Founded by the seminal teacher Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Tassajara Zen Center is one of the jewels of American Buddhism. It is steeped in practice, lineage, and history, and has incubated some of America’s finest Buddhist teachers. This venerable, irreplaceable institution was given up for lost to forest fires until five courageous monks, against all advice, stayed after the evacuation to try to save it. Colleen Morton Busch tells the story of that climatic afternoon as the fires bore down on Tassajara.
The bathhouse had never seemed so big before. Mako sprayed the scattered fires around the entrance and the section of engulfed fence on the women’s side. If that fire spread, it could potentially demolish the whole creekside structure, with its wooden benches, sundeck, and steamroom.
Graham had left to attend to the water pumps. David had stayed on the men’s side of the bathhouse to prevent the fire from spreading in that area and protect their only path back to the central area, but eventually he left the area, too, heading downcreek to put out spot fires at the opposite end of Tassajara, near student housing. Mako found herself alone.
Once the fence fire on the women’s side of the bathhouse seemed to be out, she pulled a hose attached to the closest standpipe toward the yurt, which was smoking on its backside. The hose wouldn’t reach, but just then Abbot Steve arrived carrying a shovel. He had heard the call for help on his walkie-talkie. He went around behind the yurt, an area thick with sticky burrs and poison oak, and directed Mako where to aim: “Over to the left! Now over to the right! More to the right!”
The tent yurt’s days were already marked. Tassajara planned to dismantle it and build an expanded retreat center in its place. Hoping the poison oak smoke wouldn’t stick to their lungs, they set out nonetheless to save it. It was there now, the next thing to demand their attention.
Abbot Steve pried a burning wooden step away from the yurt deck with the shovel and dragged it through the dirt to where Mako could hose it down. Then he headed to the bathhouse, where a burning stump near the fence threatened to ignite the structure again. He entered the women’s side and emerged with a bucket of water he’d dipped into the outdoor plunge. He doused the stump, then filled his bucket again and returned to the yurt to wet the remaining steps, while Mako arced the one hose attached to the bathhouse standpipe around the yurt’s backside, guessing from the smoke where she ought to aim.
The irritation she’d felt earlier with his protectiveness had evaporated. The abbot and the head cook worked together seamlessly, a sort of water-bearing tag team moving between the yurt and the nearby bathhouse and a small, freestanding bathroom, putting out the same fires again and again. The bathhouse fence and sycamore stump fires kept reigniting, like trick birthday candles.
Fire heats, wind moves, water wets, earth is solid. Abbot Steve had studied these lines from the eighth-century Harmony of Difference and Equality Sutra in a recent practice period, teaching that each of the elements has its place in the universe and in our bodies. How vibrantly alive those words were now!
Each of the myriad things has its merit, expressed according to function and place. Fire wasn’t a malevolent force bent on destroying life. Fire’s life was simply to burn. The flames kept coming back, but he didn’t feel anger. He saw the fire as simply a coming together of various elements. Not a thing-in-itself, but a constantly-coming-into-being-with. “There actually isn’t any fire,” he told me later without a shred of irony.
To say there isn’t any fire is to remember the importance of an open and pliant mind. Right then, Abbot Steve just knew there were places he didn’t want this particular fire to go, and he was going to draw a line and try to protect those places with water, which contains and wets, and earth, which covers and supports. . . .
Around four P.M., Colin saw fire on the slope above the gatehouse. At first he thought it was just a torching shrub. Within seconds, he realized that it was in fact the birdhouse cabin, completely engulfed in flames, its silver Firezat wrap flapping in molten sheets. He announced it to the others, but just a few moments later, he radioed again: “The birdhouse is toast.”
Of all the cabins that could have burned, why this one, relatively new, with its private deck and penthouse view of Tassajara?
On his way back from the garden when he heard Colin’s announcement, Graham ran to the work circle, picked up a hose line, and opened it on the birdhouse.
“It’s toast, Graham!” shouted Colin, not understanding why Graham was making the effort. It was already just a skeleton of blackened posts, well past saving.
“I wasn’t trying to save it,” Graham told me later. It was the big oak tree growing next to the cabin that he wanted to spare, with a plaque nestled in a fork at the base of its trunk:
An ancient buddha said:
The entire universe is the human body,
The entire universe is the gate of liberation . . .
But it’s not quite right to say the oak grew next to the birdhouse; the cabin practically perched in the old tree’s expansive branches—thus the cabin’s name. Tree and cabin seemed to be holding each other in place on the steep hillside.
