Imagine, if you will, the absolute blackest sort of darkness, with no light to show you where you are. Imagine that you are wearing a heavy coat and paints, steel reinforced rubber boots, leather gloves, a hood over your head, a helmet. Add to that a breathing mask, effectively cutting off your peripheral vision, a 30-pound tank on your back supplying you with air, an axe in your hand or perhaps a hose. Keep picturing the utter blackness, the eeriness of it. You're not alone-you have a partner similarly equipped and encumbered and you are responsible for each other, as well as for yourself. Your voices are muffled as you talk, identifying walls, corners, spaces where someone could have crawled to hide from the smoke.

The darkness is so thick you can taste it on your tongue. Your breath echoes in your mind as you inhale from your mask and exhale into the void outside. Your heart is laboring as you crawl along, feeling for doors or bodies, groping under obstacles, not knowing exactly where you are, but following a careful search pattern so you will not become a casualty yourself.

Your partner feels a door with the back of his hand, checking it for heat. Nothing. He opens it carefully. You continue to crawl. Check behind the door for victims. Nothing. How can anywhere be this dark? You listen to your breathing. Inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth, the most efficient way to use your air. Check your gauge, which indicates 14 minutes of air left from 20. So short a time? It seems like forever. Your heart pounds, you feel the touch of claustrophobia at the edges of your mind and you will yourself to breathe deeply, slowly. Panic subsides.

There! A body, alive or not you can't tell. Your partner grasps under the arms, you grab the legs, and you begin tortuously retracing your path to leave this place. It takes only a few minutes, but it can seem like hours before the light of the outside appears and you get outside to safety.

This time it is an exercise, but next time it may not be.

Author (DeLong, Jodi), "In the line of Fire." Saltscapes. Volume 6 No. 2, (2005): page numbers 43-44