“I KNOOOOOOOOOOOW!” screeches Amanda Page to her father as he congratulates her on passing the official physical firefighting test for the city of Tacoma. It’s her signature phrase. “I KNOOOOOOWW!” she repeats, smiling. Her eyes are big and wide.

This is the only reaction that Page, normally a talkative person, seems able to articulate. The 22-year-old college student was the only woman out of 2,000 participants to pass the test. Only a handful of those participants were women.

When she passed the physical portion of the test with a minute to spare, Page didn’t bother to change out of her sweaty orange cut-off T-shirt and Hawaiian print bandanna wrapped around her head. She just flipped on her orange men’s Oakley sunglasses, jumped into her Jeep Wrangler, with the top off in October, and turned up the music.

She sang, or rather, yelled, along with a classic Steve Miller Band favorite: “I ain’t superstitious, and I don't get suspicious, but my woman is a friend of mi-ine. And I know that it's true that all the things that I do will come-a-back to me in my sweet ti-ime. So keep a rockin’ me bay-bay, keep a rockin’ me bay-bay, bay-bay, bay-bay, bay-bay. . . . ” Page was in a hurry. She was on her way to tell her father the good news.

The song reminded Page of skiing in Deer Valley, Utah. She goes there with her family every year between Christmas and New Year’s. One year, she left all of her CDs at home and only had the one that was in her CD player, the Steve Miller Band. She has associated the band’s music with skiing ever since. Her CD collection is a mix of all kinds of music: oldies but goodies like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and John Hiatt, along with Jack Johnson and John Mayer. She doesn’t know exactly what she likes about music, but she loves to turn it up loud while she’s driving.

“That’s awesome, May Sue,” Paul Page says to his daughter. Mary Sue is Amanda’s nickname, used to distinguish her from another relative named Amanda. Page had just burst into her father’s real estate office. She had swung open the front door, bounded up the stairs and yelled across the office to tell her father her time on the test: “Six minutes and forty-six seconds.” The time of seven minutes and 30 seconds was passing.

Four weeks previously, Page had flown in from her school, Arkansas Tech University in Russellville, to take the Tacoma Fire Department’s practice test, which included an upper arm-lifting drill that was particularly challenging for Page. She finished in nine minutes and 15 seconds – “not even close,” as she says.

So how did she go from burned-out to buff in just four weeks? Page says she used a heavy plastic storage bin to strengthen her upper arms. A friend who is a personal trainer suggested the tactic. Page filled the bin with books, barbells and even an alarm clock to bring its weight to 40 pounds. She would carry the bin while running up stairs or walking across the campus at Arkansas Tech. “I carried it everywhere with me,” Page says. “People thought I was nuts!”

The hardest part of the practice test, for Page, was carrying a 40-pound fire hose up a flight of stairs. For the official physical test four weeks later, Page carried a 40-pound fan to simulate a fire hose. She was barely breathing hard as she reached the top.

Back in her father’s office, Page sits in a back room talking with her brother Scott, who works in the firm. Her uncle Carl Baker enters from a rear door, grins and yells “Whoa-hoa!” Page jumps out of her seat to wrap him in a big hug. Her slender figure is enveloped in his much larger frame.

Baker, a veteran firefighter, is the captain of a fire station in Puyallup. He has supported Page during her training and testing process. Page says she and her uncle have been close since Baker married her aunt 15 years ago.

Her uncle inspired Page to try to become a firefighter. An athlete and strong competitor, Page earned numerous sports awards in high school, including most valuable player four years in a row on her basketball team. Her main event was the Heptathlon, a series of seven track and field events, in which she ranked third in Washington state her senior year. Amanda was not only a success on the track. She also received high grades and was offered a scholarship to run track at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

After two years at the University of Hawaii, she left the school for the very different terrain of Arkansas. She transferred to Arkansas Tech University where she enrolled in the well respected Fire Science and Disaster Aid undergraduate program. Page hopes that a degree in the field will help her to secure a firefighting position.

The Tacoma Fire Department offers a series of qualifying tests once every five years. Page has already been through three rounds of the testing process. First was a series of practice tests—both written and physical—then was the official written test taken by two different groups of hopefuls, totaling over 4,000. Only 500 of those hopefuls are asked to come back to take the official physical test, and finally, 75 applicants pass all qualifying tests and are invited back for an oral interview. There are currently fewer than 20 open firefighting positions in the department.

However Amanda is still hopeful and optimistic, especially after passing the physical test. The pool of applicants, she says, “went from 2,000 to 700 to 400 and now it’ll be 75.” Women entering the firefighting world are not uncommon, especially in Tacoma. The Women and Firefighting Association, a national organization, estimates there are 121 women firefighters on active duty in the Seattle/Tacoma area, in various positions. At Station 10 in Tacoma, the entire, four-person firefighting staff is female.

Page says that gender is not a factor in her struggle to become a firefighter: “I just don’t want to get anything just because I’m a girl. Then I feel like I didn’t earn it. And if I was in a burning house, I’d want the best of the best coming in to save me.”

Meanwhile, she contemplates the prospect of making the final cut of applicants and going to work at the Tacoma Fire Department. “I’d be pretty sweet!” she says. “I wonder how long you have to work there before you can drive the truck?”