Everything I had done in fire fighting class led up to Saturday, the mid-term. The test lasted all day, and consisted of a written exam and a set of practical stations. The trainee must pass both the written exam and practicals or be dropped from the class.

We spent the preceding Saturday drilling on the skills required to pass the practicals. All the stations are both timed and graded, and exceeding the time limit is an automatic failure (a student is allowed to retest in up to 30% of the stations, but s/he must pass on the second attempt). Some of the skills involved are second nature by now -- I can don my gear and SCBA in less than the required time on virtually every attempt. Others have demanded extensive practice, like ropes and knots: knowledge that I failed to acquire in my brief moment of being a boy scout. I spent considerable downtime wandering the house with my rope, tying various things together in odd configurations, until my hands began to create the knots as if controlled by ganglion somewhere beneath my conscious mind.

Other practical stations are not so much about skill as they are about force, strength, and endurance. You must climb the aerial ladder to the seventh floor, in full gear and SCBA, in under one minute. You must carry the 60 lb. standpipe pack, again in full gear, up the steps to the seventh floor in under ninety. Advance an attack line up to the second floor and prepare to enter a fire on SCBA. Hydrant layout. The process of learning and and practicing these skills left me feeling beaten-up and exhausted week after week, and preparing for the next week's class became a daily regimen of near-masochistic exercise.

In the weeks leading up to the mid-term, I tried to get myself into a state of such super-preparedness that I could be in no danger of failure. In particular, I was worried about layout and the standpipe pack, neither of which I had completed in the required time on my last practice session. There was little I could do about layout -- there would be no opportunity to practice with all the equipment outside of class, so I just ran mental simulations in an effort to sharpen my focus on the tasks involved.

The standpipe is different. The only specialized skills involved are putting your shoulder under the midpoint of a five foot long pack of hose and walking up a lot of steps. It's nothing but strength and endurance, neither of which I appeared to have enough of with one week left until my mid-term. So I packed sixty pounds of weights into a backpack and carried it up and down the creaking stairs in the house, carrying another twenty pounds in my hands. I incorporated longer and more agonizing sprints into my morning runs. (I have observed with great interest the changes in the types of music that I listen to while exercising as a function of the intensity of the activity and the determination required to complete it, but that is another story entirely.)

A couple days before the test, I realized that I could not be certain I would pass. I had a good shot, and clearly I had pushed myself as hard as possible in my preparations, but my confidence was still shakey. I wanted to be suffused with a sense of calm mastery, eyes to the far horizon as I imagine winners must always be, but instead what I was feeling was a gritty determination not to fail. For the first time in many months, I felt this journal as a kind of burden, because if I failed the test I would be obliged to reveal it to the world in screenlit, embarrassing print. There would be no private nursing of hurt.

Susan left Friday for New York to attend a friend's birthday party, leaving me with my last 16 hours for solitary preparations. I went over to visit our friends Barbara and Jim, whose lives were recently transformed by the emergence of a new life form in their household. Barbara and Jim have always shown great interest in my fire fighting, and I felt at pains to explain to them that the next day's test would determine whether or not I would remain in the class.