Fire Monks (22 page)

As you drove in to Tassajara, the bathtub signaled that you were getting close. But as they drove out that evening, it meant they had to find a way to turn around soon.

 

 

Graham pointed to some smoke in the distance and scoffed, “We're
going because of this?” The fire didn't look any different from when he'd escorted the satellite tech up the road a couple of hours ago. He grumbled, “If Paul were here, we wouldn't be leaving!”

When I spoke to Graham and Mako about this moment later, they couldn't agree on which one of them had actually made the comment about Abbot Paul Haller. In any case, it was a momentary slip, a lashing out that had more to do with frustration than with their actual experience of Abbot Steve. They just didn't understand why he had agreed to evacuate and believed that Haller simply would have refused. Abbot Steve's arrival
had
changed the decisionmaking dynamic, Graham told me later. Before, David consulted the core team and they decided what to do together. But Abbot Steve had basically driven this decision. And now they were leaving Tassajara to burn.

Monkeybat meowed. Mako tried to soothe the cat, scrubbing her head around the ears through the pillowcase.

“We'll find a way to get back in,” she said. On the phone, Haller had reminded her that just because they were leaving Tassajara now didn't mean they could not return. That's what residents had done in 1977—they'd evacuated when ordered to by the USFS, leaving sprinklers whirling on the rooftops. First a few people had sneaked back in to refuel the pumps, and then a full crew, including poet Jane Hirshfield, had returned just before fire closed the road.

Mako's words seemed to bounce off Graham. He had one hand on top of his head as if to hold it in place, his lips pressed tightly together. The mood was markedly different in the back of the Suburban. Four residents, clearly relieved to be leaving, talked happily about eating at the Running Iron, a bar and grill in Carmel Valley Village, and where they'd like to go for vacation now that they weren't going to be fighting fire.

At Ashes Corner, branch director Jack Froggatt stood on the side of the road. When the convoy reached him around six twenty-five p.m., Shundo Haye stopped and talked to him for a moment and then drove around the corner and continued up the road to the ridge.

When Graham and Mako's vehicle reached Froggatt, Graham cut the engine. Mako handed Monkeybat to a resident in the backseat, and she and Graham climbed out of the Suburban. “I remember feeling happy it was Jack,” Mako told me later, “someone familiar.”

It was windy on the ridge, hot and smoky. The airtankers thundered through the valleys a few hundred feet away, sometimes disappearing below the level of the road.

“Hey, Jack, what's going on?” said Mako.

“I'm surprised to see you.” Froggatt stood with his hands on his hips, looking sideways at them, a quizzical expression on his face. He'd shed the dark reflective glasses he'd worn earlier that afternoon.

Mako and Graham looked at each other.

“If you leave, you know you can't go back,” said Froggatt.

“We were looking for any little opening,” Graham recalled later, anything that would allow them to stay.

Maybe we don't need to be on the road going out, Mako thought. It was an ah-ha moment, the moment when a clear path opens and you take it.

 

 

Colin had pulled up to Ashes Corner in time to catch Froggatt's re
mark. Those behind him stopped as well. Now five of the six vehicles leaving Tassajara were parked along the road—the Isuzu driven by Shundo had gone ahead. It was half past six. As the abbot and director walked up to Froggatt and the others, a few more evacuees spilled from the two Suburbans. Some stayed put inside the vehicles to avoid the smoke or because they were tired and ready to move on.

“Let's keep it moving, folks,” said Froggatt, a roll of fire maps tufting from the side pocket of his black utility pants. “We want to get you out safely.” The fixed-wing airtankers he'd ordered to protect the road stitched noisily through the smoke, dropping loads of water.

What he'd said to Mako and Graham was true. Froggatt was surprised to see them, because they'd never planned to leave. But he was also relieved. It meant he wouldn't have to worry about them any longer. Sensing the group's hesitation, he now encouraged everyone to keep heading up the road. A ridgetop with fire beneath it, as the disaster on the 2006 Esperanza fire had tragically proved, is not a place to linger. There'd been a red flag warning issued then, too, with high winds and perilously low humidity, before the burnover that killed five firefighters.

