JUST CHUTE ME: Tim Bernard would rather die jumping than live with his feet flat on the earth. 'If I do kill myself, ' he says, 'you know I'll have a big smile on my face.' THE PLANE TRUTH: skydivers take a few moments to contemplate their impending leap into the big blue. BUS BOY: Dirty Andy, a resident of Lebanon's campground-village, stands before his not-so-humble abode. THE GIFT OF LIFE: packing a parachute, says Lisa Roux, is like 'wrapping a Christmas present.' The last drop? There is no way to eliminate the possibility of serious injury or death." So says the grave-faced man in the introductory video at Skydive New England. "There isn’t now, nor will there ever be, a perfect parachute." Not exactly the words you want to hear just before you jump out of a plane for the first time. I’ll be jumping tandem, strapped to a trained instructor, but still. "I don’t want the fat jiggling on my face like that," says my editor and fellow jumper-to-be, Tamara, watching as a woman on the screen hurtles toward the earth. Priorities. In the car heading up to the airstrip, Tamara had been more nervous than I, at one point coming very close to tears. Now, moments before we board the plane, I think I have her beaten. I’m discombobulated, moving around in a kind of trance. Meanwhile, there’s a guy named Mike Myers, a videographer, wagging a camera in my face, asking me things like, "How do you feel?" Petrified, that’s how I feel. But I don’t say so. Instead, I give a limp thumbs up and spend the next 10 minutes trying to put my jumpsuit on without taking off my shoes. "So, ah, what’s it like, you know, the first time?" I ask the guy who’s binding me in an elaborate network of straps and harnesses. "You’re like, ‘Whoah!’" the guy responds. As I walk to the truck that will take me to the plane, this strikes me as a very appropriate word for the occasion. Whoah! You hear a lot from skydivers about how the sport is safer than driving a car, and so on. This argument, however, fails to take into account a significant difference between the two activities. When you skydive, you are deliberately propelling yourself towards catastrophe, with only the timely intervention of a deus ex machina — a colorful piece of cloth — to forestall the unhappy union of you and the ground. You may as well have someone shoot a bullet at your head, only for someone else to hold a frying pan up at the last moment. But what if they don’t get the pan up in time? There’s a fine line between ping and splat. But anyway, here we are, in a small plane, strapped to our instructors, climbing above the clouds. We’re at 8000 feet now, still a fair way from jumping height — 14,000 feet as the crow drops — so there’s still plenty of time to consider the ping-splat thing. "Hey! Chris!" demands the videographer. "Pretty cool, huh?" Huh? Then the door opens. Turns out the sky is very noisy. Also, we are very high. In the fairy-tale skydiving story I’d told myself earlier, we’re barely above the treetops, we can see the little people waving up at us, maybe even hear their Yoo-hoos. But this. I’m looking down at a satellite photo here. We are, after all, nearly three miles up. We’ll be in free fall for almost two miles. Woe. Walking from the seat to the door proves to be a bit awkward. For one thing, I have a guy strapped to my back. For another, I’ve forgotten how to use my legs. But we manage to sort of Frankenstein our way through the plane. Is there any way out of this? Not really. As one of the instructors put it to me earlier, "Up there, ‘No!’ sounds like ‘Go!’ " So it’s time to go — one, two, three ... People say that jumping from a plane for the first time hits you on a visceral level, that every fiber of your being resists the idea of taking that step into oblivion. For me, I think it goes further than this — my resistance is primal. I have two million years of evolution saying to me, "What, are you fucking nuts?" And evolution makes a good point. This is why we don’t fall out of trees anymore. But there’s no turning back. One, two, three ... For the first few seconds, there’s nothing — the mind wants absolutely no part of this. Then you get fragments of thoughts, or impressions that don’t really come together until later. This is violent ... it’s too late ... I can’t breathe ... oh yeah, through the nose ... hppph-hppph ... better? ... not really ... uuuuugggghhhhh ... no control ... uuuuugggghhhhh ... look, the guy with the camera ... thumbs up ... hppph-hppph ... oh God ... no, no ... please ... And then: schooof, the chute opens and your groin absorbs whatever energy is expended by two grown men slowing from 120 miles an hour to near nothing. Damn straps. The straps! I’d like to say I float down that last 6000 feet in awe of my surroundings, feeling a sense of freedom I hadn’t thought possible, which is what most people say they feel. Instead, all I can think is "Straps, straps, straps." I have gear fear, and I have it bad. Poor Mike Carpenter, the owner of Skydive New England and the guy currently strapped to my back. "Look," Mike says, "the White Mountains," and I emit a mechanical "y-e-s v-e-r-y n-i-c-e." All the while, I cling to Mike’s straps, in anticipation of my own giving way. When we hit the ground, I kneel down and I kiss it. I tongue it. I swear I’ll never leave it again. Before long, though, I’m not so much relieved as I am disappointed. Almost everyone who makes it down from their first jump says that this was a life-changing experience, that they cannot wait to do it again. They use words like "awesome" and "amazing" and they high-five everyone in sight. Even Tamara had a better time than I did. But I’m glad I tried it, I really am. I’ve watched the video of my fall, and it does look amazing. Maybe I’ll even try it again some day. Who knows? Maybe next time my face won’t jiggle so much. — CW

