Fire Monks (13 page)

Norman's son, John Maclean, uses plainer prose in
Fire and Ashes
to describe firefighter fatalities in a 1953 fire in the Mendocino National Forest in California: “An advance wave of superheated gas entered their mouths and noses and seared the delicate tissues of the nose, mouth, and esophagus involved in breathing, which ceased to function. Deprived of oxygen, the men quickly fell into unconsciousness and died within seconds.” It wasn't the fire that killed but the furnace blast of air that accompanied it.

As a firefighter, Stuart had seen what could go horribly wrong. What firefighters call a “slide tray” of haunting images sometimes kept him awake at night.

Once, he'd lit an escape fire on a deer trail to save his crew. “Just like
Young Men and Fire,
” he told me, referring to the Mann Gulch blowup in which the foreman, Wag Dodge, lit the grass ahead of the main fire raging upslope toward his crew to create a safe, burned-out zone. Dodge survived, as did two other firefighters who managed to outrun the fire, but most of the crew perished. They'd thought their foreman had gone mad, adding fire to fire, and many ignored his command to step into the burned area and lie facedown on the smoldering earth while the main fire passed.

Wag Dodge's quick, lifesaving thinking has long fascinated firefighters. Escape fires became standard practice after Mann Gulch. But others outside the firefighting world have been drawn to Dodge's story as well—historians, songwriters, scientists, poets, and those merely curious about his startling access to insight, to knowledge he didn't know he had until it materialized at just the right moment and saved his life. While the fleeing firefighters clutched at the driving thought that they had to run to stay alive, Dodge was able to stop running and open his mind to the wide field of possibilities, from which the solution to his problem dropped into view. Both Dodge's example and current neuroscience attest that a pliant, nongrasping mind is the hallmark of insight. It's also a fine description of the mind in zazen: relaxed yet alert, flexible and porous.

When Stuart ordered his young crew—they were California Youth Authority wards doing time for crimes committed as minors—to follow him into what has come to be called “good black,” they did. Helicopters dropped water on their heads. But Stuart didn't tell this story at Tassajara. He wanted to instill confidence in the residents. And everything he saw and heard led him to believe this fire was going to come backing down slow and tame.

When a new incident management team for the Basin Complex fire rotated on duty July 2, the branch director assigned to the area drove down to Tassajara to look around and meet the residents. His name was Jack Froggatt.

David introduced the two firefighters. “Stuart's an old friend of Tassajara. He taught us everything we know,” he said. Then he left them alone to talk.

“How long you been with Kern County?” Stuart asked. Froggatt's T-shirt said “KERN COUNTY FIRE.”

“Since '84.” Froggatt looked to be in his fifties, strong and fit, the gray hair more a testament to a long career in a field of risk than a concession to aging.

“We were always getting sent down to the Kern when I was a crew captain,” Stuart told Froggatt, referring to the river sometimes called the Killer Kern. The waterway originates in the Sierra Nevada range near Bakersfield. “One of the fires was in a canyon. It was the steepest climb I've ever done with a fire crew.” Stuart gestured to the acutely angled, rocky slopes towering over Tassajara. “You should feel right at home here.”

“Glad to have you as a resource,” said Froggatt.

The feeling was mutual. Stuart had never met Froggatt before, but he'd met Froggatt's country. And that told him much about Froggatt. He was a veteran, an old hand at rough country. But he didn't swagger around or try to bully anyone. He listened. He asked questions. He seemed, Stuart told me on several occasions, to appreciate what Tassajara is about.

Until he read a status report from the incident management team
that noted the threat to Tassajara, Mike Morales had never heard of the place. After reading more on local blogs, the former CAL FIRE captain who retired early owing to an injury started following the story of the monks' fire preparations. He wrote about the efforts at Tassajara on his site,
Firefighter Blog
.

Morales had been tracking the California wildfires since June on his blog. Chief among Morales's concerns was the lack of resources. “This is the widest spread of resources I can recall,” he wrote on June 22, the day after the lightning strikes. Two days later, he observed that there were still only 380 personnel assigned to the Indians fire. “Under normal circumstances CAL FIRE would have 1,500 people swarming this fire.” When the number of personnel on the Basin Complex fire jumped to 1,000 on June 29, Morales still wasn't impressed. “All considered this is a very small army for a fire this size. Troops are scarce statewide so it's improbable this one will ever get adequately staffed.”

Three days before the lightning strikes in June, Casey Judd of the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association had testified for a Senate oversight committee on the readiness of federal land management agencies—such as the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees national forests like the Los Padres. Judd told the committee that the agencies were not sufficiently prepared for the 2008 fire season. Federal fire programs were increasingly under the management of people with little or no expertise in wildland fire, said Judd, and funds meant for fire preparedness and fuels reduction had been diverted to nonfire programs and projects.

These trends may explain in part why there didn't seem to be enough firefighting resources to go around in the summer of 2008—that and the extraordinary, unanticipated burden of more than two thousand wildfires. But Morales argued that the Ventana Wilderness deserved better. “If the fires meet in the middle on their own, I have no problem. If the fires are being directed to meet, I suggest the forest is a victim of mismanagement.” Even after the number of firefighters assigned to the Basin Complex fire doubled in late June, Morales lamented that “two thousand firefighters is about a quarter of the manpower they need to make a dent.”

As the projected acreage for the Basin Complex fire continued to climb in early July, Morales consulted GeoMAC, an Internet-based fire-mapping application, alongside topographic maps he'd spread out on his desk. GeoMAC occasionally hiccuped and showed spot fires burning in the Pacific Ocean, but simple geographic common sense told him that if the fire grew, it had to grow inland, away from the coast, toward Tassajara.

