Fire Monks (35 page)

At the same time, she quickly added, “In a crisis, anybody can be abbot.”

Given a sense of responsibility and appropriate authority, both by the sangha and within oneself, anyone could take the kind of decisive lead that Abbot Steve did.

Zen fosters self-reliance and trains you to be your own boss. But the practice also points to something beyond the ordinary notions of these terms. Taking responsibility includes letting go. You accept the consequences of your actions even as you realize that your actions completely depend on the totality of circumstances in any given moment.

 

 

Two weeks after the fire, residents began to return to Tassajara,
though a backburn operation jumped a fireline and delayed their first attempt, sending them back to Jamesburg. On July 24, Shundo drove to Tassajara with Abbot Steve for the first time since the July 9 evacuation.

“It doesn't look so different,” Shundo observed as they climbed to Chews Ridge.

“Just wait,” warned the abbot.

Then they reached the ridge. The view opened onto mountains scraped clean, bare except for the wisps of leafless trees and a carpet of ash, black-andtan slopes, a hazy sky still busy with smoke. A member of a USFS fire crew waved their vehicle down to warn them that his crew was cutting dead trees along the road ahead. He cautioned them to proceed slowly and keep their eyes open.

“Past China Camp, in the chaparral, the moonscape really started,” Shundo wrote in his journal. “It looked like England in winter, bare trees, dark earth. A beautiful starkness to everything. Hazy and smoky below, the rocks standing proud . . . The Wind Caves were barren and brown, the Pines completely devastated, sticks standing, the trail clearly visible for once, winding up the valley.”

At Tassajara, Shundo ran into Mako and David first—“big hugs, no need to say anything”—then headed for the baths to rinse off the travel dust, along the way embracing several others he hadn't seen since their evacuations. “I could already feel how different I was being here,” he wrote. Reading his own words later, Shundo speculated that he'd meant he felt different at Tassajara from the way he'd felt in the city, but also that he felt different at Tassajara now compared with before the fire. Both closer to it and more distant.

At dinner the night Shundo returned to Tassajara, the residents were back to eating at individual tables. There were simply too many of them now for one big table in the center of the room—more than forty of the approximately sixty-five residents who evacuated had returned. But Shundo detected a fissure between those who'd stayed to prepare for the fire and those who'd left in the June 25 evacuation. Those who had stayed behind had never executed the tiered evacuation they'd spent so much time talking about, but here they were, organized according to how long they'd stayed or how quickly they'd gone, each drawn most easily to those in their tier, who shared their level of experience. He'd observed the same tendency in himself in the city, where he'd sought the reassuring company of others who'd been close to the fire preparations.

He'd spent the two weeks prior to returning to Tassajara after the fire “feeling like the fifth Beatle,” unraveling the energy around the preparations he'd participated in only to evacuate at the last minute. He still felt a bit out of step—like Devin, he could have been there but wasn't. But as Shundo sat next to Graham that evening in zazen in the stuffy zendo they kept closed up, preferring heat to smoke, he had an insight. He could spend the rest of his life turning over all of the little moments that had led to his decision to continue driving up the road away from Tassajara on July 9, longing for an experience he had missed.

But then he thought: Or not. He could also trust that he'd done his best and let it go.

 

 

That evening after supper, Abbot Steve held the first of several
community meetings in the dining room. They pushed aside the tables, sat in a circle, and shared what the fire was like for them, wherever they were, so that they might know something of one another's experience. Now the community that had been blown apart like the cottony wisps of a dandelion seedpod would try to reconstitute the whole bloom.

Some evacuees shared feelings of deep gratitude for everyone's efforts, both close to and far away from the fire, and reverence for the fire-dependent natural world they were part of and inhabited. Some shared painful feelings of displacement and disorientation and worries about plans to reopen the guest season. What's the rush? they asked. Can't we have a little more time to heal ourselves and this place before we throw open the gates?

Some evacuees were still upset, like the creator of the
Sitting with Ginger
mock blog—named for the monastery dog, evacuated with the residents on June 25. When it was his turn to speak, the former defense attorney challenged the wisdom of the breakaway decision the five had made to turn around and told Abbot Steve he believed they'd made a mistake. You may have saved Tassajara, he said, but you forsook the sangha, the community, more important than any building.

Abbot Steve took in the feeling that came with being criticized as well as his gratitude that the student felt free to express himself honestly. The abbot had opened the circle with his explanation for why they'd turned around on the road. He didn't repeat it. The group merely moved on to the next person in the circle when the angry resident finished speaking. “I realized a long time ago I can't convince anyone of anything,” Abbot Steve told me later.

Tassajara's director, who'd done so much talking during the fire, didn't have much to say now. David felt protective of something he couldn't quite articulate, a simplicity, an essentialness expressed in the skeletal silhouettes of trees and the exposed slopes.

As he listened, he was surprised to find himself feeling unsympathetic. People complained about how hard it was to miss the fire, and he thought: But you also had three weeks of vacation! People spoke of painful feelings of displacement and exile, and David couldn't help but recall the years of being punted from one temporary home to another. A small voice inside him snipped: You want to know what real displacement is? “Later, I realized that some of the decisions I made during the fire contributed to people experiencing something similar to what I experienced as a child—though conditions were different and this displacement may have saved their lives,” he told me. His own disregarded pain had made it difficult, he now understood, to take in theirs. “People wanted to hear from me, as director, how things came about, and they wanted to talk about the impact the decisions had on them, but I didn't want to explain or justify. What the fire taught me was: Stay with the essential. A lot of this was, ‘Let me tell you my story.'”

David was grateful to Steve for leading the conversation. David knew it was important. But for him, the burned wilderness expressed all of their grief and gratitude with a dignity beyond words.

