ONE OF the results of man's building of great machines to take him to sacred places at forbidden speeds is that he can not only arrange things so he is taken to great heights above his planet, but he can do it any hour on the hour to Chicago. Once man has been around his wondrous achievements long enough to take them for granted, he passes the experience down to his lesser numbers to let them inculcate it into his culture. Anybody, even the little beggar boy who scrapes up his $40, can go out to a town called Orange, Massachusetts and three hours later jump into the middle of the sky.

Man has always understood that he had a special relationship to the earth: he was attracted to it. It has been only in the last couple of hundred years that we've had some idea that the earth is in some small way attracted to us, though directly in proportion to its far greater importance. It is convenient when considering the throwing of yourself out of an airplane to ignore the equal and opposite force your body exerts on the earth. Especially when there could be an equal or greater number of people jumping out of planes on the other side of the earth. In Vietnam, for instance. (If everyone in the whole world flew over the same corner of the planet all at once and all jumped out at the same time, what would the world do?)

The effect of separating yourself from the earth mechanically and then letting go of the machine that was holding you away is almost exactly like the effect on a small thumbtack of the largest, most powerful magnet you've ever seen, at a fair or anywhere. You come screaming down to the ground at speeds that are constantly increasing themselves until they have you going much faster than you've ever known anything to move. And remember, when you started out, you, unlike the thumbtack, were not even so far away from what's pulling you in that you could see past its edge and around it.

They, the people who train you in the method and dangers of parachute jumping, attempt to make you forget all this.

The instruction is designed to make you think preplanned thoughts while you're falling. You are supposed to think about the muscles in your body, the tension of the pull of your back parachute opening, the positions of your legs used to manipulate your orientation in the air. You are to count, shout, "one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand, six thousand" until your chute opens.

The reason they want your thoughts to be controlled is that if something goes wrong with your main parachute, you have to recognize the difficulty as being something different from the normal (never having seen the normal, however). After you have reached the decision that something is wrong, you must decide on the appropriate course of action and enact it. It--presumably, using your reserve parachute--then takes a little time to take effect.

You are shown a chart during instruction which has the numbers one to four in green numerals down a column. Beside them is a drawing of how the parachute opens during each of these first four seconds. In an imperceptibly more alarming color, purple maybe, are the numbers five and six. Farther down are an enflamed red and yellow twelve and fifteen. Furthest down is a deep magenta seventeen.

JUMPING from the height beginners jump from, 2500 feet, you can free fall for just 17 seconds before you reach the ground. From 2500 feet you can see a couple of hundred miles in all directions. We could see the mountains in three states. We could see the farms, and rivers, and railroad tracks mostly covered with snow which had fallen over the weekend.

When you first jump, your parachute is automatically opened by something clipped onto the airplane called a Static Line Device. The parachute opens and slows you down into the regular descent four seconds later. You count for six seconds. If at the end of that time your parachute hasn't opened, you look over your right shoulder to see what's happened.

These malfunctions are possible: Your parachute might never have left its pack. It might be a "streamer," which means it's out there, but just not filling with air. It might have holes in it. It might have one of its lines looped over the top, cutting the bowl in half, creating two much-less-effective bowls.

It takes, say, two and a half seconds to appraise your situation, decide to use the emergency parachute, and decide which way to put it out (it's a little different for different malfunctions). It takes from a second to a second and a half to reach down against a 125 mile an hour wind to find the ripcord on your stomach and pull it and then punch the bag to make sure the chute is knocked out. It then takes two seconds for the emergency chute to become fully open. At this point you are travelling at the terminal velocity for a falling human, 125 miles an hour; you started with less than half a mile to fall.

Six seconds to count, two and a half to decide, one and a half to act, and two to be acted upon are a total of 12 of your deep magenta 17 seconds.

If, in the course of these events, you are distracted by your circumstances, it could take you longer than 12 seconds.

Therefore you start out, when you are about to take your first jump, with your basic fear of death. Even though in 102,000 jumps at the Orange Parachuting Center they've never had anyone killed, you have to be thinking you're about to die (or at least could die) in order to make sure it won't happen.

The first thing you expect is that the actual jumping away from the airplane will be the most terrifying act. It is not. Before you leave, you are crouched on a step almost entirely outside the fuselage of the plane. This experience gives you the feeling of existing as a flying being. You are faced forward into the wind that you are beginning to develop a true understanding for; you expect then, when you step off, to just mingle with it a little further.