Fire Monks (21 page)

“David, why are you leaving?” Abbot Haller's Irish vowels, the rich register of his voice, resonated over the patchy phone line.

Haller had once been director of Tassajara. It was his job then, just as it was David's now, to take care of Tassajara's guests, staff, and grounds. It was a simple enough question, and David understood where it came from. Haller had first come to Tassajara as a resident just after the Marble Cone fire in 1977. He knew of the legendary commando trips students had made from Jamesburg under cover of nightfall to resupply, refuel pumps, and remove valuables, in the days before a small group had returned to stay and fight the fire. During the weeks of preparing for the Basin Complex fire, Haller had told David on more than one occasion, “They can't force you to leave, you know.”

Now, Haller's question was deeply disturbing: Why were they evacuating? They had planned to be here. They had never planned to leave. So why were they leaving?

“I don't know,” said David. “I don't know myself.”

A voice came over David's radio again, requesting that he come to the parking lot. David asked Haller to hold on and set the phone aside to say he'd be right there.

He typically loathed being late—and rarely was. Now, he refused to be rushed. In fact, all awareness of time had fallen away. The hours of the morning had slid into the hours of the afternoon, and he couldn't account for them. They'd waited weeks for this fire. Now it was here and he didn't understand why they were leaving. He couldn't explain it to Haller, because it didn't make sense to him.

David picked up the phone again. “I mean, how did this happen?” Haller asked.

“Stuart ordered it,” said David. “He says it's not safe to be here anymore.”

“Ordered it,” echoed Haller, turning over the words.

“We had a meeting. We decided—Steve made the final call, and I guess we all agreed—that we should follow Stuart's recommendation.” Even as he chose the word, David realized a recommendation isn't an order. Had Stuart ordered them out? It had felt like an order, but by what authority? And they hadn't really agreed so much as deferred to the two experts in the room—one in fire, the other in the Buddha's practice.

“I see,” said Haller. He could hear within David, by nature diligent and conscientious, an unspoken conflict between doing the right thing by Stuart and doing the right thing by Tassajara.

“I think that as director, David felt an enormous responsibility,” Haller told me later. “Tassajara is the jewel of Zen Center. And here he is, holding a pivotal role in its survival.” While David's memory of this phone conversation is scant, lost to the tension of the moment, Haller recalled that they agreed that Stuart needed to do what he was doing even though it seemed contradictory. “We respected it. But we weren't fully persuaded by it.”

Just as they were ending the call, Mako burst through the door. “Let me talk to Paul.”

David promised to call Haller back as soon as the caravan reached Jamesburg, handed Mako the phone, and slung his bag over his shoulder. A blast of warm air greeted him when he opened the stone office door. It was warmer than it should have been at almost six p.m., even on a hot July evening.

Feeling slightly queasy, he put one foot in front of the other, but his body resisted the motion of going forward. Some part of him knew that it was time for evening service—for chanting, bowing, and making offerings of food and light so that all beings might be nourished and awakened. But there would be no evening service. He hadn't been inside the zendo in weeks. He had packed his priest robe and sent it up the road.

He walked the gravel path beside a patch of lawn bordered with lavender, rosemary, sage, and thyme. He ducked under wisteria vines twisting through the trellis, passed the flat bronze bell that calls residents to meals, and climbed the steps to the work circle. Tassajara seemed hushed, strangely empty. From the time Zen Center had purchased it in 1966, except for a few hours during the 1977 fire, there had always been someone at Tassajara. Even in the depths of December, when many residents took a two-week break between monastic practice periods, a few always stayed, and former residents often came to practice again in the profound quiet of the winter canyon.

David looked up into a charcoal gray and orange sky, then glanced at the zendo to his right, at the empty shoe racks on the wraparound wooden platform, the motionless, silent bell and drum. When he was six years old and driving away from the children's home with a temporary family, the sky overhead seemed to contain every kind of weather. He remembered storm clouds and lightning, bright white clouds and patches of blue, even a rainbow. He had vowed to himself then that someday he would find his true home. He had, eventually—not in a place, but in the practice of paying attention.

