Fire Monks (5 page)

Before that, Mako studied philosophy as an undergraduate and pursued a graduate degree in neurobiology, figuring that if she wanted to understand the mind, she ought to understand the brain first. “But there wasn't enough big picture in it for me,” she told me of the days spent peering through a microscope. In 1997, when she was twenty-five years old, she moved to San Francisco.

She'd learned transcendental meditation at fifteen and had heard of San Francisco Zen Center, but she was wary of organized religion. She'd read about abuses of power by spiritual teachers. She thought Zen Center seemed too big and institutional, maybe too patriarchal, and what she knew of Zen seemed like “mind tricks.” But she decided to check it out for herself. She started to meditate at City Center. She volunteered in the library. “I'd go when it was closed,” she told me, “which is funny, because I wanted to meet people.” She was searching, she later realized, for
sangha,
or community, one of Buddhism's three treasures, along with the Buddha and the Dharma.

One evening, she gave what's called a way-seeking-mind talk, introducing herself to the community, talking about her life and her path to practice. Through that talk, she connected with a senior priest interested in Buddhist logic. And through that relationship, she was drawn into the sangha at City Center. Eventually, she became a resident.

But she wanted to complete some unfinished business—her philosophy master's degree, held up by a paper on philosopher Immanuel Kant. She'd started it many times but could never finish. In December 2001, she sat a seven-day meditation intensive called a
sesshin
. Sesshin means to “gather” or “receive” the mind. It also means sitting in meditation from long before dawn to well after dark on a cushion, facing the wall, with breaks for work and rest, but only enough to make so much sitting possible. A kind of sheer, objectless concentration and feelings of profound connection and contentment can arise, a sense that the self and all of its concerns have dropped away. But the mind can also be rambunctious, distracted, tired, angry, bored, anxious, obsessed. The Zen meditator's aim, whether in a regular forty-minute period of meditation or over the course of many days, is to accept whatever emotional or mental states arise and not hold on.

This particular sesshin that Mako sat occurs every December in Buddhist communities all over the world in honor of the Buddha's enlightenment. When the seven days ended, Mako whipped out her paper. She got her master's degree. Not long after that, she put it in a drawer. She wanted to study the mind, she'd realized, by simply studying
her
mind. By 2002, she'd sold her car, her computer, and her motorcycle to pay off student loans and move to Tassajara. A year later, she met her partner, Graham Ross, on the steps to the hill cabins.

In the text Mako chanted every morning with her kitchen crew, Dōgen calls the job of tenzo—or head cook—“an all-consuming pursuit of the way.” This essential position is typically given to someone who has been in residence for a while and who has held other prominent positions. Mako had lived at Tassajara for five years when she became tenzo. She'd served as work leader previously. Before that, as a full-time fire marshal (ordinarily the position is only part-time), she'd revamped the fire and safety systems at Tassajara—organizing and updating manuals and crew instructions and refurbishing equipment.

The tenzo is responsible both for the feeling of practice in the kitchen, since those who are cooking inevitably spend less time in the zendo
,
and for feeding the monks. At Tassajara, he or she is also responsible for guest meals in the summer. Mako knew how many gallon-capacity containers of chopped mushrooms a case of mushrooms yielded, where to get quality ingredients at a reasonable price, and how to have them on hand when the cooks needed them. But a big part of her job was preserving harmony in tight quarters, within the kitchen sangha. Inevitably, there were collisions—of bodies, of personalities, of sugar and salt.

After the morning chant, Mako would ask if anyone had concerns to bring up. Then she sent the crew off to their various tasks—chopping onions, baking cookies, or washing floors—with some guiding words: Today, let's try to do just one thing at a time. Give whatever you're working with your undivided attention.

After dinner on Sunday evening, June 22, participants in the
“Poetry and the Intimacy of All Things” retreat gathered in the tent yurt. They sat cross-legged on the floor on round meditation cushions called
zafus
. Some quietly continued conversations they'd started at dinner. Jane lit a candle, offered incense, and rang a small bell to gather the group's attention. Then they went around and introduced themselves.

The mood in the room was warm, cheerful, anticipatory. If anyone else had noted the plumes of smoke, they didn't say. Jane didn't share her suspicion that their retreat would be canceled. She opened the workshop as usual, explaining how the week would be structured, answering questions, closing with what she calls a “tiny
teisho,
” or teaching talk.

Pens were uncapped, notebooks opened. A few people stretched out their legs. Buddhism is really very simple, she told them. Not complicated at all. She could distill it down to seven words:

Pay attention
.

 

 

On Monday, June 23, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared
a state of emergency in California, citing “extreme peril to the safety of persons and property” in Monterey and Trinity counties.

That morning, unaware of this development, the guests picked up their napkins outside the dining room and glanced at David's latest fire update before checking out the menu: Firefighter Hotcakes. The inspiration of a creative guest cook, the name elicited a few chuckles. When people doctored their pancakes with butter and maple syrup and ate their first forkful, they were surprised to find chocolate chips and chili flakes tucked inside. But a bigger surprise came later that morning, when Sergeant Wingo of the Monterey County Sheriff's Office called to order the “mandatory evacuation” of Tassajara.

David spoke to Wingo on the phone in the stone office. “The guests will be taken out immediately,” David said. “But we plan to have willing residents stay behind.” He explained that they had a fire crew in place at Tassajara, good sources of water, and the experience of successfully defending the monastery in two previous large fires.

