Fire Monks (3 page)

 

 

Shortly after the thunderstorm, Colin Gipson drove Tassajara's
green Isuzu Trooper up to Lime Point, a limestone outcropping on Tassajara Road partway between the monastery and Chews Ridge, beyond which the dirt road continues for another seven miles before turning to pavement.

In July 2008, Colin was head of shop at Tassajara, responsible for overseeing and often executing physical plant maintenance and repairs. The first time he came to Tassajara, in the spring of 2002, he was with a couple of friends from the Austin Zen Center. Driving in, he asked, “Where
is
this place?” One of his traveling companions pointed into the depths of a canyon at the end of a fraying ribbon of road. There's no hiding here, Colin thought.

Six years later, the forty-four-year-old former U.S. Marine with a youthful face and gray hairs sprouting from underneath the rim of his baseball cap could probably make the drive up the road with his eyes closed, after so many trips to town for supplies. The Isuzu was certainly more comfortable than his motorcycle, a Kawasaki KLR650 he took on long road trips between practice periods.

Tassajara Road was in pretty good shape on June 21—much better than it would be by the end of the summer, after baking in sun and shouldering the traffic of the guest season, or than it was in the winter, when rain and snow washed chunks of it away. Chinese laborers built the road in the late 1880s. Now Monterey County crews maintain it, grading it every spring after the rains end. Bay laurel, madrone, live oaks, scrub oaks, manzanita, sycamore, and western maple lined the road's edge—their leaves coated with road dust. By June, the wildflowers that paint the limestone cliffs in April and May had dried up. Only the hardiest Indian paintbrush, yellow monkey flower, and yucca remained.

Colin pulled the truck off to the side of the road at Lime Point. He wore shorts, a T-shirt, a baseball cap, and a water bottle slung around his torso—his usual attire when he wasn't in priest robes. But there was something of the uniform about Colin even when he wasn't in robes. He kept a cool layer between himself and the world—the habit of someone raised to be “a pleaser” in a family with a legacy of troublemaking.

At Tassajara, something is always in need of repair. Some buildings date back to before the turn of the last century. The plumbing is full of patches and prayers. Colin was confident in his job as head of shop, something he couldn't say about other positions he'd held at Tassajara, in the dining room and kitchen. Practice positions, as job assignments are called there, are assigned not to take advantage of talents, but to teach the flexibility to develop ones you didn't know you had. Experience is not as important as willingness.

But Colin had driven to Lime Point that day—and quite a few days before that, since the Indians fire had started earlier in June—because of his experience. As a teenager in rural Texas, he'd worked as a volunteer firefighter, putting out brushfires.

This wasn't brush country, the grassy knolls of central Texas where he'd lived on his grandparents' ranch, west of Austin. This was the Ventana Wilderness—where the knife-edged peaks and valleys of the coastal Santa Lucia Mountains cut a jagged relief against the sky. The Santa Lucias are young as mountains go—only two million years old—and with mountains, youth corresponds to verticality. In the Ventana, elevation can change abruptly, from six hundred feet to nearly six thousand at Junipero Serra Peak. The one similarity to Texas was the heat. It was blazing hot up on the ridge, in the open sun. A weather station in nearby Carmel Valley recorded an afternoon high on June 21 of 103 degrees Fahrenheit.

From Lime Point, Colin could see in three directions: northwest toward Miller Canyon, west toward the ocean, and south-southeast toward Junipero Serra Peak, where the Indians fire had been burning for two weeks. Hazy smoke draped the ridges near Fort Hunter Liggett, a U.S. Army training center. Fire management personnel were based there in what is known as an “incident command post” in the incident command system (ICS), a multiagency emergency response framework implemented in disasters, from wildfires to hurricanes to terrorist attacks, which grew out of a devastating fire season in California in the 1970s.

The smoke didn't look much different to Colin from when they'd started watching the Indians fire. Lucky us, he thought, we got through all of that lightning without any new fire. But then he noticed an oddly shaped cloud, more vertical than horizontal. He got back in the truck and drove another two miles up to the ridge approximately three thousand feet above Tassajara, where he had an even more panoramic view. Though he didn't know their names yet, he spotted the plumes of two lightning-sparked fires to the west—the Gallery fire, south of Big Sur, and the Bear Basin fire, north of Tassajara. “That was the moment I knew it was going to come in,” Colin told me later. “The thing that had protected us with the Indians fire was that the wind was blowing it away. This was going to blow right to us.”

As Colin walked back to the Isuzu, a couple drove by in a Toyota Corolla—probably day guests coming down the road for a soak in the hot springs. Too much brake, he thought, as the Corolla lurched downhill, taillights blinking. Better to put it in a low gear and coast. Following a safe distance behind, he mulled over how to break the news that the fire was coming their way.

 

 

Occasionally a backpacker wanders into Tassajara on foot, but
most people arrive via the road. As Colin did the first time, they have plenty of time to wonder, Where
is
this place? Tassajara sits at the road's terminus, in a deep notch in the earth, rimmed by mountains. On the drive in, the world's glitter and self-importance gradually fall away. Humility comes naturally when you are standing at the base of so much vertical rock from within Tassajara, or looking down into the valley from a trail in the surrounding wilderness.

The first time I entered the coursing quiet of Tassajara, I felt as if I had landed somewhere I could truly rest—both out of my usual element and completely within the elements. There is no electricity in the guest cabins—light is obtained by kerosene lamp. There are no keys. The paths and internal road are earth and gravel. Residents silently greet one another in passing with a small standing bow called a
gassho
.

