Fire Monks (37 page)

Fire will come, welcome or not. Illness comes, and with it, fear, pain, loss. Turning away, I realized when my strong, athletic husband suddenly became a cancer patient, is really not a workable option. When I look back on John's diagnosis, what I feel surprises me. It is something like longing—for the high relief of that time, for so much love drawn into focus. The disease seems to be controlled for now. Some days I don't think about myeloma at all. I'm lulled into a false sense of permanence, of having something that is mine to keep. Until someone sickens or dies and life reminds me, repeats the hard lesson:
Nothing is for keeps
.

 

 

I once asked Abbot Steve about the value of ruminating on the past
within the context of a practice so completely committed to the present moment. Will the 2008 fire's lessons have any bearing the next time fire comes to Tassajara? It will be a different fire. A different Tassajara.

He looked at me, smiled, and said, “There is no present that does not include the past.”

The present is the only actionable moment, but it is not a moment alone. The 2008 fire came into being because of previous conditions that prepared the forest to burn. The fire left its mark—on people, a place, the land—some more lasting than others. It's difficult to pinpoint when it ended or when it began. Even before the lightning strikes, the seeds of fire existed in the dry tree branches and roots. I could say there was fire, then there wasn't fire anymore, but the Buddha's words feel most true:

 

—February 1, 2011
Colleen Morton Busch
Myoka Eido
, Subtle River, Endless Path

Many people contributed to this effort, in countless ways. I offer deep gratitude.

For trusting me with their stories: David Zimmerman, Steve Stücky, Mako Voelkel, Graham Ross, Colin Gipson, Shundo Haye, and Devin Patel. And thank you as well to all those not named elsewhere who allowed me to interview them: Alan Block, Alicia Baturoni, Andy Handler, Ann Voelkel, Bryan Clark, Caden Wang, Carl Coppage, Dana Velden, David Nicolson (aka “Spanky”), Edward Skinner, Eva Tuschman, Gina Horrocks, Greg Fain, Heather Iarusso, Ivan Eberle, Jon Wight, Joseph Schommer, Judith Randall, Kathy Early, Keith Meyerhoff, Kim Leigh, Lane Olson, Lauren Bouyea, Maria P. Linsao, Mark Ferriera, Michael Bodman, Michaela O'Connor Bono, Mikwa Strauss, Nancy Simmons, Paul Haller, Robert Thomas, Roger Broussal, Shoen Ferrell, Simon Moyes, Sonja Gardenswartz, Ted Marshall, Tim Kroll, Tom Johnson, and Walter and Joanne Ross.

For expert guidance in the world of wildfire and firefighting: Stuart Carlson, Jack Froggatt, Rick Hutchinson, George Haines, John Maclean, Matt Desmond, Steve Pyne, Ted Putnam, Mike Morales, Bill Stewart, Kelly Andersson. For her instructive film
Behind the Lines: Fighting a Wildland Fire,
Jennie Reinish. For assistance with my queries to the USFS: Jane Childers and Andrew Madsen. For fielding questions about fire weather: Ryan Walbrun. For help researching the history of temple fires in Japan: Hisayuki Ishimatsu, Alex Vesey, and John Stucky.

For consulting on Tassajara fire history: David Chadwick. For sharing their own recorded conversations and video footage: Ko Blix, Genine Lentine, and Susan O'Connell and Tim O' Connor Fraser, directors of the
Sitting with Fire
documentary. For creating and maintaining the
Sitting with Fire
blog: Chris Slymon, Kathleen Rose, and the rest of the Jamesburg crew. For her extensive local reporting at thefirelane.blogspot.com: Kelly O'Brien. For illuminating the relationship between fire and the Tassajara landscape: Diane Renshaw, with help from Barry Hecht, Reid Fisher, Sarah Richmond, and David Rogers. For sundry research and technical support: John Kuzel, Karen Sundheim, Nancy Suib, John Mogey, Walter Kieser, Jean Selkirk, and Christy Calame; also Alan Kelly, who transcribed some of my interviews.

For their insightful feedback on early drafts: Holly Rose, Suzanne LaFetra, and Kathy Briccetti. For asking the question this book tries to answer: Danny Parker. For writing words that inspired and supported
FireMonks
: the authors whose works I cite, especially Eihei Dōgen. For paying attention to my words: Dan Kasper, Roman Sysyn, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Henry Hughes, Patricia Henley, Marianne Boruch, Bruce Weigl, and Kathryn Arnold.

