Fire Monks (2 page)

As a Zen student and regular visitor to Tassajara over the past ten years, I followed the fire closely. On the day it swept through the monastery, I was camping in Oregon, outside the band of smoke drifting north from California. As soon as I read Tassajara director David Zimmerman's account of the fire's arrival, I wanted to tell this story—from as close in as possible, but also with a wide lens. What was it like to meet a wildfire with minimal training in firefighting but years of Zen practice to guide you? I believed others might benefit from knowing, the fire being a perfect metaphor for anything that comes uninvited and threatens to hurt us or the people and places we love.

The word
Zen
is often used as a catchall synonym for paradox, simultaneously evoking the simple and the unfathomable. In
Fire Monks,
I wanted to portray Zen in all of its true complexity and relevance, as a continuous practice, a way of life that cultivates a particular kind of fearlessness whether or not there's a wildfire at the gate.

To write the book, I relied on official reports and logs, news coverage, written accounts and public talks, the
Sitting with Fire
blog created during the lead-up to the fire's arrival, and my own interviews—more than one hundred taped hours—with residents of Tassajara. I used first names in the pages that follow to distinguish the story's main characters; for practical reasons, many people I spoke with are named not in the body of the story but in the endnotes.

Over a period of two years after the fire, I made many trips to Tassajara, some during the summer guest season, others during the closed fall and winter training periods. Tassajara during a practice period and Tassajara during guest season are two sides of the same coin. Practice is always happening there—even in the summer months when there are guests who may have come simply for the hot springs and lavish vegetarian food—but it can look quite different depending on the season.

In a formal training period, practice looks like this: a wake-up bell at three fifty a.m., six periods of meditation, from forty minutes to an hour in length, interspersed with periods of work and study and occasional lectures. Simple meals are eaten in the
zendo
(meditation hall) at one's seat, in three bowls, nested and wrapped in cloths when not in use. There is about an hour and a half in the late afternoon for exercise and bathing. The day ends around nine p.m. after the last period of
zazen,
or meditation. On designated workdays and personal days, the schedule is slightly more forgiving.

In the summer guest season, a student runs up and down the paths at Tassajara swinging the wake-up bell and calling the resident community to meditation a full hour and a half later, at five fifteen a.m. The summer community consists of both long-term, year-round residents and summer “work practice” students often new to Zen. Though the zazen schedule is much lighter, the community works for most of each day to take care of Tassajara and its guests, mostly in silence. Whether it's tending to the altars, serving meals, or washing dishes, this work is considered an essential part of practice—not separate from the practice of meditation.

My first trip to Tassajara for
Fire Monks
took place during the winter practice period in November 2008, four months after the fire. David greeted me at the gate. When I commented on the smoky smell still in the air and the paths littered with leaves, he said, “That's Tassajara in the fall.” I'd been there only during the summer, for “guest practice”—meditating and working with the community in the morning, relaxing as a guest in the afternoon.

During the book's writing, I witnessed Tassajara's recovery. Wildflowers bloomed on barren hillsides. Grasses sprouted, ferns unfurled, bright green shoots broke through the soil at the bases of charred tree trunks. The road became an obstacle course of potholes, runoff, rockfalls, and downed trees, until the county rehabilitated and graded it. New buildings gradually replaced burned ones. A community tested by a crisis continued to practice together and to examine their experience for whatever truths it might hold. Memories faded and then reappeared when I asked questions or when smoke hovered over the valley from a new wildfire in the distance.

At Tassajara, fire burned around some things and straight through others, in a course that might seem haphazard but was determined mostly by wind, relative humidity, topography. Similarly, the fire burned uniquely in each person. There wasn't one fire, but many. There was a shared fire—the event Tassajara's residents and friends experienced as a community—and the fires individuals lived through in the valleys of their own hearts.

When wildfire first threatened Tassajara, the question arose: Even if every building burned down to its foundation, wouldn't Tassajara survive? It's not the buildings that make Tassajara what it is. So, what does? What is Tassajara? It's a question that can't be fully met with words.

One of the monks who fought the fire observed in an interview: “The Tassajara that was here before the fire is not here anymore.” But a smile tugged at the corners of his lips even before the next question came: What
is
here?

He paused, then answered, “Tassajara.”

To know the spirit of the place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is whole. You start with the part you are whole in.

—GARY SNYDER,
The Practice of the Wild

Fire season had started early, in May, when people typically start
dusting off barbecues and dreaming of long summer days. The Indians fire was one of those early-season blazes, ignited when a heat wave followed the driest spring on record in California. Weather staff for the Indians fire first spotted the lightning strikes several hundred miles off the Pacific Coast on the evening of June 20. Usually storms swept into the Big Sur area from the southeast. They often came with rain. But this one appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and it looked as though it might run all the way up to the northern edge of the state. By the morning of June 21, commanders had stripped resources from the Indians fire to assign to the lightning-ignited fires before those fires even started
.

At one p.m. on June 21, David Zimmerman finished his gazpacho—a
cooling summer tomato soup, crisp with cucumbers—and set aside his bowl. He picked up the phone and dialed the number for the Indians fire public information line. The drum had already sounded for work circle. He would be late, if he made it at all, but he wanted to get the latest official update on the wildfire burning through the wilderness five miles south (as the crow flies) of Tassajara.