There are certain things the mind has difficulty grasping — the nature of God, quantum physics, parachute failure. "At first you don’t believe it," says Chuck Karcher, a veteran skydiver. "You look up and you go, ‘Nah.’" This sense of disbelief, though, quickly resolves into finger-tingling terror, at least until the reserve chute opens, when relief, joy, and maybe even a newfound appreciation for the Almighty prevail. It’s an experience, say those who’ve been through it, that tends to stay with you.

Karcher, 42, has been leaping out of planes since his teens, when he enlisted in the military as a rigger — the person responsible for putting parachutes together — so he knows a thing or two about equipment anxiety. Even now, 10,000 jumps after his first jittery exit from the door of an airplane, he can see why people have reservations about the system of buckles, straps, and underwear-thin material that stands between them and a painful lesson in gravitational pull — the strap-snap or string-snag, followed by the inevitable thud. Those in the skydiving game call it "gear fear."

"People have told you that everything works," says Karcher. "You’ve seen it work a few times, but you don’t really trust it."

As dreadful as the prospect of parachute failure may be, though, the probability of dying from it is minuscule. According to Jim Crouch, a safety director at the US Parachute Association, there were 33 skydiving-related fatalities in the United States last year, out of a total of three million jumps, and none of these was related to equipment failure. "The equipment is incredible now," Crouch says, adding, "We did have an incident of a harness breaking this year, a fatality."

Karcher can still recall, with play-by-play clarity, the first time his own gear fear took on renewed urgency. As he jettisoned — or cut away — his failed parachute, he had a moment to contemplate his predicament. The main chute had been whipped upward, as if yanked by an invisible hand. He, meanwhile, was hurtling in the opposite direction, at 120 miles per hour — the aptly named "terminal velocity" — with only a reserve chute to rely on. "I pulled the back-up," Karcher says, "and I remembered that I’d only paid $50 for it. My only thought was not ‘I hope it opens,’ but ‘I wish I’d paid more than 50 bucks for it.’ There’s a second or two after you pull the handles, before the second chute deploys. There’s nothing left to do now but wait."

A friendly-looking man with sandy hair and a lightning-quick wit, Karcher leans back in a rigging room at Skydive New England, in Lebanon, Maine, and talks of his ordeal with an air of insouciance bordering on glee. After all, as he tells it, Karcher didn’t only survive his brush with catastrophe — he came out of it a better man. "Once you step through that block of fear," he says, "your life changes completely. It opens up a bunch of new doors. It changes your thought process. You learn to process information a bit quicker — what’s important stays, and what’s not gets filtered out pretty quickly. There’s a confidence. You see people come in here with their heads down, and they leave doing back flips."

And then there are the ones who come and never leave. "Some people feed off of this," Karcher says. "There are people here who just eat, live, and breathe free fall."

