Moving Holes: Growing Up Western Soto Zen Buddhist

I'm about to start reading Fire Monks which chronicles the 2008 Basin Complex fire and the efforts to protect Tassajara.

When I was a child, there were two tales at the core of my personal mythological cannon: May Day on the Yale campus*, and the defense of Tassajara against the Marble Cone fire of '77.

This can be the latter story for the next generation.  I've yet to read this rendition of it, but I already know one version of this tale.  I remember seeing Tassajara smack in the middle of the "burn box" (a huge tract of fire-adapted wilderness area that the forest service decided to let burn), the "3 Day Fire" (the fire was "going to arrive in three days" for weeks), and the day the fire finally hit. I remember simultaneously worrying about my home and accepting that it might burn down. I remember going in 10 days after the fire had passed with ashes coating everything and smoke from Miller Canyon heavy in the air. I know the awesome ecology of the story in far, far greater detail than I'm sure is discussed in this book and the amazing response of the landscape.  For me, the fire also means two weeks of shoveling sandbags and cutting brush to prepare for the massive landslides and floods that could have resulted (they didn't much, but that's not the point. The point is that I spent two weeks filling sandbags by hand and then Tommy Little Bear came in with his sandbag making machine and made about five times as many in something like two days. This didn't particularly bother me; I'm familiar with moving walls several inches & piles of firewood several feet. Sometimes, that's just how it goes. Actually, I still feel a deep connection with sandbags. Bizarre, I know.)

I am aware that, as with anything involving a community of people, there exist certain complex webs of feeling surrounding the publication of Fire Monks and the portrayal of the "Tassajara Five" as heroes...or something.  For me, it 'boils' down to an afternoon in the hot plunge in the Summer of 2009 (I can't remember all of the exact words, so DON'T QUOTE ME ON THIS EXCHANGE, YOU FOOLS) when a woman visiting from another Zen center turned to Mako and said something along the lines of,

"I just really really wanted to thank you."
Mako, genuinely confused, replied with something akin to (but more gracious than),"wait...for what?" Woman: "Uh...saving Tassajara!"
Mako: "Oooh right. That." [general laughter and joking at her initial befuddlement]
Mako: [in a disaffected hipster voice] "The fire was so 2008."

For me, this story will never be about ego or politics or outside perceptions, or any of the other things some members of the SFZC community may carry.  In my mind, it's about sandbags, a monk eating a pint of Ben and Jerry's with a spoon, and fields full of flowers you only see in the immediate wake of a fire.

As Gene DeSmidt wrote:

THEY ARE NOT HEROES
JUST 5 PRACTICING ZEN MONKS.....
IN DIFFERENT ROBES !

Plus, this photo is hilarious:

I think my favorite part is Graham's hat (far left). 

Be Seeing You

*that story involves the trial of Bobby Seale, the National Guard, and a brilliant diplomacy move by the Dean of the college. It's a great story. Maybe someday I'll share with you the rendition I've heard over the years.