Jump street.

I'M scared of heights. That's not quite true. I'm scared of falling.

That's why one afternoon a few weeks ago I was left wondering why I was about to climb into an airplane, ride in it for about 20 minutes, then jump out. It was the product of long-running idle talk with a friend--"We should jump out of an airplane sometime"--now gone horribly wrong, or so it seemed to me at the time. We were at a tiny airfield 50 miles outside Washington where for a few hundred bucks they will do you the favor of letting you fall out of one of their airplanes.

You can do a "tandem," a jump where you are tethered to an expert and don't have to do anything except enjoy the ride down. Or you can do the "accelerated free fall," where you exit the plane with two instructors, but they aren't attached to you and once you pull the rip cord, you are on your own. My friend--made of sterner stuff--insisted that the tandem was insufficiently manly, so we asked for the other, even though just the words "accelerated free fall" gave me the jitters.

As they started our training course, the first thing they said was, "We're all about keeping you alive." It wasn't necessarily reassuring, since I've always preferred activities in which staying alive goes without saying.

There are two types who hang out at these airfields and are the expert jumpers. There are the stoners--like one of my instructors with shoulder-length bleached hair who loved making porn references and sticking his tongue out in lewd gestures (this is the guy who's going to keep me alive?). Then there are the former military guys with short-cropped hair who were parachutists in the service and are straitlaced and serious. I nervously laughed at the jokes of the stoners, and tried whenever possible to gravitate to the former military guys.

We had several hours of instruction. At one point we got deeper and deeper into potential crises in the air. "Well," our instructor replied to one query, "at that point, there's really no right answer." No right answer! It turned out that it didn't pay to be overly analytical. The instruction manual has a little section on emergency scenarios. One is under the heading "physically incapacitated." The advice is simply "pull," as in the rip cord. Uh, wait a minute. I thought I was physically incapacitated! How am I going to pull?

All this is probably why the old line in Airborne School--or so I'm told--is that the first week they separate the men from the boys, the second week they separate the boys from the idiots, and the third week the idiots jump.

When we were finished with the instruction, I told my friend I wanted to go first because I couldn't take the anxiety anymore. But before I could get on, the plane had to fly to another field to refuel, which would take about an hour. My stomach twisted into a new knot every few minutes. It was too warm to be in a cold sweat, so I was just in a warm sweat. My mind raced to try to think of a way to back out. Could I fake injury? "Have I ever mentioned that I have a trick shoulder? It comes from not having played football in high school."

Eventually the plane arrived (a small twin prop), and I climbed in. On the way up, one of the instructors told me that it is standing on the edge of the plane's door that is the hardest part because it's so loud and windy, and once you jump it gets relatively peaceful. It sounded a lot like a line to try to gull you out the door, but it turned out to be true.

It is so profoundly unnatural to stand at the very edge of an open plane door and stick your head out, as you do just prior to jumping. But once you are at the door, I found, anxiety and hesitation are useless. You're going out the door no matter what, and the longer you wait, the further you will get from your target and the more likely you are to end up landing in some farmer's field rather than safely back on the airstrip.

At the door, you go through a little ritual that allows the two instructors who will hang onto you during your free fall to know when you are about to jump. You look at the instructor hanging out the door to your left, then back at the instructor on your right inside the plane, bounce up on the balls of your feet, come back down, and then out the door.

It's really taking one step to your left. There's no need to jump, because even if you are just a little out of the plane, you are ... out of the plane, and gravity takes care of the rest. Initially, your feet are roughly pointing toward the ground. But the air pushes you until your feet and the rest of you are parallel to the ground, headed belly-first to a potentially cataclysmic rendezvous with terra firma.

All I remember from going out is a herky-jerky feeling of disorientation. You don't know what is up, down, or sideways. "It's going to feel weird--there's no way around it," one of the instructors had said. I had a video made of my jump and whenever I look at the exit, my stomach drops. It's such a bizarre sight watching the three of us disappear out the door.

They call being out in the air during free fall being in "the element." And it does seem like something utterly different that should have its own spot on the periodic table. It feels like both water and air, a sensation like swimming underwater and sticking your head out the window of a car on a highway.

You fall at a speed of 120 mph. A beginner jumps at 13,000 feet and then pulls at roughly 6,000 feet. It is right after you pull that you find out whether you have a life-saving parachute over you or not (if not, there is a reserve chute). They tell you to look up and see if "it's there and square" (square means it is fully deployed and in good flying shape). When I saw mine, I let out a hearty, "Thank you, Jesus!" and chortled at my good fate.

The free fall lasts about 45 seconds. But it is a long 45 seconds because you experience each one so intensely. One instructor told me, "Time is changeable, it's only altitude that's immutable." It's true. After you pull, you slow down radically and relative to how fast you were going seem to stand still. You then seem to have forever. You are suspended midair, with nowhere to go and nothing to do. It's only when you get closer to the ground again that time speeds up.

A wise man once said that nothing is quite as exhilarating as being shot at without consequence. On the same principle, the best part of falling out of an airplane is landing, getting up, and walking away. I was exhilarated, but had no intention of ever doing it again.

But the whole experience strangely stuck with me. Life seemed so slow for days afterward. I'd walk down the street and remember the stomach-tingling intensity of the free fall and want to feel the adrenaline and the terror again. When on a plane, I'd look out the window, at that flat landscape from thousands of feet up, and think of jumping. I wanted to do it again.

We went back to the airfield a few weeks later because my friend didn't get to jump the first time--we had run out of daylight. It turned out a pilot had died there a week or so before. He had been working on fixing an airplane and had taken it for a test run, but had never fully gotten off the ground. You could still see the wreckage at the end of the airstrip. "It's sad," an instructor of the stoner variety told us. "When this is your sport, you deal with a lot of death. People are always doing stupid things and dying."

It was a dolorous beginning to our return. My second time was less intense, but I was also more aware of what was happening during the free fall. I had forgotten the violence of it, the sheer pounding rush of air. My instructor signaled with his arm in a sweeping motion, as if to say, "Behold, all this beneath you." And it was truly awesome, how far you could see in all directions, the mountains in the distance and the beautiful patchwork colors of the ground below, but I had a tickle of panic somewhere in the back of my brain: I was out in nothingness, with nothing to hold on to, hurtling toward oblivion.

I can see how people get addicted to it. The skydivers are great American recreational risk-takers like those guys on the Harleys wearing no helmets. They have the same taste for speed, danger, and a hell-bent ethic of individuality. A more timid soul, I will never fully drink of their cup, but I'm glad I at least sipped from it. It's a hell of a trip down.