Skydive New ENGLAND has three locations, or "drop zones": one in Providence, Rhode Island, one at Plum Island, and one up in Lebanon, which is where Karcher, a professional skydiving photographer, does the bulk of his jumping. For nearly 20 years, Lebanon has served as a place for seasoned pros and quivering newbies alike to experience what the zone’s owner, Mike Carpenter, jokingly calls "suicide without the commitment." Each year, more than 18,000 people take the leap here, some tethered to instructors in "tandem" jumps, the more experienced jumpers going solo.

While many of us may consider skydiving something we’d maybe like to try once in a lifetime — if at all — there are people who quickly get hooked, who come back week after week, year after year. Dennis Ducharme, a 52-year-old upholsterer from Dracut, has been a fixture at the Lebanon drop zone since it opened, and he expects to be jumping into his 70s. For Ducharme, skydiving is a form of escape, a way to quite literally leave the world and its troubles behind.

"You put a parachute on your back and jump out of an airplane at 14,000 feet," he says, "and there’s no screaming, no yelling, no biting, no kicking, no scratching, no phone calls, no gun shots, no horns blaring. When you skydive, the only thing you can think about is that. Once you hit the ground, then you can worry about the IRS, and the funeral you’ve got to go to, and the truck is broken, and the kids are sick. Up there, it’s such a peaceful feeling."

But not always. In his 32 years as a skydiver, Ducharme has had to deploy his reserve chute more times than he cares to count. A paunchy, jovial man with a ponytail and a penchant for wearing red, white, and blue outfits, Ducharme laughs heartily when recalling his own near-splat experiences. "You’re making all these promises to God," he says, "in five different languages: ‘I’ll go to church every Sunday for the next 200 years! I’ll never do this again!’ As soon as you’re on the ground, you’re" — he cackles — " ‘Suckaaah!’ "

In many ways, skydiving is a predictable pursuit — the laws of gravity can be bent, but not broken. But it’s not quite as simple as jumping and falling. For Melissa Burns, 31, skydiving is competitive, a discipline. "It’s important for me to learn something every day," she says. "You can never be overeducated in this sport." For Eli Bolotin, 27, it’s a way to defy nature, to "pull off something that you thought was only possible in your dreams." For David Perry, 35, it offers a chance to travel around the world and have somewhere to stay. "I know people from England, Spain, Italy, Florida," he says. "You always get a big hug, a shake of the hand, and a ‘How you doing?’ "

Then there are the adrenaline junkies, those for whom the pursuit is, in a very real way, a kind of drug, with all the brain fizzes and heart shimmies this entails. Tim Bernard, a wild-haired 40-year-old who works at the Lebanon zone as a videographer, is one of the more extreme examples. "I like skiing, snowboarding, water-skiing, snowmobiles, dirt bikes," he says, sitting at a picnic table beside the Lebanon landing strip. "I’m a thrill seeker, without a shadow of a doubt."

Even at a place like Lebanon, where larger-than-life characters are the norm, Bernard stands out. You’ll see him in his flashy red suit, swooping down toward the drop zone, his body swinging parallel to the ground. Whizzing along at speeds of up to 70 miles an hour, his feet will skim the ground, his canopy hissing, and then whump, a weirdly gentle landing. "I ride a razor’s edge," Bernard says. "I come right up against the walls of the don’ts. I’ve had some crashes, but I’m lucky enough to learn from them instead of dying."

But Lebanon is more than just a place to get one’s adrenaline gushing. Unlike the vast majority of drop zones in the United States, which are generally located on public airstrips, Skydive New England in Lebanon is privately owned, with its own airport, its own planes, and its own very peculiar culture. "Each drop zone has a personality," says Chuck Karcher, who has jumped in 22 countries and 47 states. "This one’s unlike any I’ve seen anywhere."