Graham stood there for a while, watering the oak. They could rebuild the birdhouse in one work period. But no amount of effort or charitable labor could rebuild a tree that had been growing there for at least a hundred years.
Runaway embers rolling downhill from the blackened frame of the birdhouse cabin now threatened to ignite the gatehouse, where residents had taken a group photo the prior afternoon with the Indiana fire crew. Fire also continued to skid down the slope of Flag Rock. Like a marathon runner in the last leg of a race, Colin rallied energy from somewhere, because he had to. He couldn’t let down his guard now and allow the fire to sneak up on the founder’s hall the way it had on the birdhouse. He knew from watching the birdhouse go up in flames that it could happen instantly, while you had your head turned for a moment.
The love Suzuki Roshi’s students felt for him is in each stone of the kaisando, built when he was still alive. In contrast with the sprawling shop, the founder’s hall is an intimate space, about the size of a large bedroom. Occasionally, when yoga workshops take over the zendo during the summer guest season, afternoon service is held in the founder’s hall. Chanting in there, as in the closed space of the steamroom in the baths, is a powerful, resonant experience. While nobody would cry if they lost the shop—for years people had wanted to move it out to the flats, out of sight—if the kaisando burned, hearts would ache.
Colin dragged a hose up from the Cabarga Creek standpipe on the west side of the founder’s hall, across from the zendo. During the weeks they’d been clearing in preparation for fire, they’d dumped raked leaves and trimmed branches into the dry creek bed—too close to the buildings, he could see now, though there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
Abbot Steve took his place on the east face of the hall, near the abbot’s cabin, where a stone basin in a rock garden built by Suzuki Roshi reflects the pre-dawn stars. For an hour or so, from their respective positions, they followed the crashing course of rocks and flaming branches down the slope and poured water on anything that had burned, was burning, or just might burn.
Throughout this time, Mako stayed at the flats, repeatedly extinguishing fires she thought she’d taken care of. Every time she turned around, there was some new fire to attend to or an old fire that had resurrected.
Around four thirty P.M., the woodshed fire took off. The threesided structure with corrugated metal roofing was chock-full of kindling for the wood stoves in the stone and pine rooms and a handful of other cabins—much fuller now in summer than it would be in winter. As Mako sprayed the burning piles with the meager flow from her hose, she began to worry about the volume of available fuel. If it got hot enough and all of it went up, it would be a much bigger fire than she could handle alone. Already the smoke and heat were intense, and strangely, she smelled burning rubber.
The center stack was burning the hottest, so she started toppling the pile with a McLeod, part hoe and part rake. She’d hook on to the wood with the hoe part, pull out the burning pieces, then water them down. Because the water pressure was weak, she had to get up close to the fire to work this way, within five feet. The woodpiles on either side of her were burning, too, and the smoke began to pierce her eyes and prick her throat.
When she started to feel nauseated, she set down the hose and stepped out of the woodshed to get some relief. As soon as she felt better, she picked up her hose again. She moved in and out like that for a while, in a kind of waltz with the need to take care of herself and the need to put out the fire.
Mako saw that the tires on the wood splitter, parked at the edge of the central woodpile, were on fire. That was why she’d smelled burning rubber. But as she sprayed down the machine, she instinctively took a big step back. Was there gasoline in the tank? What if it exploded? “For all I knew,” she told me later, “twisted hunks of metal shrapnel were about to come flying at me.”
There was a time in Japan when female Zen students deliberately disfigured themselves—often with a hot iron—in order to renounce any attachment to their beauty and to demonstrate their fierce commitment to entering a monastic practice that was once exclusively male. But San Francisco Zen Center has had female abbesses. Many American Zen teachers are women. Neither Mako nor the generation of female Zen students before her required such extreme measures to earn a teacher’s respect or manifest their will. If the wood splitter exploded, much harm and no good would come of it. With her heart galloping in her chest, Mako called for help, making no attempt to disguise her fear.
“This is Mako. Graham, Colin, is there gas in the wood splitter? Over.”
Graham was still salvaging the oak tree. Standing on the Cabarga Creek bridge, Colin answered first: “Copy. Colin here. Uh, yeah. . . . Why? Over.” Of course there was gas in the wood splitter, but he had no idea how much.
“It’s on fire! Is it going to explode?”