For their professionalism, talent, and warmth: Penguin Press associate editor Lindsay Whalen;
FireMonks
jacket designer Tal Goretsky; and my publicist, Stephanie Gilardi. For their enthusiasm for this project and confidence in me: Leslie James, Michael Wenger, and especially Jane Hirshfield, whose words and encouragement thread through
FireMonks
. For pushing this book to be its best: Michael Katz, my agent, and the incomparable Ann Godoff, my editor.

For their constant teaching: Edward Brown, Sojun Mel Weitsman, Alan Senauke, and the Berkeley Zen Center sangha. For their love and friendship: Nora Isaacs, Tove Jensen, Jeanne Ricci, Jen Richter, David Keplinger, and my family. For being both mountain and moon: John Busch. For taking care of Tassajara: monks, firefighters, neighbors, friends, guests—bodhisattvas all.

vii “Fire is more than an ecological process”: Stephen J. Pyne quote, from the
NOVA
documentary
Fire Wars
. Pyne has written numerous books on fire. Particularly instructive to me was
Fire on the Rim: A Firefighter's Season at the Grand Canyon
(Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1995).

4 One of the monks who fought the fire: Taken from the trailer for
Sitting with Fire
, a documentary film,
www.sittingwithfiremovie.com
.

6 Fire had burned 51, 125 acres: From the six a.m. Indians fire incident status report, or ICS 209, for June 21, 2008, and from
www.inciweb.org
. Maps and information on the Basin Complex fire can be found at
http://www.inciweb.org/incident/1367/
.

9 Chinese laborers built the road: From “The First Passenger Wagon to Reach Tassajara,”
The Double Cone Quarterly
3, no. 2 (Winter Solstice 2000), p. 2.

12 The basalt and granite walls of the stone rooms: This and other architectural details are from
Zen Architecture: The Building Process as Practice
, by Paul Discoe with Alexandra Quin (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2008), and from interviews with Tassajara residents.

12 A grand turn-of-the-century sandstone hotel: Says David Chadwick, keeper of Tassajara history and lore, “Joan Crawford's ex-husband was the ownerthen. He was there. Some suspected him of arson. The remaining building stones were bulldozed into the basement. When we first made a garden there back in '67, I remember us digging up one big sandstone block after another.” For more on the history of fire at Tassajara, visit
www.cuke.com/tassfire
.

15 Refused to leave: From a profile of Jane Hirshfield by the author,
Tricycle
(spring 2006), p. 73.

15 Stopped in Jamesburg: An unincorporated community named for the man who founded it in the 1860s, John James—of no relation to Leslie James.

18 Suzuki Roshi had been looking for several years for the right place: From
Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teachings of Shunryu Suzuki,
by David Chadwick (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), p. 265.

19 The first known structures at Tassajara: This and other Tassajara history comes from a file of historical documents and timelines that resides on the back porch behind the stone office, from
Crooked Cucumber
, and
The Double Cone Quarterly
article referenced above.

19 Robert and Anna Beck purchased Tassajara: Details about the Becks' ownership and sale of Tassajara and quotes from Robert Beck are taken from David Chadwick's interview with Beck at
www.cuke.com
.

20 Now translated into Czech, Dutch, Finnish: From David Chadwick's afterword in the 40th anniversary edition of
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
(Boston: Shambhala, 2010), p. 137.

21
Instructions for the Zen Cook:
All quotes from this text, also known as the
Tenzo Kyōkun,
are taken from
From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment: Refining Your Life,
by Zen Master Dōgen and Kōshō Uchiyama, translated by Thomas Wright (New York: Weatherhill, 1983).

22 She'd read about abuses of power: The story of Suzuki Roshi Dharma heir Richard Baker's fall from grace and resignation from the abbacy of the San Francisco Zen Center in 1984 has been well documented. It does not need repeating here, except to say that the crisis raised issues of authority and decision making for the organization that emerged again during the 2008 Basin Complex fire—especially during the final evacuation, when Tassajara residents had to face the hierarchical power structure of the firefighting authorities and decide internally who would stay and who would leave, on the spot and under intense pressure.

30 “The great way is not difficult”: A popular phrase from the
Hsin Hsin Ming
, attributed to Sêng-ts'an (Kanchi Sosan in Japanese), the third Chinese Zen patriarch, who lived in the sixth century.