If the seventy residents currently at Tassajara, or any portion of them, chose to stay against the orders of the Monterey County sheriff, Wingo replied, he needed dental records and next-of-kin contacts for every individual remaining on the grounds.

Following the evacuation procedures the senior staff had established after the lightning strikes, David sent a crew to round up the guests. They knocked on cabin doors, left notices on beds, emptied out the bathhouse, and sent scouts to the Narrows, a popular swimming hole about a twenty-minute walk down Tassajara Creek. They reached the yurt where the poetry retreat was being held just as Jane had given the participants a writing prompt. Instead, they took their notebooks and pens back to their cabins and packed them into suitcases. By eleven thirty a.m., all forty-six guests were accounted for. It took another half hour for the communications crew, wearing yellow and red bandannas, to sort them into vehicles. By noon the guests were heading back up the road, along with twenty-three students who'd chosen to leave. The poets in Jane's workshop had spent less than twenty-four hours at Tassajara.

David found Jane. “Would you please stay for a while?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

That Jane had been through a fire at Tassajara was deeply reassuring to David. She had already shared her thoughts with him about what to expect from authorities and what preparations to make. Though Tassajara had an infrastructure in place to respond to fires, with student crews trained to operate the pumps and lay hoses, the current summer residents hadn't experienced a wildfire before. People would look to David, as director, for an answer to the question “What happens now?” He didn't want the answer to be, “I have no idea.” He certainly didn't want to have to ask the sheriff.

He had a note in his pocket—a message from Jane's old friend Leslie, who was in San Francisco at an abbots' council meeting along with Zen Center's two co-abbots. David had asked Leslie to attend the meeting in his place. For more than twenty years, Leslie had divided her weeks between Jamesburg and Tassajara, where she'd held nearly every staff position, including director—some several times. A slight woman with long white hair and brown eyes, Leslie floated easily between the monastery and the secular world up the road, sometimes in robes, sometimes in blue jeans.

“Keep people who want to stay and are able-bodied and emotionally stable until at least six p.m. unless it becomes clear fire is close,” her note read. “Abbots are willing to come but realize what we need is people with expertise. Go slow sending residents away.”

“Zen Center” is actually three centers: City Center, on Page Street in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco; Green Gulch Farm, in a fog-hemmed coastal valley across the Golden Gate Bridge; and Tassajara. They inhabit three different ecosystems: urban, coastal, and wilderness. They have discrete cultures, schedules, and ways of relating to the forms and traditions of Zen practice. But like a tree whose trunk forks in three directions, they share the same roots. They are separate even as they are deeply interconnected.

All three centers depend on revenues from Tassajara's guest season—for nearly half of all operating expenses. If Tassajara burned, much would be lost that could not be measured in dollars. But shutting down Tassajara for any amount of time in the summer could deal a blow to Zen Center's material well-being. The abbots, meeting in San Francisco, knew this. David knew it, too.

Numbers never lie, after all: they simply tell different stories depending on the math of the tellers.

—LUIS ALBERTO URREA,
The Devil's Highway

Around noon on Monday, after the guests had left, David called
an urgent meeting in the screened-in student eating area for the forty-seven remaining residents. “Saturday's lightning strikes started three new fires in the Ventana Wilderness, and they are growing rapidly. By order of the Monterey County Sheriff's Office, we've evacuated the guests. Actually, the sheriff requested that we evacuate Tassajara completely, but I explained that we need people here to prepare. It's not clear yet what kind of help we might receive. The state's resources are challenged right now, but hopefully they'll send several crews as they did in '99,” he said, thinking of the Kirk Complex fire, which threatened but ultimately missed Tassajara.

“Our primary concern is everyone's safety,” he continued. “We don't know how long we have before the fire will arrive—or even whether it will arrive. It could be three days. It could be three weeks. But we are in regular contact with the fire service and we will keep you informed. Since things could change quickly, please pack a bag so that you are ready to go with short notice.”

He took a breath and tried to keep his tone informative, neutral. “The sergeant who ordered the mandatory evacuation has asked each of us to provide the names of our dentists and emergency contacts.” He left out the sergeant's words—“so we can identify bodies.”

Silence. Startled looks back and forth. A few muffled, nervous laughs. No one said anything, but questions hung in the air. You're telling me I'm safe, but you want the name of my dentist? Wasn't I just making strawberry pie?

“I know it sounds alarming,” David continued, “but it's just a precautionary measure.”

A sheriff's deputy had arrived to collect residents' identifying information as the guests were being taken out. David had explained that many of the students would need to make phone calls to get the requested information, sharing three phone lines. The deputy had declined an offer to join the community for lunch. He waited nearby while they held their meeting.

David paused to gather his thoughts. Was he forgetting something important? “No one will be asked to stay who does not wish to. We have a lot of work to do. We'll be identifying those priorities just as soon as we can. We are lucky to have Jane Hirshfield here with us, who defended Tassajara during the 1977 fire, and maybe she can guide us in our efforts.”

Jane bowed. David asked her if she'd like to add anything. Around the room, there were not a lot of familiar faces. Many of the students were new to Tassajara—having arrived only in May. Many were young, she noted, in their twenties—energetic, fit, tattoos hidden under their clothes. A few were old Tassajara hands, people she'd seen year after year, priests and senior staff who'd held many practice positions. Everyone was in work clothes—shorts or jeans and T-shirts, or
samues,
two-piece informal outfits worn by monks during periods of temple work—mostly dark fabrics to hide the dirt.