Early Sunday morning I awoke to the static of rain. I'd hoped that conditions might be a bit drier for the second round of firefighter tests. Again I bumbled out of bed and got myself ready for a return to the academy. I was stiff, aching, hating the world, and running dangerously low on self-administered pep talks.

Still, there's something nice about getting into a car on a dark wet morning and listening to the rain drum on the roof while the heater warms up. I ate my customary breakfast of protein bar and Gatorade (personal research has found this combination is least likely to be puked up during extreme levels of physical activity) while examining the radio dial for signs of life. It turns out that early Sunday morning programming is so stunningly uninteresting that it makes bland Saturday morning look like Times Square on New Years Eve.

The streets were almost deserted. As I came down the Calvert Street hill towards the Duke Ellington Bridge, I noticed that about forty feet of the roadway at the base of the hill was flooded. A truck ahead of me slowed, and I saw a car ahead of him pull a quick U-turn rather than attempting to cross the pool. The truck's brake lights stayed on for a moment, and seemed to be considering whether or not to go ahead as well. Then he jumped ahead and into the water.

I don't have time for this shit I thought, I went right in after him. Quickly I noted that 1) it was beginning to look much deeper as he went further in and 2) it was beginning to look much, much deeper on my car, which lacked several inches clearance that the other vehicle had. Then I heard the ominous sound of water hitting the undercarriage, and I felt the car begin to slow from the drag as I plowed in. Can't stop, I thought, and gunned it. The car sprang ahead and cleared the pool, shooting twin fountains off to either side.

The superstitious side immediately began examining the subtext of this event -- good omen or bad? Though I dared not allow myself to feel too much confidence, signs seemed to be pointing towards the positive: temporary hindrance overcome by outpouring of energy.

At the academy, we quickly gathered our gear and went up the hill to the burn building. Everyone had at least one station to complete. We were nervous, but there was a shared sense of determination to get everyone through the day. Because many of the tests were team skills in which only one member would be evaluated at a time, we would likely repeat the stations several times over, and assist other classmates on skills we'd already passed.

There was a delay when the instructor couldn't find the key to a padlock that secured the ladder shed. In most venues, this would have led to a round of phone calls to whomever might have accidentally pocketed the keys, then perhaps a call for locksmith. The instructor looked at the lock with irritation. "Get the bolt cutters off the engine and take this off," he told us. For the first time since the testing began, I felt a renewed sense of affection for the fire and rescue service.

In a couple minutes, we returned with bad news: the engine didn't have any bolt cutters on board. "Then grab a Halligan bar and a flathead ax and break the lock," he told us. As we carried the tools over to the shed, I couldn't help but believe that this was an auspicious beginning to the day. My classmate Bob slipped one end of the bar into the lock's loop and I began hitting the bar with the flat side of the ax. Nothing happened for about ten solid blows, then the lock went tink! and fell at our feet.

Even the rain began to clear up as we began our tests. Bob and I went over our strategy and verbal commands as I prepared to retest on the "roof ladder up a 35' ladder" station. When the time came, we powered the ladder up to the roofline almost effortlessly. I was so relieved that I was shaking on the way down, almost as much as I'd been shaking after failing the station and then slipping on the wet rungs the day before.

Firefighting class was kind of like Peace Corps: it throws you together with people you might not otherwise know or like, and bonds you to them through shared hardship and survival. All seven of us were determined that no one would fail the class, and we divided up duties for the team tests to make sure everyone would have a strong, relatively rested backup person. Even after some of us had finished our own tests we stayed on to support each other's efforts. By noon we had all retested, and everyone had passed. We were done.

We were too exhausted to whoop it up very much. There was some feeble talk of going out to celebrate, but ultimately we packed up our gear and limped out to our cars. I could hardly believe it was over. On the drive home, the radio serve up a hit parade of positive-omen songs. Thanks a lot, I thought. You sure were coy with the encouragement a few hours ago.

Back home, Susan and I sat around and drank beer in a decidedly low-key mode. I was feeling far too bruised to go out to dinner, dance, or move around much. Late in the afternoon Susan ducked out to go to a yoga class at the nearby gym. I settled in for some serious sloth.

About ten minutes later, the phone rang. I ignored it, feeling utterly contended in my decision to ignore the rest of the world for the evening. But soon there was a knock on the door. I lumbered down to get it and found our neighbor, Sarah the Economista, carrying a flashlight and looking embarrassed.

"I was working on the upstairs wiring and I think I've done something to the lights downstairs," she said in her charming English accent. I pulled on a coat and followed her out to the sidewalk and up the steps of the rowhouse next door. This was not the first time I had gone over to provide some advice after Sarah's determined efforts to learn electrical wiring the hard way had precipitated an outage. Last time, I was well rested enough to appreciate the potential lethality of the situation, and tried to offer some advice on reducing the risk of electrocution. Susan has a vivid memory of me instructing her not to touch Sarah if she stuck to the wire, but sort of kick her away from the stepladder.

This time I was far too tired to even consider the potential medical consequences of her rewiring efforts. We examined the circuit panel in the dark living room by flashlight. Sarah told me that the circuit breaker had popped and asked if I could stay downstairs to reset it while she "held some wires together" upstairs. Even this flagrantly suicidal attitude failed to rouse my rescuer instinct, and I dutifully held the light so she could see her way back to the stairs.

"Okay!" she called down to me. "I've got the wires! Go ahead and flip the circuit breaker!" And I did. The lights in the living room immediately came on again.

And a bunch of people yelled "Surprise!" An utterly confounding moment passed as I tried to ascertain how I had stumbled into someone else's surprise party. There was Sarah and her husband John, and new friends Barbara, Jim, and the New Life Form, and there was Susan... what the hell was going on here? Only after a pathetically long interval did I realize that this event was for my benefit, a party in celebration of my passing the class. I was immediately presented with a homemade crown, a medallion fashioned from a garden hose nozzle, and humorous certificate of achievement.

No one had ever attempted to spring a surprise party on me before. (My immediate family had warned Susan that I get so unnerved when thrown into social situations that this would almost certainly precipitate the end of our relationship.) I found myself genuinely touched that my friends cared enough to bother with a celebration. Having bored them with endless tales of the class' brutal demands and how ugly my various bruises were from one week to the next, I simply couldn't imagine that they had retained enough interest in the topic to care. Even if the party was, from their perspective, marking an end of my whining, it was an utterly unexpected treat for me. I felt like Sally Field on Oscar Night, and was about as expressive.

Late that night on two separate occasions I awoke in a panic, certain that I'd dreamed passing the class and still had yet to go back to the academy for my retest. I fumbled my watch off the bedside table and checked the date. It wasn't a dream. I'd passed.

[From our last burn, before the disposable camera melted.]