30 “It was as if the set for a play had suddenly been stripped from the stage”: Quote is from Eva Tuschman, a twenty-four-year-old summer guest cook.

32 One student's apartment building in San Francisco had burned down: Forty-eightyear-old Guatemala native Edward Skinner.

32 Another lived in New Orleans: Twenty-five-year-old Michaela O'Connor Bono.

35 “Stay home and stay inside”: From a press release issued by the California Governor's Office, June 25, 2008.

36 A carload of four senior students: Shundo David Haye, Greg Fain, Simon Moyes, and Aliyu Turaki.

38 Three other Tassajara senior staff members, also women: Judith Randall (zendo manager), Kathy Early (treasurer), and Maria P. Linsao (work leader).

40 In 2008, about half of the electricity used: By the close of summer 2010, Tassajara had transitioned to 100 percent solar power.

42 Find out for yourself: From a talk given March 15, 1969. A transcript is available through the Shunryu Suzuki digital archives, http://shunryusuzuki.com/suzuki/base.htm.

43 Genjo Koan: These well-known lines from Dōgen's text were taken from the version used at San Francisco Zen Center, translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Robert Aitken. See
http://www.sfzc.org/sp–download/liturgy/24–Genjo–Koan.pdf
.

44 Quick turn of events: That day, Grace Dammann, a Green Gulch Farm resident who had been in a coma for weeks after a head-on auto collision on the Golden Gate Bridge, had woken up and mouthed her daughter's name—but the Tassajara evacuees didn't know this yet.

44 “I'd just left my whole life”: Quote from forty-one-year-old resident Heather Iarusso.

46 “There's no good place in the middle of the wilderness to fight the fires”: IC Dietrich's quote is from a KAZU report by Krista Almanzan, aired June 26, 2008.

46 At 178,000 acres burned: Both the 2007 Zaca fire (240,207 acres) and the 2003 Cedar fire (280,278 acres) surpassed the Marble Cone fire in size.

48 The two-thousand-year-old stone Gandharan Buddha statue: From Gandhara, an area along the Silk Road where Buddhism once thrived—“where Greek Hellenic culture met Indian culture through Alexander the Great,” according to Abbot Steve. The region, in present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, produced the earliest depictions of the Buddha in human form.

48 Probably because of a faulty pilot light on a propane gas refrigerator: Jane Hirshfield told me that the zendo fire may also have started in the kerosene-soaked rags used for cleaning the lamps: “As far as I know, no one's ever made a definitive call. I think we don't actually know.”

53 The unofficial state ecosystem: Details on fire and chaparral in the Santa Lucias come from a talk by ecologist Diane Renshaw at San Francisco Zen Center on January 8, 2010, and many e-mail exchanges. Diane also provided the fascinating details on fire beetles in this section. For more, see
Introduction to California Chaparral
, by Ronald D. Quinn and Sterling C. Keeley (University of California Press, 2006), pp. 71–73, and Warren E. Leary, “On the Trail of Fire-Detecting Beetles,”
New York Times
, May 11, 1999.

57 Made cookies for the inmates: Sixty-five-year-old Tom Johnson.

60 He shot footage destined for YouTube: Sixty-year-old Kokaku Brian Blix. You can watch this footage and interviews with some of the fire monks in Blix's online gallery at
http://www.kofotofactory.me/
.

61 Leaving the crew nowhere to hide: Details on the Esperanza fire are taken from the
Esperanza Fire Accident Investigation Factual Report
, October 26, 2006, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Inspector General's
Report of Investigation
dated November 30, 2009. That an arsonist started the Esperanza fire made the deaths of the firefighters even more tragic. When the arsonist was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in March 2009, the mother of one of the deceased firefighters made this remarkable statement to her son's killer: “I harbor no anger, only hope that you understand the depth of pain you caused us and your family. More importantly, I forgive you for the act that took my son's life.”

62 Not mandated by their agency to provide structure protection: CAL FIRE unit chief Rick Hutchinson, who worked in unified command on the Indians and Basin Complex fire, said of the USFS, “It is actually laced throughout numerous guiding documents for their agency that they can do structure protection. What they can't do is combat a structure fire. They can protect structures from the outside. They do in fact do that with a lot of their own infrastructure when fires are impacting them. There's conflicting info coming down from the upper levels, all the way from Washington, D.C.”