Free Fire Monks by Colleen Morton Busch Page B

Carlson arrived that afternoon, he admired what Tassajara’s residents had already accomplished—the rooftop sprinklers, the firelines, the cleared ground around the solar panels and cabins. He’d been headed to the Sierra Nevada mountains for a weeklong backpacking trip when he got a call asking him to come to Tassajara to advise the residents and help them prepare for the fire. “I’m on my way,” he said. He brought his eighteen-year-old son with him.
    Stuart had been coming to Tassajara for years to give first-aid training and assist in fire safety evaluations and drills. He first arrived as a Zen student in 1987—but his connection to meditative practices predated that. When he was growing up, Stuart was introduced to meditation by his godmother, a member of the Franciscan order, and later to Zen by a brief encounter in the San Bernardino National Forest in the 1970s with poet and natural world spokesman Gary Snyder, who once worked as a fire lookout. Snyder read his poem “Control Burn”—“Fire is the old story. / I would like, /with a sense of helpful order, / with respect for laws / of nature / to help my land / with a burn, a hot clean / burn”—and Stuart’s ears pricked up.
    Having grown up in rural Santa Cruz County, he’d been in the woods his whole life. His first and favorite family dog was a coyote his father had nursed back to health from a gunshot wound. He spent summers at Pico Blanco Boy Scout Camp near Big Sur, racking up merit badges. When Governor Jerry Brown created the California Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1976, Stuart was among the first group hired. He wanted to “heal” the forest. He worked at Pico Blanco on a CCC crew during the 1977 Marble Cone fire.
    â€œMy poor mom got a house full of Vikings,” the fifty-three-year-old youngest of three boys told me when we talked at Tassajara in June 2009. He’d returned to Tassajara the summer after the fire to give his annual first-aid training. A drizzle had turned into a downpour and we’d sought shelter in the student eating area. The kitchen crew chopped vegetables nearby at two long tables.
    â€œWe were all surfers, wandering around with dirty bare feet on her white carpets,” Stuart recalled with a sympathetic laugh. Both of his parents were activists, though his father’s politics were considerably more radical than his mother’s. His father was an animator at the Walt Disney Studios and a founding member of the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Guild during the House Un-American Activities Committee era. From his father, whom he described as “a hard-core labor man and true conservationist in the Teddy Roosevelt mode,” Stuart inherited the desire to take care of others, even at risk to himself.
    In 1984, a few years after signing up as a seasonal firefighter with the California Department of Forestry (CDF), now known as CAL FIRE, Stuart found out his girlfriend was pregnant. He applied for a permanent position for financial stability but, like many firefighters, got hooked by the “esprit de corps and feeling of family” as well as the sense of being useful to his community. He was promoted to captain in the early 1990s. As station captain at Soquel Station, near Santa Cruz, Stuart oversees a four-person engine crew. He’s responsible for the upkeep of equipment, vehicles, and the station itself, budget management, and the training and supervision of firefighters.
    â€œI’m hard on them at first,” Stuart told me. “It’s easier to be a jerk and then a nice guy later on.” It’s not so easy to imagine Stuart playing tough. He’s gregarious, with a warm, tenderhearted demeanor. He has soft eyes, wavy hair, a flirtatious smile, and a quick, slightly nervous laugh. He studied traditional Japanese karate for years but is more surfer than black belt, agreeable and amiable by nature.
    Under the surface,