Tassajara sits deep in the Ventana Wilderness, inside the boundary of the Los Padres National Forest, in rugged country designed to burn. At times, the satellite phone connection could sound as if you were placing a call to a Himalayan peak just to reach Salinas forty-six miles north. Today the connection with forest headquarters in Goleta was surprisingly clear. One of the fire info techs staffing the line answered—a friendly female voice David recognized. She reported that the fire had burned 51,125 acres as of six a.m. that morning, southeast of Tassajara. Northeasterly winds were blowing it away from the monastery.

The Indians fire had started with a runaway campfire on June 8. It was now June 21, the summer solstice. As Tassajara director, David had called the info line several times a day for nearly two weeks to check the status of the fire. He didn't have a personal phone, so he used the phone on the back porch or in the stone office. He'd put signs up around Tassajara for the guests, explaining the smoke. He'd noted that the fire was moving away from Tassajara, that staff were monitoring the situation closely and were in contact with fire officials, and that they had plans in place should evacuation become necessary.

He wasn't particularly worried. Other than the smoke, it was summer business as usual. The guest season had been open since early May. A dozen retreats for summer guests had come and gone. The various crews staffed by students—kitchen, dining room, bag lunch, cabin, garden, shop, dish shack—had worked out any kinks and settled into the schedule. Part of David's job was to coordinate the constant in-and-out flow of summer students and consult with crew heads to ensure that things ran smoothly. It could be tedious at times. Following the movements of the fire was new and engaging, like traveling abroad and learning to speak the local language.

David thanked the woman for the update. He cradled the receiver and stood up. Just then, the sky exploded. One loud whip-crack to the earth and then, a moment later, another. A brief downpour thrummed the roof, slapping sycamore leaves and splashing on the surface of the creek.

He'd seen the heavy gray clouds gathering overhead on his way to lunch. He'd thought they might get a little rain—rare in the summer, but not unheard of, and welcome, considering the lingering drought. But lightning? Thunder?

David could feel the expansion of heated air, smell the clouds giving up their condensation. He loved thunderstorms. Summer afternoon squalls tossed long shadows across Pennsylvania's green fields when he was a boy. But this storm stopped as suddenly as it started. The clouds closed up, and two strands of thought came together in David's mind: The drought-dry earth. And now lightning, like a match to the wilderness.

 

 

In David's life, there had been many match-strike moments like
this, when everything changed, suddenly and drastically. Six months after his call on June 21 to the Indians fire information line, he sat in the library at San Francisco Zen Center, where he'd first learned to practice. Looking like someone more suited to wandering the halls of a library or museum than to holding a fire hose, David let his tea cool as he described how he came to be at Tassajara. Dark, well-defined eyebrows framed his round face. He answered my questions about his background with a determined precision to his speech yet an open focus to his gaze, suggesting that his past is no longer where he lives.

When he was five years old, his mother left the family. Unequipped to raise his kids alone, David's father was ordered by Child Protective Services to put David and his older brother in a children's home. For most of his childhood in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, David bounced between the children's home, foster families, and stints living with his father, Paul, who struggled with alcohol abuse and the demands of holding down several jobs.

While living with their father, the boys were often left alone to meals of potato-chip sandwiches or TV dinners. They liked to pretend they were superheroes. David's brother, who later joined the U.S. Navy, would act out the destruction of whole towns, burning Matchbox cars, stomping on Lego buildings, and killing toy soldiers. David would transform himself into Wonder Woman—the feminine embodiment of goodness, strength, beauty, and compassion, in his eyes—with a white sheet, a towel for hair, his grandmother's tiara and clip-on earrings, and an imaginary golden lasso. When his father's truck pulled into the driveway, David ripped off his costume and threw himself in front of the television.

As for memories of his mother, David counted them on a few fingers. His recollections include a tender vision of her hanging laundry on the line in the backyard, her dress swaying in a breeze, and the sharp pain of witnessing an argument in which his father drew a knife from a kitchen drawer and raised it at his mother—the night before she left.

The Millersville Mennonite Children's Home, where he lived intermittently after his mother left, between the ages of six and nine, provided a stable and nurturing environment. The women who ran the home were chaste yet warm, strict but maternal. When he landed at San Francisco Zen Center in 1991 at age twenty-eight, the building on Page Street reminded him of the children's home, from the brick façade to the smell of old wood to its history as a residence for Jewish women. Early morning prayers, communal meals at long tables, a great, embracing silence—much seemed familiar. He wanted to learn to meditate. He'd been laid off from his job at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and had student loans to repay. His father, not yet fifty, was dying of colon cancer.

At forty-six years old in the summer of 2008—the age his father was when diagnosed—David didn't want to die without waking up, without having tasted his life completely. That desire had led him to Tassajara and then to take priest's vows. But on June 21, listening to the lightning, he felt a deep unease. If the fire came Tassajara's way, what would they do? As director, he'd have to do more than talk to the friendly people staffing the fire information line and courier updates to the work circle. He knew something would be required of him, even if he couldn't anticipate exactly what it was. And would he be able to meet it?