“Are you the last ones out?” Froggatt asked.

Abbot Steve nodded and looked out over the valley from the ridge. Dark, forested ridgelines cut straight up and down at nearly perpendicular angles. A searing, blustery wind blew down the canyons from the northwest, driving the flames both toward Tassajara and uphill toward the road. Smoke drifted up from the valley floor and waltzed with the wind into a black opal sky.

Wind had also blown fiercely the night a group of students scattered Suzuki Roshi's ashes under a full moon in April 1972. Abbot Steve was among the disciples who felt their way on a short rocky trail that extends along a ridgeline from Ashes Corner out to a peak. “A big gust of wind came up and, poof,” he told me later, fingers spreading, palms drifting apart, “it took the ashes.” Mitsu, Suzuki Roshi's wife, had said, “Ah, Suzuki Roshi like wind.” Abbot Steve had tasted the grit of the ashes on his tongue.

Words he had written for the occasion of his installation as abbot in 2007 could well have been penned for this moment on the smoky ridge above Tassajara, airtankers rumbling through the canyon, beating the fire back from the road: “Our practice of zazen gives us backbone. Tough, sturdy, resilient. Soft as silk, tempered like fine steel.”

He thought of his wife. She would understand why he needed to do what he was about to do. She trusted his judgment. He thought of Haller, his Dharma brother and co-abbot. “I knew that I'd have Paul's support,” Abbot Steve told me later. Part of that confidence came from knowing Haller. Both had studied under the same teacher and received Dharma transmission in 1993 at Tassajara. But part of it came from the question Haller had put to David in the stone office: Why are you leaving?

On the ridge, the abbot turned to the branch director. “What happens if we don't go?”

Stuart stood to Abbot Steve's right, looking as if he couldn't believe he was hearing this question. He let out an exasperated chuckle, then peeled off from the conversation and walked a few yards up the road.

Froggatt's face was less forthcoming. The branch director kept his emotions tucked away, out of view. “I can't make you leave,” he said. “But once you pass this point, I have to stop you from going back in until we know it's safe.”

By definition, being in the path of a moving fire front is not safe. You could be overrun by fire or overcome by smoke. You could be crushed by falling trees, rolling boulders, explosions. A firestorm could suck all the oxygen from the valley. A crown fire, leaping from treetop to treetop, can reach 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, releasing the energy of an atomic bomb every fifteen minutes.

But even a seemingly minor mishap could become life-threatening at Tassajara, Froggatt knew, because once fire compromised the road there would be no way in or out. “I could have attempted to prevent their return, since they were no longer on their property,” Froggatt told me afterward, “but I am not a law enforcement officer, and the best thing to do was to try to convince them that returning was not a good idea. I felt strongly that their lives would be at risk.”

An airtanker roared overhead, then banked along the ridge, dropping a few thousand gallons of water into the Church Creek valley.

“We need you all to keep moving,” said Froggatt, waving his hand up the road.

Abbot Steve turned to David. “Let's call the core team together.”

This chipped Froggatt's neutral demeanor. “We just spent fifty thousand dollars keeping the road open for you so you could have a meeting?”

Someone else was yelling at them from a vehicle that had driven down from another post: “Go! Go! Get moving! Now!”

“That was your decision,” said the abbot. Fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money, but, as he said to Froggatt next, walking down the road a ways so the core team could meet in private: “We didn't ask for that.”

 

 

“You feel this wind now?” Stuart asked Colin. They stood on the
uphill side of the bend, with an up-valley view of the fire, while Abbot Steve talked with Froggatt. A hot wind raked the road. “It's going to be like this and one hundred thirteen degrees tomorrow. You don't want to be down there.”