Colin heard the fear in Mako’s voice, and it surprised him. He’d never heard her sound panicked.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Just keep it wet. Graham and I will bring out the Mark 3.”
“Hurry!”
They’d moved the portable pump in from the flats earlier in the day, at Colin’s suggestion, because they didn’t want to get cut off from it. Now, Graham and Colin wheeled it back in a garden cart to set it up in the creek. Two-stroke Mark 3 engines are high-powered but notoriously difficult to start. This moment was no exception. Graham and Colin took turns yanking on the cord. While one of them tried, the other radioed Mako, who couldn’t see them down by the creek from where she stood, to tell her they were working on it.
She had to back away. The side piles were burning intensely and it was too hot to stand in the middle of the shed, armed with the water pressure of a squirt gun. She could feel the heat searing her throat. She snugged her bandanna back up over her mouth and nose. It gave some relief, but not much. When a blast of smoke hit her in the face, she coughed so deeply she wretched.
David had also responded to Mako’s distress call. He too tried to sort out the maze of hoses left over from the activation, his old rotator cuff injury acting up as he lifted the waterlogged hoses. Finally, Graham got the Mark 3 going. Colin had rolled out a new hose that hooked directly into the Mark 3. The line was too long, and it kept kinking, but once he’d smoothed it out and the pump was running, water blasted through the nozzle.
It was the first time that Colin had left the central area, the first time Mako had glimpsed him or Graham in hours, the first time they were all together since the fire arrived—except for Abbot Steve, who had stayed to keep an eye on the shop when Colin left. The four of them tried to lift the metal roof to soak the wood burning hottest directly underneath it, dodging gusts of smoke. The wind tipped the clouds rising from the woodpiles into Colin’s face at one point, and he thought he might puke on his boots.
When the woodshed fire was mostly under control, Mako wandered off—she couldn’t remember later where she’d gone or why she’d left; maybe she’d just needed to use the bathroom. Eventually, David and Graham left as well. Colin looked up and found himself alone. Hey, where did everyone go?
The woodshed looked like a huge, abandoned campfire. It had been transformed from neat stacks of cured firewood to ashes and cinder, a mix of scorched and unburned wood. “Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again,” Eihei Dogen wrote. “Yet, do not suppose that the ash is future and the firewood past. You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood, which fully includes past and future and is independent of past and future. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes future and past. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death.”
Tassajara residents knew this passage well, having chanted it many times. It awakened a changed relationship to time, to reality itself, in those able to enter its meaning. But Colin wasn’t thinking about Dogen or about returning to anything but a state of rest. He was so done-in that he could barely hold the hose, too tired even to get on the radio and tease the others for abandoning him. He propped a couple of hoses on a stump, pointed them at the smoldering woodpile, and left the flats.
After leaving the woodshed, David returned to the stone office and listened to the messages on the answering machine. There were at least three from Leslie. She wasn’t the type to make a fuss, but he could hear the immense relief in her voice when he finally called back, around five P.M. Relaying a message from City Center, in San Francisco, she gave David the name and number of an information officer to call.
“Something about air support. It might be a private thing, somebody with a helicopter. But I don’t really know.”
Things were cooling and quieting down, but David radioed the others anyway to tell them about the potential water drop. “Where do you think we could we use it?”
After a long pause with no answer, Mako responded: “Ummmm, they want to drop water now?” It was like someone sauntering into the kitchen as dinner was coming out of the oven and asking, What can I chop?
David never reached the information officer. He left a voice mail saying that yes, they would welcome a water drop at Tassajara. The pool bathroom and birdhouse were beyond saving, but more water couldn’t hurt. He didn’t say, Where were you when we needed you? . . .
Finally, after they’d knocked back the woodshed fire at the flats, there was a palpable shift, like the moment the sun dips below the horizon, an atmosphere of finality and transition.
“We knew it was over when the fire bell finally sounded,” David joked when I met with the five all together for the first time after the fire. The others laughed, knowing intimately the desperation that can set in after hours of zazen, when your legs are on fire and you’re perched on the edge of your cushion, waiting for the period’s end, pleading silently with the person watching the clock, seated at the bells.
“It was pretty clear,” said Abbot Steve, recalling what they could plainly see. “Everything on the perimeter is burned. It’s not going to burn again.”
Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again.
It had been nearly a month since the first threat of fire when David called Zen Center president, Robert Thomas, from the stone office to report, surprised and somewhat awed: “I think we saved Tassajara!”