 

 

Much that the residents had done to prepare for the fire needed
undoing to welcome back the guests. Tassajara needed a top-to-bottom cleaning. They drained the pool, tracking footprints in the soot as they scrubbed away the slimy layers. They pried protective boards off windows and eaves, wiped ash from every horizontal surface, rolled fire hose, sorted out undamaged wood, curtains, cushions, and linens, and redistributed lanterns. They began repairs on damaged structures. They sat zazen, chopped vegetables in the kitchen, and resumed the everyday tasks of monastic life. No more leftovers from the walk-in or MREs—the extras were stashed away—the head cook had meals to plan, mouths of monks to fill again.

The camaraderie that marked the early hours of fire preparations returned. “We weren't on crews,” one evacuated student said. “I talked to people I'd never spoken to before.” The resident whose San Francisco apartment had burned down washed dishes and turned compost for ten days straight without complaint, delighted just to be useful, to contribute in a tangible way to Tassajara's recovery.

For some others, the work fueled lingering resentment. First they'd worked their muscles raw doing fire prep. Then they'd been kicked out. Then they were asked, Can you come back and work again? Some residents didn't return after the fire. They'd made other plans during the long wait for the fire's arrival.

There was a calmness, a regal feel, to the landscape, a quiet and dramatic vitality. The air smelled of crushed leaves and wood smoke. By late July, tender new shoots sprouted from the bases of burned trees. Bright green ferns unfurled from ashes in the Cabarga Creek bed. As the land began to mend itself, the sangha worked together and tried to heal. “I had this dream my first night here,” said one young resident-evacuee in an interview for the
Sitting with Fire
documentary. “The roots of the trees were cracking underneath the soil. Maybe that's what's actually happening.” It
was
what had happened with the shop woodshed, ignited when fire had smoldered underground and traveled along a root to the structure. “But for Tassajara, the community, it's also like that,” she continued. “We are trying to reestablish our sense of community.”

 

 

On July 25, David, Mako, and Graham finally left Tassajara for
vacation. On that day, in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in Northern California, something horrible happened—just the kind of mishap Jack Froggatt had feared. National Park Service firefighter Andrew Palmer bled to death when an eight-foot-long, twenty-inch-wide sugar pine branch fell on his leg, shattering his femur and severing his femoral artery. It was his first day on the fireline. He was eighteen years old.

More than a dozen firefighters carried Palmer down a steep dozer line to a place sufficiently level for a Coast Guard helicopter to set down a litter. Other helicopter pilots had refused to make the pickup, citing too much smoke in the air. Ultimately, it took three and a half hours just to get Palmer to a hospital.

Before they left for some time off, Colin and Mako had talked about all the things that could have gone wrong at Tassajara that didn't. What if they'd lingered longer on the Overlook Trail? What if Graham's radio had failed and he hadn't been able to call for help from the bathhouse? What if one of those rock bombs dropping down from Flag Rock had hit someone or the shop's four hundred gallons of gasoline had caught fire? What if the pumps had failed or a major pipe had burst, taking down Dharma Rain? What if someone had been seriously burned—or suffered a heart attack? At the time of the fire, Mako was the only one with any current wilderness first-aid training. What if she'd suddenly had a real victim on her hands, someone she knew and cared for? Even if she could stabilize her patient, fire had rendered the road impassable. Would a helicopter have been willing to land in the narrow valley for a rescue? An old helipad on the hogback ridge, built in the 1970s, had never really been used. Safety officers for the Basin Complex fire had just looked at it and shook their heads.

What if someone
had
died saving Tassajara? Would that have made it a mistake to stay?

With more than forty years of practice guiding him, Abbot Steve won't weigh what didn't happen. Just as he learned a long time ago that he can't convince anyone of anything, he's rid himself of the temptation to deal in potentialities. Even as he could imagine the infinite ache of losing a son or daughter, brother, sister, or friend, he said, “It's not so helpful to judge it good or bad. Was it an appropriate response? That takes it beyond good and bad. . .. It is what it is. In any kind of action you take, you accept the karma that comes with it”—even though the effects of your actions can't be predicted. When five priests turned around on a smoky, windy hairpin turn on Tassajara Road to meet the fire alone, it was just a moment, not good or bad, an action connected to the past and future by spider's silk, its consequences yet unknown.

People may try to distinguish a meaningful death from a meaningless one—a preventable one, like young Andrew Palmer's. But Zen doesn't hold to such divisions. Death is just death, a transformation. “Death could be construed as a disaster. Birth, another kind of disaster, or anything unexpected that ruins our plans,” Abbot Steve observed.

In a talk at Tassajara after the fire, his voice low with residual fatigue, Abbot Steve spoke about the particular suffering of “might have been.” If you feel some regret for something, he said, it is your responsibility to engage that feeling. Only you can tend your own mind. He himself regretted that he hadn't taken the time at the turnaround point on the road on July 9 to call everyone together and announce the five's decision to return. “I could have done something there to better communicate,” he said almost two years after the fire.

 

 

On July 27, the Basin Complex fire was declared 100 percent con
tained at a total of 162,818 acres. Estimated suppression costs to date topped $78 million. Combined with the Indians fire, burned land exceeded 240,000 acres—the third-largest tally in California history.

On August 3, David read a statement at the temple gate to relaunch the guest season: “What, I ask, has the fire taught you? What, during these past weeks, have you discovered in the blaze of your own being that is beyond all displacement, beyond all destruction . . . ?” The first stage from Jamesburg in more than a month shuttled down Tassajara Road. The kitchen fired up its ovens and the cabin crew made beds for a few dozen guests—a smaller group than usual, yet still too many for some of the students. Though air quality had vastly improved, a smoky haze still settled over the valley in the mornings and evenings, and occasional winds transported smoke toward the monastery from the surrounding wilderness that still burned.