I have to admit that it is harder than I thought to get into full firefighter turnout gear in sixty seconds. I tried it on Friday night, preparing belatedly for my all-day Saturday class in Personal Protective Gear. I managed to wrestle my way inelegantly into the ensemble in around a minute forty. Damn. So it stripped it all off and started again, and again, and again, and again, until I could metamorphose from casually attired fellow to fully suited firefighter in the living room, within one minute. By then I was sweating profusely. It seems that protective gear does as marvelous a job keeping heat in as it does at keeping heat out. Why firefighters don't spontaneously combust with alarming frequency during the summer months is a mystery to me.

Fortunately, it was quite cold on the day of the training, so I was merely toasty warm in my gear. The day concluded with the trainees climbing up four stories in the academy's "burn building" (not, at that moment, on fire) and then crawling one-by-one through a tight, cramped maze designed to simulate the various nooks and crannies of a home. In the total darkness, meant to simulate the extreme sadism of firefighter trainers. No, actually it was to simulate the complete obscurity of the dense smoke generated in a house fire, and aside from the absence of anything that could burn me to death, I found it to be a very evocative simulation. When you are laden with heavy turnout gear and bearing a tank of compressed air on your back, and breathing in ragged whooshes through a mask that tightly covers your face, and you are crawling down a tunnel that's just large enough to allow you to pass on hands and knees, in the dark, and suddenly the passage gets so small that your tank bangs against the ceiling, and you have no choice but to get down on your belly and shimmy forward into the blind and claustrophobic darkness, you may experience instincts that you never knew you had. Like the instinct to throw up into your face mask and go volunteer on the bookmobile instead of the rescue squad.

Whatever else I may have been feeling, I was also experiencing the instinct to show no weakness in public, so I bucked up and got through without incident. In fact, for reasons that make less sense to me now, I was determined to make my air last as long as possible. Some of my more nervous colleagues were huffing through their tanks at a brisk pace, and so I continuously reminded myself to slow down my breathing and take it easy. Having to pull in each breath from the regulator is unnerving to some people, as their body interprets this as a sign that it is not receiving enough air. Their anxiety causes their breathing to speed up, which can bring on the effects of mild hyperventilation and further give the sense of suffocation. I thought the sensation was much like breathing through a regulator while scuba diving, and so I was able to shout down my body's protestations and keep my respirations down to a near-normal level.

At the end of the session, the instructors made each of us use up all the remaining air in our tank, so we could get the sense of what it felt like. I believe that in those last few painful breaths, as I pulled the last wisps of air with mounting effort and unease, my face behind the clear mask probably looked remarkably like a fish that has been pulled out of the water and is squirming in the bottom of a boat. I tried to inhale, and there was simply nothing there. I could not make my lungs expand. I think that was the one moment when my instincts bettered me: instead of merely disconnecting the tubing from the front of the mask, as I'd been told, my hands came to my face and yanked the mask free with clumsy desperation. Then air flowed in my nostrils -- I felt it, like you do when you swallow something cold, and my momentary panic immediately subsided. And no one seemed to have noticed.