Behind the parking lot at the zone, there’s a wooded area containing a sprawl of caravans, Winnebagos, buses, and tents. And people don’t just stay back here, they live here, full-time — at least until the weather prohibits jumping, when they’ll migrate to warmer climes. It’s actually more of an odd little shantytown than a campground. All around, people have added homey touches — patios strung with lights, paddling pools, a large outdoor fireplace. During the day, the campground is a sleepy spot, silent except for the wind in the trees and the buzzing of the flies. When the sun goes down, though, the place comes alive.

"There’s a tendency at night," says Eli Bolotin, "to — what’s a delicate way to put this — indulge."

Bolotin, a Harvard grad who earns a living running a skydiving-related Web site from a hut at the campground, has lived here for three summers. He has, he says, some interesting neighbors: Dirty Andy, a carpentry whiz who lives in a psychedelic school bus; Papa Smurf, a Trotsky-bearded computer buff who rides around on a small bike; David Perry, a peripatetic Englishman who spices up his parachuting by attaching a propeller to his back (they call him Perry Poppins). "You have nothing but characters here," Bolotin says. "You could just run through the campsite and find a little bit of everything."

Indeed, looking around the Lebanon drop zone, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with what you might call a skydiving type. Unlike other extreme sports, skydiving attracts people of all ages. (Gravity, after all, does most of the work.) There are also dozens of different nationalities represented — Australian, Irish, Indonesian, and Brazilian among them. And, although it can be a rather pricey sport — a complete set of gear costs about $4000 — it tends to attract people of wildly varying economic situations. Not that you’d necessarily be able to tell the difference.

"There’ll be someone in tie-dye and sandals and his name will be Doctor Death," says Karcher. "So you’ll jump with Doctor Death and you won’t know anything about him except he’s a skydiver. Two years later, you’ll find out he’s a neurosurgeon. Or you’ll meet someone else just as crazy who lives under a blue tarp in the woods and eats an ear of corn every night just so he can afford to skydive. It’s the strangest cross section of people you’ll ever meet."

Visit the Lebanon drop zone on a weekend and you’ll see what Karcher means. On a recent Saturday afternoon, there’s a weather-beaten old guy fiddling with a chain saw beside a bronzed, tattooed girl who’s chatting on her cell phone. A white-haired lady talks to a young man with what appears to be industrial equipment sticking through his nose. Nearby, next to a 10-foot carved wooden hand making the peace sign, a guy from the UK choreographs a group of 50 people who are practicing for a group jump. "Legs!" he cries out. "Legs! Legs! Legs!"

In the evenings, the little café here will serve dinner, and these people will sit and eat together. Later, they’ll gather around a large campfire, drinking beers, cracking jokes, swapping war stories, hooking up. Sometimes they’ll roast a pig, or hire bands to come up and play, and the whole thing will turn into a large, noisy wingding. For many of Skydive New England’s devotees, this communal spirit is half the fun. "We’re a big family," says Perry.

In the daytime, Lebanon is all bustle. There’s usually music blaring from a speaker, or the wry woman who works the office will be calling out the names of those about to jump. There are small planes taking off and landing, rickety, hand-painted trucks ferrying jumpers to the runway. People lounge around on the tatty couches strewn around the site, watching the colorful airborne regatta as set after set of skydivers open their chutes, floating gently down at first, and then whipping and whoo-hooing back towards the drop zone.

Nearby, in a large hangar-type building, teams of packers go about their work, folding the canopies just so, picking through the rigging, attaching rubber bands and testing straps, preparing the chutes for the next set of jumpers. "It’s very demanding," says packer Lisa Roux. "I feel as though I have people’s lives in my hands." Even so, there is a lot of banter in the packing room, a lot of flirting. Outside, there are dogs running about, pet ferrets lounging in a cage, children chasing balls. You wouldn’t be at all surprised to see chickens pecking in the dirt. The place has the feel of a commune about it, an odd little countercultural refuge.

As Bolotin puts it, "We’re a gate away from being a cult."

