sadness and frustration when their orders came to pull out on June 29. It was the second time he'd been told to leave Tassajara. The first was only an hour after they'd arrived on June 27, but he'd argued with the commander and received permission to stay. He'd originally been told his crew was going down to Tassajara to ride out the fire. The residents had welcomed his crew with warmth and respect. “Driving away,” Wight said later about leaving, “I won't say I cried, but I wanted to. I had such a good feeling about the type of people they were and the way they treated us. I felt like we were abandoning them.”

Later that morning, firefighters and monks gathered in the courtyard, circling around a large upright boulder. A student who'd returned after the resident evacuation to help in the kitchen had made cookies for the inmates. He distributed a brown paper bag of cookies to each of the men. “Just be careful when you bite down,” he announced, unable to resist, “there's a tiny metal file in each cookie.”

The inmates laughed, though their wardens weren't amused. After that, everyone took a group picture in the parking lot—orange suits clustered in the middle, flanked by uniformed crew leaders and wardens, and monks in work clothes. The monks thanked the firefighters for their hard work. Wight assured them that another crew would be on the way if the fire moved closer. Then the engines pulled out, and the residents were left alone.

It is hard to know what to do with all the detail that rises out of a fire. It rises out of a fire as thick as smoke and threatens to blot out everything—some of it is true but doesn't make any difference, some is just plain wrong, and some doesn't even exist, except in your mind, as you slowly discover long afterwards. Some of it, though, is true—and makes all the difference.

—NORMAN MACLEAN,
Young Men and Fire

At Jamesburg, the phone kept ringing. The far-flung sangha called
for updates and with offers to drop everything and drive into the valley to help. Chris Slymon,
Sitting with Fire
's creator, broadcast a thank-you, saying, “We are unable to accept any offers to help work at Tassajara as we cannot increase the number of people we have staying down there.” The post's larger font drew attention to the unwritten message:
Do not come to Tassajara
. He suggested that those who wanted to help could open their homes to the displaced.

Some could not be so easily dissuaded. One Zen student who had lived at Tassajara in the 1980s decided to drive down Tassajara Road. Videocamera in hand, he shot footage destined for YouTube of smoke-churned skies above Tassajara and interviewed eighty-five-year-old local Esselen “Grandpa” Fred Nason, who just a few days earlier had ridden his horse in front of a fleet of bulldozers rehabilitating old firelines from the 1977 and 1999 fires, to safeguard Native American sites in their path.

But few ventured past the closure signs at the Los Padres National Forest boundary. For many, checking
Sitting with Fire
regularly was enough—or was the only option. Slymon passed along whatever he knew to readers hungry for information about what was happening down at Tassajara.

As the month of June drew to a close, he summarized the situation. The Indians fire was “almost-but-not-quite controlled,” but the Basin Complex fire was burning out of control, extending its northern, southern, and eastern perimeters. “The current plan for controlling the fire to the north and east,” reported Slymon, “involves the construction of a large box within which the fire is allowed to burn and within which they work only to protect structures such as Tassajara . . . There are many scenarios for protecting Tassajara that vary with the direction in which the fire approaches.” The one constant was unpredictability. Fire behavior, and firefighting strategies, couldn't be set in stone because they depended so completely on weather.

“Well, life goes on (toilet paper and tissues),” he wrote, speaking of supplies still being driven in to Tassajara for the resident fire crew, “and life changes (electrolyte powder, oxygen and hoses, hoses, and yet more hoses).”

 

 

Talking about the weather may be a euphemism for conversation
with a lack of substance, but nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to wildfires. Weather makes or breaks fires. Big fires create their own weather. When firefighters and civilians die in wildfires, weather plays a pivotal role.

Most recently, and most directly relevant to the Basin Complex fire's management, was the 2006 Esperanza fire in Southern California. Ignited by an arsonist and stoked by hot, dry, October Santa Ana winds, the wildfire killed five USFS firefighters defending an empty, half-built residence on a ridgeline west of Palm Springs.

