Zen Rattler

     Deep in the dry, khaki hills of inland north-central California is a hot springs compound with a pool, a few cabins, a dining hall, and a meeting space, Tassajara, owned by the San Francisco Zen Center for retreats and general get-aways. 

     Fifty years ago, I left a hired man’s job in the high country of Idaho and bunked in the houseboat section of Sausalito because I had been asked to edit an edition of The Coevolution Quarterly, a biproduct of the Whole Earth Catalog where I worked for a few years and which won the National Book Award in 1972, my fifteen minutes of fame. 

   It was a tough transition from pulling calves out of “open” heifers in a snowstorm to herding authors like Brautigan, McGuane, Crumb, and Brando into some cogent form. I developed editorial constipation, a more acute version of writer’s block and needed to retreat to some neutral corner for a recharge, so I got in touch with the Zen Center and asked if I could rent a room at Tassajara for three days. Yeah, come on down, thirty bucks a day, but be advised that they were in sesshin.

     The evolution of information hadn’t yet occurred for me to be able to Google “sesshin,” but I did learn from a fellow worker that it is a time when zen students do a whole lot of meditation and not a word is spoken, for a week. Suited me.

    After a full day’s travel in my Ford stock truck from north of San Francisco down along the coast then inland from Big Sur over thirty miles of dusty switchbacks, I was met at the portals of Tassajara by a young woman in flip flops and loose clothes with a blank face who handed me a single sheet of cheap paper entitled “Rules,” and a hand written bill for $90, payable then. 

     The rules included no smoking, alcohol, drugs, musical instruments, radios, or speech. I was assigned Cabin Six at the outflow of the hot springs. I would be fed outside the dining hall. The hot pools were open for my use from two to four in the afternoon while everyone was in zazen, meditation. I paid in cash and rolled the old truck and my Royal portable typewriter to the far end of the compound, Cabin Six, that was furnished with a futon, night stand, waste basket, water pitcher, single lamp, and motel-quality plastic drinking cup. 

     Supper on the concrete steps of the dining hall, alone and apart from the zenners, was a tad spooky but the rice and veggies were first rate. Particularly impressive was the final course, two of cups of plain old hot water poured into one’s empty wooden bowl that created a thin broth and left the dish washer folks with a head start on cleaning up. Smart.

     I have never slept well in a motel, hotel, jail cell, or guest room. Tassajara felt like a combination of all. When morning finally crept down into the canyon, I was more tired than when I went to bed. It was time for a walk before attacking the typewriter, so I ambled downstream on a dirt path skirting a stream of mildly sulfuric water that exited the hot springs. 

     A quarter mile below Cabin Six I came around a sharp bend in the trail, into the bright sunshine, and was met by a coiled, rattlesnake that picked up its head, fired off its buzzer, and startled the peewadding out of me. 

     I grew pubic hair in the Sandhills of Nebraska where there were gobs of non-tolerated rattlesnakes and was taught to dispatch them, so my fear and training led me to choose a couple of boulders from the creek bed that I shot putted toward this one’s fangs, squishing the viper to eternity, feeling almost proud to have been the anonymous protector of a group of Tassajarans in rubber sandals and linen pants. 

     As I was bent over the carcass, a fellow sporting the zen version of a man bun flapped around the corner, saw what I had accomplished and yelled “What have you done? What have you done?” then slapped his hand over his mouth, whirled, and ran back up the trail. I used a manzanita branch to flip the snake’s mortal coil up into the bushes.

     The emotion-free woman was waiting for me at Cabin Six. She handed me sixty dollars and a typed note that explained that all beings are sentient, that my ignorance had caused a reduction in the overall life force, and furthermore my killing of the snake had caused a student to break sesshin, so could I please gather my belongings and leave immediately. I had been 86-ed from a zen center.

     A couple of switchbacks above Tassajara I pulled over, threaded five rattles on a chunk of fishing line, and hung the talisman from the ashtray knob of the truck.