When I asked Colin to describe what the fire looked like from Ashes Corner then, he couldn't remember. He was looking closer in, at Stuart. “I didn't know what was happening for him, but I could feel it. I could feel fear. What arose was, Maybe there's something to be worried about here. I'm thinking, He's been through this a million times, why would he be scared?”

At Ashes Corner, Colin overheard the conversation between Abbot Steve and the branch director even as he talked with Stuart, his senses trained to take it all in. But what registered the strongest, what he remembered best, was the concern he saw on the fire captain's face.

 

 

Everyone who'd been at the stone office evacuation meeting now
gathered around the abbot. The huddle did not include all of the core team members—Shundo had continued obediently past Froggatt and driven on up the road. Those present briefly discussed whether they ought to wait for Shundo, but there wasn't time. And they thought maybe he'd driven out of radio contact.

“I'm going back to Tassajara,” Abbot Steve told the five people circled around him, making deliberate eye contact with each as if meeting them in dokusan
,
one-on-one. “What I hear from Jack Froggatt is that we might not be able to get back in if we leave now, but I feel that Tassajara can be defended. I can't make the decision for you or request that you stay under the circumstances. You have to decide for yourself what you want to do.”

Abbot Steve already knew David's answer.

Practically in the same instant, Mako and Graham said they wanted to return. As former fire marshal and plant manager, they knew the systems that would be critical for protecting Tassajara.

Next it was Colin's turn. After a moment's hesitation, he confirmed that he would return, too. Despite what Stuart had just told him about what a furnace it would be in the valley when the fire came through, he felt he had to go back. He was head of the shop, and these were his friends. He didn't think he'd be able to look them in the eye again if he let them go back alone.

After Colin said he'd return, the group focused on the only member of the huddle who hadn't spoken yet, fire marshal Devin Patel.

“I'm going out,” he said.

Devin's girlfriend, a guest cook, waited in one of the Suburbans. She'd returned to Tassajara just the day before with another evacuee primarily to help in the kitchen. But Abbot Steve suspected that Devin's desire to continue with the evacuation had just as much to do with Stuart's recommendation that they leave. “He took his cues from Stuart,” the abbot said later. “He depended on his experience.”

Abbot Steve respected Stuart, too, but he didn't base his own evaluation of the situation or his own state of mind on the fire captain's or that of the few firefighters on the road, shouting, “You've got to go! You have five minutes! You no longer have five minutes! The road is going to burn up any minute!”

Proud of Devin for choosing his own path, Abbot Steve nodded once. “I was concerned about putting pressure on people to stay,” he told me. “The fact that Devin said no meant that it was possible to be in that meeting and not stay.”

A few residents who had left their vehicles and heard the exchange between the abbot and branch director Froggatt asked Abbot Steve if they could go back, too. But Abbot Steve turned them down. Each of the four returning with him had attended regular fire briefings and decision-making meetings. He didn't feel he could ask others to assume the same risks when they didn't have the same information and experience. Moreover, five was a solid, manageable number. Though the abbot didn't know this, five was the maximum number of firefighters on one of Stuart's engines—more than that, and you risk losing track.

Abbot Steve had looked at the core team and seen something different from what Stuart had seen: not inexperienced firefighters, but seasoned practitioners of calm mind, prepared to deal with uncertainty. “We had confidence in beginner's mind,” he told me when we spoke about this moment later. On one side there is what you think you know, the abbot explained, but on the other, there is simply trust in staying open, “the willingness to remain completely present and not turn away from the unknown—an extension of our zazen practice.”

He walked back up the road to Froggatt, whose cheeks tensed with impatience.

“Five of us are staying.” Abbot Steve chose the word
staying
deliberately. To him, they weren't going back. They'd never left Tassajara, because it was all Tassajara. They'd merely gone up the road a bit.

Froggatt simply nodded. No surprise this time. He turned to a colleague, a safety officer standing nearby. “Make sure we've got their names.” Then he walked off, talking into his radio.