“As the week progresses,” he wrote on the Fourth of July, “firefighters will find themselves working away from Big Sur proper and farther into the Ventana Wilderness.” And they would do so in brutal heat. Temperatures for the beginning of the following week were forecast to bust ten-year records. “Folks at the Tassajara compound,” he warned, “have renewed reason for concern.”

 

 

On July Fourth, an
NBC Nightly News
crew drove down the road,
filmed Tassajara residents clearing leaves and testing out Dharma Rain, and interviewed Abbot Steve. The footage aired the following evening as part of a larger report on the California fires, particularly those threatening Santa Barbara and Big Sur.

That evening, at a festive dinner of pizza, ice cream, and fizzy drinks in the dining room, David allowed himself two slices of pizza. He tended to gain weight in the summertime at Tassajara, when leftover guest food was available at the back door of the kitchen for endless snacking. Cherry scones. Pecan pancakes. Double chocolate cookies. He knew well the false comforts of food. When he was ten years old and living with his father again, he had weighed 152 pounds.

For the past few days, the core team had been trying to anticipate various scenarios. David had made a list of the thresholds and contingencies they'd discussed, mostly in the form of questions. What are the “trigger points”—a term firefighters used—at which we evacuate noncore team members? Evacuate everyone remaining in the valley? Take shelter in safety zones? If a CAL FIRE crew is here, who stays and under what circumstances? When do we evacuate: if they do? Or if they tell us to but they stay? When do we bury the Buddha?

They'd been trying to hammer out a system of tiered evacuations in which nonessential people would leave when the fire was close and a smaller group would stay for the fire to fuel the pumps Dharma Rain depended on. But by July Fourth, they'd abandoned that idea and decided to focus on ensuring that there were twenty people inside Tassajara willing to stay and defend it even if the road was cut off.

Counting the fourteen residents who'd initially stayed behind during the June 25 evacuation, plus students who'd returned to help after, residents then at Tassajara numbered around twenty already. Some of those individuals, however, hadn't committed to staying for the duration, as the core team had. Bringing in more people would mean more reinforcements and more time to recover from the constant physical work of the last couple of weeks. One resident was so fatigued that he'd walked into the bronze gong outside the kitchen used to announce student meals and nearly knocked himself out.

After dinner, when the dishes were bused to the dish shack and the food put away, they gathered again around the table in the dining room. An upbeat mood lingered from the special holiday meal. It flattened when David made his announcement: Now is the time to choose. If you stay, you must be willing to meet the fire when it comes to Tassajara. Those concerned for their safety and unwilling to engage the fire should leave right away so others can come.

That Fourth of July evening, the skies were quiet over much of California. Some citizens had heeded the governor's request to forgo fireworks. Normally, July Fourth is a festive night at Tassajara. Residents perform skits and parade down the main path, celebrating the anniversary of Tassajara's official opening day in 1967 as much as the national holiday.

Zen students are more likely to affirm interdependence than independence. Part of Buddhist practice is learning to perceive the ways we are all connected to one another, just as each moment is tethered to the past and the future. Like a stand of aspens, all phenomena emerge aboveground from the same root. People forget this most of the time. They remember in times of crisis, when the habit of disconnection is broken.

This Independence Day at Tassajara, the residents were too tired to put together a celebration. They went to bed early as the forest put on its own display, bathing everything in a smoky orange glow.

 

 

The Three-Day-Away fire had been lurking in the Ventana Wilderness
for two weeks. Though the fire wasn't holding true to its name, it was still fitting. Many things come in threes in Zen. An old adage advises: Reflect three times before speaking. Monks make three bows (or nine, a multiple of three) during service. They eat from three bowls. They recognize three worlds or realms of existence: the realm of desire, the realm of form, and the realm of formlessness. They vow to abide by three pure precepts—to do no evil, to do good, and to save all beings—and to cherish the three treasures: Buddha (the teacher), Dharma (the teachings), and sangha (the community).

On the steamy afternoon of July 5, the standoff between Mako and Graham was three days old. When Mako left the kitchen after lunch, she ran into Graham inside their temporary lodgings in one of the stone rooms, where it was blissfully cool.

“Do you want a cookie?” she said. She'd brought some from the kitchen.

He answered no with a quick shake of his head.

“I wish you'd talk to me,” she said.

She took a bite. The cookie didn't taste sweet, despite the sugar and chocolate chips in it. She closed her eyes and took a breath, reminding herself that she and her partner were still connected, even if she couldn't feel it. Still, it hurt to feel separate. That day, Stuart had returned to Tassajara, bringing his girlfriend, Solange, as his guest. Introducing her at work circle, he was solicitous and sweet, protective, maybe overly so. Shundo, the acting work leader, had sent her to the kitchen. Her presence there made the dissonance with Graham all the more vivid for Mako.

One moment, you're so close you feel you share the same skin, and the next, you're a universe apart. But Mako knew better than to take Graham's silence personally. Whatever was bothering him wasn't really about her. His mood would shift eventually.

“I'll leave this here,” she said, setting a cookie on the table.

She petted Monkeybat, asleep on a chair. The cat lifted her head into Mako's palm and purred. Four weeks out from surgery for an intestinal tumor, she seemed to be slowly healing. Mako had sent Monkeybat to Jamesburg during the June 25 evacuation, but as fire preparations dragged on at Tassajara, Monkeybat was brought back in so Mako could take care of her personally.