This moment is home. In a sense, it is the only true home you will ever have. And still, David thought, Tassajara is the place where this practice lives. How many people had come here and walked away changed, touched by the stillness and silence, the possibility of living differently, with an unguarded heart? The transformation had something to do with the place where it happened, this remote, narrow valley. Could they really leave it now to burn?

The sprinklers rained on the rooftops. The residents had done everything the experts had told them to, preparing Tassajara so that when the fire came, they'd be safe and ready. They'd designed and installed Dharma Rain. They'd raked. They'd swept. They'd dug fireline. They'd drilled and briefed and debriefed. They had planned to stay and meet the fire. Now, after weeks of Stuart's consistent confidence and despite the fact that Abbot Steve had said he couldn't imagine leaving Tassajara under any circumstance, both waited for him in the parking lot with the rest of the evacuees.

His radio squawked again: “David. Mako. Are you coming?”

He could hear Mako's footsteps behind him, faster than her usual purposeful stride. He pushed the talk button: “Yes.” He would go, even as every molecule of his being protested.

Mako caught up with him, arms swinging at her sides. David sensed that her haste had more to do with wanting to talk to Graham than with any desire to leave Tassajara. Like him, Mako hadn't said much during the evacuation meeting. But he didn't need to hear her say it to know that she didn't want to go. At Tassajara, you learn how to read your fellow practitioners through your senses. You know the sound of their footsteps on the floorboards of the zendo, the way they open and close a door, the clicking sound their jaw makes when they chew. You know them the way you know family—perhaps more completely. Your eyes have learned to see and your ears have learned to hear, without filters or labels.

David walked out the gate, to the line of idling vehicles. At the end of each summer guest season, the residents held a gate-closing ceremony, reading the names of all the people who had worked at Tassajara over those months and supported the practice. But there would be no closing ceremony today, no time to mark everyone who had come to help since the fires first started a month before. Airtankers droned overhead. He felt the fire's closeness. He glanced back and wondered, Would he be the last to see Tassajara as it looked now?

Human life is messy. It's out of our control. It's like we're walking around in total darkness with a little speck of light which is called “right now.”

—LESLIE JAMES

A line of vehicles queued up behind Stuart Carlson's car at Tas
sajara. The residents had made their decision—in part because of a decision they'd made earlier: to heed the counsel of the expert in fire and evacuate. That didn't stop it from feeling, in the moment, like a terrible misstep. For many in the line of vehicles pointing up the road, it wasn't even their choice; they were merely following the lead of others.

David was supposed to get into the Suburban with Mako and Graham, but he tossed his bag in the backseat of the abbot's car instead. “Did you want to talk to Paul?” he asked.

Abbot Steve shook his head. “I'll talk to him later.”

Over the walkie-talkies, a resident took a final head count, calling out names and asking for confirmation.

It pained David to answer yes to his name as Abbot Steve shifted the CR-V into gear. Both abbot and director initially kept their thoughts to themselves, yet each was aware of a shared backward pull as the car moved forward. Both sensed that they had much to talk about and that it was good they were in the car together. Yet they wanted to take their time, to go at their own pace, not at the urgent clip set by Stuart.

The vehicles ahead churned up dust. They drove slowly, in rare radio silence, closing windows and waiting for gritty clouds to clear. Manzanita bushes and hardy scrub oaks gripped the road's steep shoulder. These plants had taken seed and clung to life with fierce tenacity, using whatever earth and light and water they found to survive. But fire would mow them down in minutes.

A month before, fire had cremated the body of a long-term Green Gulch Farm resident and friend of Abbot Steve's who'd died. Abbot Steve had been at Tassajara leading a retreat and missed the ceremony. His friend's death had been expected. But if you really took to heart the words of the Heart Sutra, chanted daily in Soto Zen temples, no death could come as a surprise: “Form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form. Sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness are also like this.”

