You see, my parachute didn't open.

There I was. Falling through the air, high over western Massachusetts.

Last weekend I rented a car and headed to Turners Falls (about 90 miles west of Boston on Route 2), set for what I was sure would be the experience of a lifetime.

I was going skydiving. Static line jumping, mind you, not accelerated free fall or anything fancy like that. In static jumping, the main ripcord is attached to the plane, automatically opening the canopy at the beginning of the fall. (That's how the theory goes, at least.)

So, at 8:30 Saturday morning, four other people and I dutifully began signing away our legal rights and started down the long road to the ultimate natural high.

I looked over my right shoulder again--just to make sure there was nothing there. There was nothing there.

I was falling--spinning now--as my rigid body knifed through the air at crazy angles.

There was Rob and Eric, two juniors at UMass, both lanky individuals jumping for their first time. There was Scott, 22 years old, driving a pickup truck and wearing a vain attempt at a moustache.

There was Mary, a middle-aged volunteer firefighter who kept making bad jokes, made worse by her incomprehensible nasal twang. Her 60 year-old husband kept videotaping us.

There was Kevin, our instructor and mentor, an old 82nd Airborne vet who (as it said on the license he passed around) had made 2054 jumps in the six years he had been a member of the United States Parachuting Association.

I was caught in the greedy grip of gravity, falling at 9.8 meters per second squared. The training took over.

"Look right!" I screamed, not bothering to fight the panic. Both my hands closed over the red release tab attached to my right harness strap and pulled it from the velcro strip.

"Pull!" I screamed, ripping the red release tab down. "Throw it away!" The red release tab and yellow wires disappeared.

"We're going to put you in stress situations," Kevin told us. "Our goal is to prepare you for every contingency that could happen to you up there."

So saying, he hauled out a fully packed parachute pack and started showing us the mechanical intricacies. Every system had a redundancy. There was even an electronic device to trigger the reserve if the jumper was falling too fast too close to the ground. I could experience total main canopy failure, pass out and survive easily.