Free Fire Monks by Colleen Morton Busch

“that’s a strategy that we’re looking at.” The “strategy” under consideration seemed to be: Do nothing and let the fire dictate its course. “There’s no good place in the middle of the wilderness to fight the fires,” IC Dietrich said. In 1977, the Marble Cone fire had spread through the Ventana despite significant efforts to contain it. This time, Dietrich and his cohorts on the incident management team planned to let the fire burn inside a big box drawn by the old 1977 “dozer lines”—wide firebreaks cut by bulldozers.
    Thirty-one years after the Marble Cone fire, the incident commander on the Basin Complex fire invoked that fire as a strategic model for how to fight this one. Indeed, there were many similarities. Like the Basin Complex fire, the Marble Cone fire was lightning ignited. It was an aggregated fire—the result of several smaller fires that burned together. At 178,000 acres burned, it was the biggest fire the state of California had ever seen. Estimates of the combined acreage for the 2008 Basin Complex and Indians fires were approaching that record figure.
    For Tassajara residents, too, the 1977 Marble Cone fire provided a gauge for what to expect. One of the first things David had done after the lightning strikes was to read the Marble Cone fire log. Tassajara had been ordered to evacuate in 1977 as well. After initially following those orders, residents had made covert trips into Tassajara at night. One group had even driven through a roadblock while some students distracted the officers posted there. A couple of days after being told by the USFS not to expect help, hotshots—the gritty elite of firefighting—had arrived at Tassajara.
    Hotshots hike extreme terrain on foot, carrying thirty-five-pound packs, chainsaws, and other tools to do the backbreaking work of digging a trough of bare earth to catch flames and stop their spread through fine surface fuels like grasses, twigs, pine needles, and leaf litter. They also light backfires to consume fuels and create a safety zone—an area that has burned won’t burn again.
    At Tassajara, when the main fire was still off in the distance, the hotshots lit the hill behind the monastery, across the creek. They disappeared either up- or downstream to continue their work as a crew of residents extinguished spot fires from drifting embers inside Tassajara. Once that large area had burned, there was less chance of a firestorm in the canyon, and a group of residents returned to prepare for the main fire’s arrival. Jane and Leslie rode in the last vehicle to return to Tassajara from Jamesburg before fire closed the road.
    For two weeks in 1977, Zen students cut firelines and set sprinklers on the roofs of the central buildings. From time to time a fire crew arrived, took baths, ate some of that truckload of peaches, then hiked upstream. When the Marble Cone fire finally burst into the canyon over Flag Rock one August afternoon after several weeks of lingering nearby, a small fire crew was at Tassajara. The crew boss invited then abbot Richard Baker to do the honors of igniting a backburn on the slope across from the stone office. The monks who worked alongside firefighters to defend Tassajara became known as the Tassajara “cool shots.”
    Reading the Marble Cone log in 2008 gave David reason to believe that help was coming, eventually. The record also provided a glimpse of what to expect after a fire passed through—as well as what couldn’t be expected but could happen anyway. At the end of August 1977, the skies above Tassajara were still smoky and spitting ash. That fall and winter, hundred-year rains streamed down the charred watershed and flooded Tassajara. The creek turned chocolate brown and swelled several feet. Some twenty-five hundred sandbags were placed around buildings, and a few hundred creekside trees were felled to prevent damming. Tassajara Road, which had been