Every moment is a life-or-death moment, Abbot Steve had realized through Zen—“Every act is the last time this happens,” he told me. And because he had grown up close to nature's rhythms, working fields and tending animals, he understood that cycles of burn and regrowth are natural and necessary, that landscapes like the Ventana have coexisted with fire for millennia.

“How are you feeling?” he asked David.

“It feels wrong. We shouldn't be abandoning Tassajara.” With these words, the knot in David's gut began to loosen. He was aware of the facts. But it wasn't a matter of weighing the facts—the disadvantageous change in the weather, the observable features of the fire, Stuart's judgment born of experience against his own lack of fire knowledge. David just trusted the truth of his own experience at that precise moment, and that truth shouted, Don't go!

“Maybe we could go back,” he added.

The abbot nodded, adjusted his hands on the wheel. “I don't want to alarm the others,” he said. His bushy eyebrows shrugged upward as they often did in conversation. “We'll need to find a way to tell them.”

About a mile and a half from Tassajara, where the road widens at a switchback, Stuart pulled over so the convoy could pass him and he could take up the rear. Abbot Steve pulled in behind, honked, and waved back, declining to move ahead. Stuart got out of his car and made vigorous gestures for the CR-V to pass, but Abbot Steve just shook his head. Eventually, Stuart gave up and got back into his truck ahead of the abbot's car. “It was a who's-in-charge-here moment,” Abbot Steve recalled afterward. In his mind, who was in charge couldn't have been clearer. “There was no way I was going to let Stuart get behind me.”

The captain is the last to leave a sinking ship. “But Stuart was never the captain,” said Abbot Steve. “It's a whole different thing, being abbot of Zen Center as opposed to being a guest here, a consultant on the fire.” The abbot wasn't at Tassajara when the core team had first agreed to take the fire captain's advice and follow him out if he said it was time to go. “I wasn't in on that,” he told me later with a slight smile, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I would never have made that agreement.”

About ten minutes after leaving Tassajara, around six fifteen p.m., the convoy passed Lime Point. Here, they could look out the car windows into the Church Creek canyon. A bruised, prematurely dark sky hung like a heavy curtain over the ridge, blocking the setting sun. Flames backing downslope on this side of the Church Creek divide needed to climb across the valley and uphill to reach the road. If the fire burned down the Church Creek canyon, toward the confluence with Tassajara Creek, it would enter Tassajara over the hogback, near Suzuki Roshi's memorial marker.

David wondered if they should radio the others and let them know they were thinking of returning. But there were problems with that approach. First, Stuart would hear it. Would he try to prevent them? Somehow the core team needed to be able to have a conversation, some sort of process, and they couldn't do it over walkie-talkies.

Many nights over the past couple of weeks, David had lain awake repeating, I don't know, I simply don't know, silently to himself. He dreaded the thought of causing someone else to suffer because of a decision he'd made, and as director he'd made many decisions since the start of the fires. He'd gathered information and consulted with the core team, but most of the time he just had to trust his instincts and let go, embodying his Dharma name, the part that suggested where he should point his effort: Complete Surrender.

“My sense of responsibility meant that I had to carry others,” he told me later. It was something he'd learned to do early, in response to his parents' inability to care for him and his brother. During the fire, he had to be strong and decisive even when he didn't know what would happen next or whether the choices he was making were good ones. Complete surrender and full responsibility. Was it possible to hold both?

As they drove past Lime Point and climbed toward the place where some of Suzuki Roshi's ashes had been scattered, David looked out the passenger window at an old bathtub slumping into the hillside. How many times had he driven past this landmark in seven years? Too many to count. A drinking trough left over from the road's horse-drawn carriage days, the tub carried whatever water the season brought, gushing in the wintertime, barely damp this time of year.