Fire Monks (31 page)

Graham stood there for a while, watering the oak. They could rebuild the birdhouse in one work period. But no amount of effort or charitable labor could rebuild a tree that had been growing there for at least a hundred years.

 

 

Runaway embers rolling downhill from the blackened frame of the
birdhouse cabin now threatened to ignite the gatehouse, where residents had taken a group photo the prior afternoon with the Indiana crew. Fire also continued to skid down the slope of Flag Rock. Like a marathon runner in the last leg of a race, Colin rallied energy from somewhere, because he had to. He couldn't let down his guard now and allow the fire to sneak up on the founder's hall the way it had on the birdhouse. He knew from watching the birdhouse go up in flames that it could happen instantly, while you had your head turned for a moment.

The love Suzuki Roshi's students felt for him is in each stone of the
kaisando,
built when he was still alive. In contrast with the sprawling shop, the founder's hall is an intimate space, about the size of a large bedroom. Occasionally, when yoga workshops take over the zendo during the summer guest season, afternoon service is held in the founder's hall. Chanting in there, as in the closed space of the steamroom in the baths, is a powerful, resonant experience. While nobody would cry if they lost the shop—for years people had wanted to move it out to the flats, out of sight—if the kaisando burned, hearts would ache.

Colin dragged a hose up from the Cabarga Creek standpipe on the west side of the founder's hall, across from the zendo. During the weeks they'd been clearing in preparation for fire, they'd dumped raked leaves and trimmed branches into the dry creekbed—too close to the buildings, he could see now, though there wasn't anything he could do about it.

Abbot Steve took his place on the east face of the hall, near the abbot's cabin, where a stone basin in a rock garden built by Suzuki Roshi reflects the pre-dawn stars. For an hour or so, from their respective positions, they followed the crashing course of rocks and flaming branches down the slope and poured water on anything that had burned, was burning, or just might burn.

 

 

Throughout this time, Mako stayed at the flats, repeatedly extin
guishing fires she thought she'd taken care of. Every time she turned around, there was some new fire to tend to or an old fire that had resurrected.

Around four thirty p.m., the woodshed fire took off. The three-sided structure with corrugated metal roofing was chock-f of kindling for the wood stoves in the stone and pine rooms and a handful of other cabins—much fuller now in summer than it would be in winter. As Mako sprayed the burning piles with the meager flow from her hose, she began to worry about the volume of available fuel. If it got hot enough and all of it went up, it would be a much bigger fire than she could handle alone. Already the smoke and heat were intense, and strangely, she smelled burning rubber.

The center stack was burning the hottest, so she started toppling the pile with a McLeod, part hoe and part rake. She'd hook on to the wood with the hoe part, pull out the burning pieces, then water them down. Because the water pressure was weak, she had to get up close to the fire to work this way, within five feet. The woodpiles on either side of her were burning, too, and the smoke began to pierce her eyes and prick her throat.

When she started to feel nauseated, she set down the hose and stepped out of the woodshed to get some relief. As soon as she felt better, she picked up her hose again. She moved in and out like that for a while, in a kind of waltz with the need to take care of herself and the need to put out the fire.

Mako saw that the tires on the wood splitter, parked at the edge of the central woodpile, were on fire. That was why she'd smelled burning rubber. But as she sprayed down the machine, she instinctively took a big step back. Was there gasoline in the tank? What if it exploded? “For all I knew,” she told me later, “twisted hunks of metal shrapnel were about to come flying at me.”

There was a time when female Zen students deliberately disfigured themselves—often with a hot iron—in order to renounce any attachment to their beauty and to demonstrate their fierce commitment to entering a monastic practice that was once exclusively male. But San Francisco Zen Center has had female abbesses. Many American Zen teachers are women. Neither Mako nor the generation of female Zen students before her required such extreme measures to earn a teacher's respect or manifest their will. If the wood splitter exploded, much harm and no good would come of it. With her heart galloping in her chest, Mako called for help, making no attempt to disguise her fear.

“This is Mako. Graham, Colin, is there gas in the wood splitter? Over.”

Graham was still salvaging the oak tree. Standing on the Cabarga Creek bridge, Colin answered first: “Copy. Colin here. Uh, yeah.... Why? Over.” Of course there was gas in the wood splitter, but he had no idea how much.

“It's on fire! Is it going to explode?”

Colin heard the fear in Mako's voice, and it surprised him. He'd never heard her sound panicked.

“Don't worry,” he told her. “Just keep it wet. Graham and I will bring out the Mark 3.”

“Hurry!”

They'd moved the portable pump in from the flats earlier in the day, at Colin's suggestion, because they didn't want to get cut off from it. Now, Graham and Colin wheeled it back in a garden cart to set it up in the creek. Two-stroke Mark 3 engines are high-powered but notoriously difficult to start. This moment was no exception. Graham and Colin took turns yanking on the cord. While one of them tried, the other radioed Mako, who couldn't see them down by the creek from where she stood, to tell her they were working on it.

She had to back away. The side piles were burning intensely and it was too hot to stand in the middle of the shed, armed with the water pressure of a squirt gun. She could feel the heat searing her throat. She snugged her bandanna back up over her mouth and nose. It gave some relief, but not much. When a blast of smoke hit her in the face, she coughed so deeply she wretched.

David had also responded to Mako's distress call. He too tried to sort out the maze of hoses left over from the activation, his old rotator cuff injury acting up as he lifted the waterlogged hoses. Finally, Graham got the Mark 3 going. Colin had rolled out a new hose that hooked directly into the Mark 3. The line was too long, and it kept kinking, but once he'd smoothed it out and the pump was running, water blasted through the nozzle.