Eli Bolotin came to Skydive New England a few years back to write a story on the drop zone for the Boston Sports Journal. He never left. For Bolotin and others like him, Lebanon represents a kind of modern-day kibbutz, a refuge for people who don’t quite fit in with mainstream society. "There are people who accept everything that’s presented to them, and there are people who don’t," he says. "Whether you question authority, or whether you question reality, at some point you become dissatisfied with what is put on your plate and you start to look for something else. Well, this place is about as something else as you’re likely to find."

Dark-haired, with searching, intelligent eyes looking out from behind wire-rimmed glasses, Bolotin is a remarkably charismatic young man. He is also remarkably bright — often serving as a kind of unofficial philosopher for the zone (his business card says simply "muse"). He is not, though, what you’d call an overachiever, at least not by conventional standards. Indeed, you get the sense that Bolotin had been dreaming of finding a place like Lebanon long before he came here — a dropout in search of a place to drop.

"I knew I didn’t want to be a part of the daily grind, the corporate hustle and bustle," he says, explaining how he "got stuck" in Lebanon. "I’d watched all my classmates go off and come back a year or two later miserable with their current consulting or investment-banking job or whatever job they were told they were supposed to do. Now they were going to law school or medical school because they’d looked around and that’s what all their friends were doing. I wasn’t going to go down that path."

Bolotin’s not the only one who feels this way. "I used to work for the union," says skydiving videographer Tim Bernard, "driving a truck in Boston, earning $60,000 a year. I was so stressed — you come home at night and you’re a royal prick all the friggin’ time. I’m making $15,000, $20,000 a year now, and I’ve never been happier. My stress level is zero. I’ll tell people, ‘You know something? I really hate my job. BUT NOT TODAY!’ "

Then there’s Mike Carpenter, who bought the Lebanon drop zone four years ago and transformed it into a skydiving commune. A boyishly handsome 36-year-old with a hang-10 attitude and a passion for flight, Carpenter really likes his job. "It’s amazing to me that you can jump out of a plane and fall for 60 seconds," he says. "It still blows me away that we can do this. I love the feeling of falling. I could fall all day."

Before he fell for a living, Carpenter was a medical student. And, like many of the die-hards here, he wasn’t particularly happy with his life. "I went to med school for seven years," he says. "I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, and I didn’t like it, so I left to do this. I love it here. It’s like a summer camp. We spend every day together, jumping out of planes by day, telling lies to each other around the bonfire at night. This is a way of life."

But it’s not all fun and games. As laid-back as Carpenter has made Skydive New England, he must still demand a high degree of discipline from his employees — the instructors, the packers, the pilots. They may joke about not quite knowing how those straps are supposed to be fastened, but Carpenter is deadly serious about his zone’s safety record, which he describes as "excellent." There was, however, a fatality last year, an experienced female skydiver who landed hard on concrete and died of her injuries. As with most skydiving deaths, this one came about as a result of jumper error. "She made a bad decision," Carpenter says, adding, "We’ve never lost a student."

On a recent afternoon, two people experience parachute failure — one of them an instructor named Jonei Hernandez, with a novice tandem jumper attached to him. "It’s no big deal," Hernandez says afterwards. "This is what we’re trained to do." For someone who just confronted his mortality, he looks remarkably cheerful. But maybe that’s the point. You get through that block of fear and you come out the other side a happier person.

"People think we’re these crazy guys, on the edge, cheating death," says Bernard. "But that’s not what this is about. Every time we jump we’re celebrating life. To be up there, floating among the clouds. To watch a sunset, looking at your toes 6000 feet above the ground. To do that on a daily basis. Some people pay for therapy, I skydive. How could you not be happy doing this?" When asked if he ever considers leaving Lebanon, Bernard gets a puzzled look on his face, like he can’t understand the question.

That’s what happens to people who come here, says Bolotin. They get sucked in, they get stuck. "There’s the term ‘cutting away,’ " he says, walking along one of the pathways that wind through Lebanon’s campground-village. "It means cutting away from a parachute, but it also means cutting away from real life. There’s that unsettling feeling, alluded to in The Matrix, that nothing is quite right in the world." He pauses to swat at a mosquito on his arm. "Well, shit ain’t all right here, but it’s a little less wrong."

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com