All that preparation doesn't really prepare you for the feeling of switching on the lights and siren and heading out into afternoon traffic on an emergency call. I'm still looking for the right words to render it.

It's not a power trip, although I thought it might be. Seeing the sea of red brake lights part for me. Suspending the rules.

On Saturday afternoon, after an all-day training in confined space rescue, a friend and I went out driving and catching calls off the radio. I'm still in a probationary period as a driver -- I can drive emergency as long as there's an approved driver in the cab with me. If I get twenty satisfactory reports, I'm cleared to drive emergency on my own.

Traffic was heavy for a Saturday, and I diverted occasionally on to small side streets, spending the time familiarizing myself with the more obtuse neighborhoods in our area. Driving the ambulance (easily the largest vehicle I've ever handled) no longer feels like being at the wheel of a large and cumbersome ship. At some point it became almost normal. But in all my training I'd only switched on lights and siren twice, and that had been at night with few other cars around me.

Rain blew in around 4 PM and we braced for the inevitable slew of car wrecks.

What is the sensation? I'm sitting in traffic on Wisconsin Avenue, chatting with my friend about squad politics, when a single tone comes over the radio. Beeeeeep. "Ambulance 13." Communications is requesting my location. Pick up the microphone and tell them where we are. They come back: "Respond, Injured Person, Beech Drive and Cedar Lane..."

I have a flash of sympathy for the driver in front of me as I turn on the lights and siren; trapped in traffic, he momentarily has nowhere to go and a very large loud flashing ambulance is looming in his rear view mirror. The cars around me nose to the edges of the street and create a path. And I'm off through intersections and away down major thoroughfares.

At first I am looking for the gaps between cars and aiming the ambulance there, weaving through the emerging path between vehicles, but almost immediately I have a realization that I'm not doing it quite right. I'm treating it as a video game and guiding the ambulance through what appears to be the path of least resistance. This is probably how you'd drive a car if you had to get it somewhere very fast. But other drivers aren't expecting me to actively seek a path through them -- they're looking to see where I intend to go so they can get out of my way. I will make a path. I declare which lane I intend to be in and they will do whatever they can to clear it for me. I have to resist the urge to act and just let the other drivers open the way for me. Even driving an ambulance gets down to Zen.

And yet, the sensation isn't one of power. It's more... unworldly. Surreal, in fact. The rules don't apply for a few fast minutes. I can't say I really enjoy it -- navigating this enormous, screaming rig demands too much of me for me to spare an emotion. I focus everything on getting to this call cleanly, safely, with appropriate haste. It's harder than I thought to juggle lights, siren, the radio (and a separate radio that lets me talk directly to my rescue squad), and the buttons that automatically communicate our status to the communications center. I fumble across the panel with one hand and mistakenly push the button indicating I'm "at scene" instead of the one next to it that lets communications know I'm "en route." To them it must look like I just drove at near-light speed to a call that's a mile away.

I just want to know how to do all this flawlessly. Sometimes I like the feeling of stretching to embrace a new skill -- one of the reasons I love the rescue squad so much is that it never ceases to challenge and push me. But right now I just want to be magically transformed into the best emergency driver ever. I want all this twisting anxiety to vanish and confidence to rush in and fill the place where uncertainty knots and curls inside me. Only time and more calls can do that, and so even as it scares me a little I'm impatient for more.