The basalt and granite walls of the stone rooms, some of the oldest cabins, were pulled from the streambed 150 years ago. The walls of the founder's hall were formed of clay from Tassajara Road. The roof beams in the kitchen were salvaged from a local stand of pine trees killed by beetles. The wood surfaces in the zendo were naturally finished with damp rags and monks' feet. Wood, dirt, stone, bare skin: These are the materials Tassajara is made of. Natural, sturdy, porous, impermanent.

The work circle, zendo, and courtyard between the guest dining room and kitchen constitute the central area of Tassajara. It's harder to say where Tassajara's heart is—to locate it in any one place. It isn't bound to structures but rather flows throughout the place like Tassajara Creek.

Despite that generous, endlessly renewing source of water, buildings have been lost to fire before at Tassajara. A grand turn-of-the-century sandstone hotel burned to the ground in 1949. The original zendo went up in flames in 1978. The current zendo was meant to be a temporary replacement but still stands today, on the site of the old hotel, across from the courtyard—an outdoor parlor of sorts for guests and residents.

At seven a.m. on Sunday, June 22, the courtyard at Tassajara was still quiet. Morning meditation had just ended. A student arranged the cloth napkins for guest breakfast, in alphabetical order by the name on the napkin ring. Another student, still wearing the black robe worn in the zendo, raked the gravel steps above the courtyard. A few early-rising guests wandered into the morning chill to fetch coffee. The smell of lemon-ginger scones pierced the smoke.

David had been up since before the wake-up bell. He'd just put signs on the dining room doors so that the guests would see them when they came to breakfast at nine o'clock. He'd decided to refer to the Gallery fire as the Big Sur fire in his announcement, since most guests would be familiar with Big Sur. The signs read:

For Tassajara in the summer, Sunday was one of the busiest days of the week. Back when David's practice position was guest manager—
shika
, or “guest knower” in Japanese—he'd have had his hands full, sorting out issues with accommodations and arranging rides on the stage, a Suburban that at least once a day shuttles up to eight passengers between Jamesburg, Tassajara's outpost fourteen miles up the road, and Tassajara proper.

He'd liked being guest manager—taking care of people, making sure they were comfortable, and ensuring that their surroundings were aesthetically pleasing. As director, his responsibilities were more administrative. He missed the more creative aspects of his former role. He had to drive to meetings every two weeks at City Center, Zen Center's headquarters and temple in San Francisco, but he liked this part of the job. Despite having been born in rural Pennsylvania, David had urban sensibilities, with a particular fondness for theater and travel, though he could hardly afford much on his stipend of $560 a month.

Often, he returned to Tassajara late, after meetings in the city ended. The road was actually easier to deal with in the dark. The headlights illuminated the potholes, while the surrounding darkness blotted out any distractions. But when he drove the road in daylight, the beauty of the landscape always moved him. Especially when fog skimmed the ridges toward the coast, it looked like a Chinese painting. The scale of the Santa Lucias dwarfed the more modest mountains in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where his father, Paul, sometimes took him when he was young.

David and his father had had little contact with each other in the years before his father became ill. Shortly after David went away to college, he had told his father he was gay. His father saw homosexuality as an offense against God and had responded by disowning him. The two didn't speak for several years. AIDS was on the rise at the time and pegged as a homosexual disease. David suspected that his father, who'd remarried and had another child, feared that his son could have the virus and might infect his new family.

Once, after they'd reconciled, David visited his father and stepmother at their home in Colorado. Paul Zimmerman tried to apologize for his failings as a parent. “It was late. The TV was on,” David told me. “My father came downstairs in his bathrobe. He wanted to talk. But I wasn't in a space where I could really engage him. I realized later what a loss that moment was.” A few years later, his father slipped into a coma and died before David could make it to his bedside. David's stepmother had been vague about the seriousness of his father's condition, and David had thought he had more time.

David and the rest of the senior staff at Tassajara—a group of long-term residents holding vital temple positions, such as head cook and zendo manager—had a plan in place should they have to evacuate the guests, but David hoped that wouldn't be necessary. He knew how much it meant to the guests to come to Tassajara. Some saved up for it all year. He didn't want to disappoint anyone.

He noticed a familiar nagging feeling that no matter what he did, it wouldn't be enough. Practice had helped to shine a light on that old bit of suffering. It had loosened its grip. But it didn't make it go away.

 

 

There is a sign outside the house at Jamesburg, where the paved
road turns to dirt. Snaky black script on pressed wood announces:
Tassajara Hot Springs, Zen Mountain Center, by Reservation Only
.

When Jane Hirshfield showed up at Jamesburg in her red Dodge van with yellow tie-dyed curtains in the summer of 1974, she was told she could not enter Tassajara without first going to San Francisco Zen Center. But she was twenty-one years old and not easily discouraged. Wearing a strand of bone-colored prayer beads around her neck, a Nepali
mala
given to her when she lived at Tassajara, the now fifty-seven-year-old poet refused to leave. “I unwittingly sat my first
tangaryo.
”

Tangaryo is the Japanese Zen tradition in which a student demonstrates commitment and a desire to enter training by sitting at the monastery gate, for days if necessary. In Tassajara's adaptation of this tradition, for the first five days of the two yearly monastic practice periods, new students at Tassajara sit in the zendo for one long period of uninterrupted zazen
,
leaving their cushions only for bathroom breaks and at night to sleep. This unstructured, unsupervised sitting can be excruciating. There are no breaks, except to use the bathroom, and the new students are essentially ignored, left to negotiate the hours as best they can. As long as they remain in the zendo
,
they are allowed to stay on and practice.

Jane talked her way into staying at Tassajara for a week that first time. A year later, she returned to Tassajara for three years of residency, during which the future prize-winning poet put down her pen and focused on studying the Dharma, the teachings of Buddhism. Since then, she's returned most summers to teach a workshop on poetry and practice.