As is usually the case in tragedies, several factors lined up to create the conditions for devastation. There was a temperature inversion in place that morning. When fire entered the canyon below the octagon-shaped house where the firefighters of Engine 57 had stationed themselves, superheated flames—1,200 degrees Fahrenheit—punched through the inversion layer. A twenty-four-thousand-foot plume acted as a chimney, drawing winds into the fire downwind of the house and blowing walls of flame up the canyon at speeds of 50–70 mph toward the house. Flames wrapped around the angled sides of the structure, leaving the crew nowhere to hide. The extreme heat and winds created an “area ignition”—all combustible material in the area caught fire simultaneously, without needing to come in contact with flames. The firefighters' Nomex, flame- and heat-resistant clothing that chars at 824 degrees Fahrenheit, disintegrated.

The captain of Engine 57 must have determined that the spot, perched on the rim of a steep canyon, was safe. So what went wrong?

The Esperanza fire made its fatal run up a steep drainage. The 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana and the 1994 South Canyon fire in Colorado had already provided grave examples of what could happen in that kind of terrain. In addition, crews on the Esperanza fire—there were several engines in the area—had trouble reaching one another on the radio because assigned frequencies were overwhelmed by radio traffic. They resorted to using unassigned frequencies, where those managing the fire couldn't hear them.

In the world of wildland firefighting, the firefighter who arrives first at a fire usually names it and assumes command of the incident, at least initially. Who is ultimately “responsible” for a fire depends on who owns or manages the land where the fire starts or spreads to. The Esperanza fire start, and the accident site, were in CAL FIRE's area of responsibility. A CAL FIRE engine arrived first, at just after one in the morning. As the fire burned into the San Bernardino National Forest, the CAL FIRE battalion chief functioning as incident commander requested U.S. Forest Service support. Five USFS engines, including the doomed Engine 57, were dispatched within a half hour.

According to an investigation conducted by the USFS and CAL FIRE, unified command for the fire was established (and radio broadcast) at three ten a.m. An independent federal inquiry three years later, however, found that unified command wasn't put in place until after the fatal burnover. Either way, here is the bitter irony of Esperanza: Five USFS firefighters, not mandated by their agency to provide structure protection, died defending an empty residence burning within the jurisdiction of CAL FIRE, whose mission clearly includes protecting property.

Esperanza
means “hope” in Spanish, but this was no hope-giving event. Rather, it seeded doubt and an abundance of caution. Why did our men die? fire commanders had to ask. And there was no good answer. No good response but to refocus on firefighter safety going forward. Basin Complex IC Mike Dietrich spoke at the memorial service for the Engine 57 firefighters when he was still fire chief for the San Bernardino National Forest. In 2008, it's unlikely that Dietrich or any other firefighter had forgotten the stricken faces of family members at those firefighters' funerals.

The USFS firefighters who'd come to Tassajara since the start of the Basin Complex fire mentioned the Esperanza fire often. We can't put our men down here, they'd say. Not with one road in and out. Not to protect structures.

It got under CAL FIRE captain Stuart Carlson's skin. “They kept on saying we lost these firefighters on this fire in San Bernardino County. So what they were saying is we're not doing structure protection. Well, they've lost a lot more people doing wildland firefighting throughout their history, so why are they doing wildland firefighting?”

There were ways in which Tassajara evoked Esperanza. The steepness and remoteness of the terrain. The access issues. But there were also key differences. The burnover in Southern California had happened on a ridge—a dangerous place to be during a wildfire. Tassajara is situated in a riparian corridor. Fire would have to work hard to descend into the relatively moist Tassajara valley anywhere near as hot and fast as it had swept up the ridge on the Esperanza fire.

The federal inquiry into the Esperanza fatalities concluded that a lapse in situational awareness played a destructive role. Firefighters need to know what is going on around them, be able to perceive the potential for change, and be willing to modulate those perceptions based on what is actually happening on the ground. Zen monks, too, are trained to attend closely to the dynamics of their environment. They try to stay in contact with reality, to realize that things constantly change, and to respond to each moment's cues.

Call it situational awareness or call it beginner's mind. Mindfulness is the everyday practice of a monk. It can save the life of a firefighter.

 

 

As June gave way to July at Tassajara, the remaining residents kept
preparing for the Basin Complex fire, not knowing if it would arrive or when. They tested the Mark 3 pump at the creek, had meetings, studied fire maps, drank mullein herb tea—good for the lungs. They dug a hole for the Gandharan Buddha statue in the bocce ball court, just in case. Shundo Haye took pictures of helicopters passing overhead and gorgeous orange sunsets, stone walls tinged red. On Tuesday, July 1, he wrote in his journal: “Not knowing is the habit. We become elemental—earth air fire and water.”