Early on the morning of my fire fighting midterm I called a probationary member of the Squad who had asked me for a ride to the Academy. His EMT class starts an hour after my fire class does, but a ride's a ride. Perhaps his mind was not working well just after 6 AM, and he was unable to communicate the exact location of his apartment building, so we arranged to meet at a convenient point along Connecticut Ave.

I felt marginally confident about the test. I had trained just up to the point where I began to fear that I could injure myself in preparation for the most grueling physical challenges. Late the previous night I had completed my review for the written component. Susan had left for New York City earlier in the day, and as I went to sleep I had the ridiculous desire to embrace a stuffed animal as a pacifying placebo for human warmth.

In the car I went hunting for some nice angry music to get my adrenals revving, but the early morning airwaves would not oblige. I eventually settled for some tinkling classical, a self-hypnotic track that I thought might help me focus myself on the trials ahead. I arrived at the designated meeting point for my fellow Squad member just a little early, and left the car running while I waited. It was a cold, gray morning, the street lamps still in their last fitful moments of illumination. People emerged from a corner convenience store at regular intervals, pausing in the doorway to blow on a Styrofoam cup of coffee and then step down into the street, looking like characters animated by a giant grubby urban Swiss clock.

Minutes went by, and my nerves began to crackle. I could not be late to the mid term. I would have to leave him. I set an arbitrary time limit, after which I told myself I would go. He would have to find some other way of getting to Rockville. I watched the minutes climb toward my deadline. With only a minute or so left, he appeared on the other side of the street and calmly crossed over to get in the car. He explained that he'd been "entertaining a lady friend" the night before and was quite tired out from the experience. I was so jittery by that point that I could not summon the energy to ask any probing, voyeuristic questions about this exhausting adventure.

In the morning, we took out written test. We would each have to pass the written to go on and do the practical tests -- you fail, you're out. We all gathered in the hall and waited while the instructors graded the tests, wondering if we would lose more people. From a class of 24, we were now down to 12. A few more losses and we'd practically have one-on-one instruction with our group of trainers.

Everyone passed, and so we moved on to the practical tests.

We went through the stations in pairs. The first few were easy: donning gear, donning SCBA, emergency procedures. Then we were told to report to "the hill" where the burn building is located. The next test would be the standpipe pack.

In full gear and SCBA, shoulder a 5-ft pack of hose weighing in excess of 60 pounds, and carry it up to the seventh floor in under 90 seconds.

My time in the last practice session was 104 seconds. I had spent considerable effort since then on strengthening my legs and increasing my stamina, but had no way of measuring the success of my exercise plan. I had no idea what my time might be now.

At first, the standpipe pack feels pretty light. It takes a couple floors before the weight begins to thicken in your thighs and calves. By the fifth floor my legs were shaking and I was gasping for air. The one thing I could not do was fall -- I would never be able to get the hose back up on my shoulder in a reasonable amount of time. On the sixth floor, I wanted more than anything else to pause, just for a moment, just to catch my breath. Anything. In my last practice session I'd paused here, too, and it was this fact that forced me on. Last time wasn't good enough -- this had to be.

The last few steps to the seventh floor landing were unpleasant. I tried to put down the hose pack without it taking me to the floor with it. "What's my time?" I croaked to the instructor.

"81 seconds," he replied.

I am going to pass these tests today, I thought. I really am going to do this. I still felt nervous, but what I most wanted then was to get on with it, to dive in and see if I was really ready.

And I passed, pulling out decent enough times on all the skills to avoid having to retest any stations. I made some mistakes, but I managed to avoid doing anything too boneheaded. At the end of the day, I felt like I'd been pushed from a moving car, and I felt the exhilaration of having survived it.

Halfway to the yellow helmet.

I raced home, sprinted through a shower and threw a bunch of crap into a small suitcase, and caught a cab to the train station to join Susan in New York.