Fire Monks by Colleen Morton Busch Page B

physical contribution to work at Tassajara ought to count against his staying as well. But it wasn’t really a question, and Gardenswartz didn’t wait for an answer before walking away.
    Later, she told me that several factors—closed communication and a lack of experience, coupled with the confusion and intensity of the moment—had perhaps obscured “a wider view of what might be needed in the circumstances, that maybe youth and physical strength were not the only qualifications to consider.” Had she known at the time what she later learned—“a mandatory evacuation does not mean they will haul you out”—she might have made a different choice herself that morning and refused to leave.
    Hard as it was to deny Gardenswartz—and to dismiss three other Tassajara senior staff members, also women—David was sure he’d made the right decision. He counted up those he had asked to stay—four women and ten men, a mix of senior staff and students who’d arrived at Tassajara for the first time only a few weeks before.
    He’d pared them down from forty-plus to fourteen. Fourteen wasn’t nearly enough, but it was better than eight.
    Â 
    Â 
    Around ten a.m., after the evacuation convoy left, the remaining fourteen regrouped and recalibrated their preparation efforts. An hour later, one green U.S. Forest Service (USFS) fire engine with a crew of eight arrived. David, Graham, and Tassajara’s resident fire marshal, Devin Patel, gave the crew a tour. The firefighters helped residents clear brush and dig fireline, but shortly before four p.m., the engine captain told David they wouldn’t be staying the night. The crew left before dinner.
    David felt duped. Based on the urgency of that morning’s mandatory evacuation order, he had emptied out most of Tassajara, expecting that the firefighters would stay—and that there would be many engines, not one. The numbers in his head from the 1977 and 1999 fire logs—sixty firefighters, twenty engines lining the road—dwarfed this response.
    That evening, David and Graham drove up to Chews Ridge and the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy (MIRA) observatory, built to take advantage of the clear atmosphere above the Santa Lucia Mountains and lack of ambient light in the Ventana. During the Basin Complex fire, MIRA served as a safety zone, lookout, meeting site, and operations base for firefighters, as it had in the 1999 Kirk Complex fire. Ivan Eberle, MIRA’s caretaker, had invited David and Graham for a visit to get acquainted with the fire commanders who held briefings there and to view Google Earth maps of the fire’s progression.
    Eberle had stayed at MIRA throughout the 1999 fire. He was familiar with the lingo, tactics, and politics of firefighting. He had relationships with local firefighters. But for David and Graham, it was like being thrown into another world. When they first arrived, to David’s surprise, they encountered the USFS engine captain who had pulled his crew out of Tassajara just a few hours earlier.
    Inside Eberle’s living quarters, a group of firefighters in varying uniforms—including several members of the USFS engine crew—gathered around the dinette table. Some wore USFS uniforms. Others were from CAL FIRE, California’s state firefighting agency. As the firefighters ribbed one another like members of opposing sports teams, David and Graham glimpsed the complex and sometimes conflicted relationship between the agencies. “We learned that CAL FIRE was more proactive,” David told me later. “The Forest Service was in charge, but it seemed like CAL FIRE wanted to be.”
    Firefighters came and went from the room. Eberle played a YouTube video of a “fire tornado”—a spinning pillar of black smoke churning through a stand of oak trees in a grassy meadow on the Indians fire, southeast of Tassajara. He told David and Graham