It was the first time that Colin had left the central area, the first time Mako had glimpsed him or Graham in hours, the first time they were all together since the fire arrived—except for Abbot Steve, who had stayed to keep an eye on the shop when Colin left. The four of them tried to lift the metal roof to soak the wood burning hottest directly underneath it, dodging gusts of smoke. The wind tipped the clouds rising from the woodpiles into Colin's face at one point, and he thought he might puke on his boots.

When the woodshed fire was mostly under control, Mako wandered off—she couldn't remember later where she'd gone or why she'd left; maybe she'd just needed to use the bathroom. Eventually, David and Graham left as well. Colin looked up and found himself alone. Hey, where did everyone go?

The woodshed looked like a huge, abandoned campfire. It had been transformed from neat stacks of cured firewood to ashes and cinder, a mix of scorched and unburned wood. “Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again,” Eihei Dōgen wrote. “Yet, do not suppose that the ash is future and the firewood past. You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood, which fully includes past and future and is independent of past and future. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes future and past. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death.”

Tassajara residents knew this passage well, having chanted it many times. It awakened a changed relationship to time, to reality itself, in those able to enter its meaning. But Colin wasn't thinking about Dōgen or about returning to anything but a state of rest. He was so done in that he could barely hold the hose, too tired even to get on the radio and tease the others for abandoning him. He propped a couple of hoses on a stump, pointed them at the smoldering woodpile, and left the flats.

 

 

After leaving the woodshed, David returned to the stone office and
listened to the messages on the answering machine. There were at least three from Leslie. She wasn't the type to make a fuss, but he could hear the immense relief in her voice when he finally called back, around five p.m. Relaying a message from City Center, she gave David the name and number of an information officer to call. “Something about air support. It might be a private thing, somebody with a helicopter. I don't really know.”

Things were cooling and quieting down, but David radioed the others anyway to tell them about the potential water drop. “Where do you think we could we use it?”

After a long pause with no answer, Mako responded: “Ummmm, they want to drop water
now
?” It was like someone sauntering into the kitchen as dinner was coming out of the oven and asking, What can I chop?

David never reached the information officer. He left a voice mail saying that yes, they would welcome a water drop at Tassajara. The pool bathroom and birdhouse were beyond saving, but more water couldn't hurt. He didn't say, Where were you when we needed you?

 

 

When Walter and Joanne Ross checked
Sitting with Fire
on the
morning of July 10, they were certain Graham had turned around during the evacuation and Mako, too, but it was just a hunch. There's a three-hour time difference between California and Ontario, so the names of those who'd gone back hadn't yet been posted. Joanne sent an e-mail inquiring about her son and received a reply that the identities of the remaining residents weren't being released until the individuals had given their consent.

The Rosses spent the next few hours wrestling with their frustrated need to know whether Graham and Mako were still in Tassajara and a stubborn intuition that they were. “I just knew that whatever fear Graham experienced, he wouldn't shy away from it,” Joanne told me when I talked to her and Walter together after the fire. She'd watched her young son guard the net on the hockey rink, ready to face whatever came flying at him. She'd be gritting her teeth in the stands, but he wouldn't flinch.

Throughout the morning of July 10, she tried to busy herself with errands. Walter Ross stayed home, glued to the blog. By the time Joanne returned home around lunchtime,
Sitting with Fire
had confirmed her suspicion, listing Graham and Mako as two of the five now at Tassajara. The post noted that Jamesburg was in regular phone contact with them. Joanne resisted the urge to call and see if she could get more information, figuring it was better to keep the phone lines open. “We just had to trust and wait to hear,” she told me.

If you weren't inside Tassajara, you didn't have much choice but to sit with fire—to pass the time as best you could with uncertainty, without letting worry carry you away.

The origin of the word
worry
—it comes from the Old English
wyrgan,
for “strangle”—accurately depicts the state of breathless torment that anxiety can bring. The Rosses could have picked up the phone and spread their anxiety or aired their frustration on
Sitting with Fire
. Other distressed family members did, understandably. When there's a pair of hands clutching your throat, your instinct is to pry them off.

But the Rosses, who are not Buddhists, chose to let go. They didn't know where their son was, and once they did, they couldn't be sure he was safe. “I was agitated at first,” said Joanne later. Then she added, “But really, what would it have changed to know?”

 

 

Finally, after they'd knocked back the woodshed fire at the flats,
there was a palpable shift, like the moment the sun dips below the horizon, an atmosphere of finality and transition.

“We knew it was over when the fire bell finally sounded,” David joked when I met with the five all together for the first time after the fire. The others laughed, knowing intimately the desperation that can set in after hours of zazen, when your legs are on fire and you're perched on the edge of your cushion, waiting for the period's end, pleading silently with the person watching the clock, seated at the bells.

“It was pretty clear,” said Abbot Steve, recalling what they could plainly see. “Everything on the perimeter is burned. It's not going to burn again.”

Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again
.

It had been nearly a month since the first threat of fire when David called Zen Center president Robert Thomas from the stone office to report, surprised and somewhat awed: “I think we saved Tassajara!”

Disaster could be called a crash course in Buddhist principles ...

—REBECCA SOLNIT,
A Paradise Built in Hell

There were cheers in San Francisco and Jamesburg. Within min
utes, the good news traveled to the dining room at City Center and caused an eruption of applause and whistles. A similar scene unfolded across the Golden Gate Bridge at Green Gulch Farm. But it wasn't all jubilation. Evacuated priest Judith Randall wept when she saw the photo of the five in their fire gear, simultaneously realizing and releasing the depth of her concern.