In The Zone

At terminal velocity, the wind can have a troubling effect on the male body.

Consider that a plummeting adult falls at a rate of about 120 mph, a freefall fast enough to ripple your lips back around your ears.

Nude, the whipping winds can actually flip a penis backward, thrusting it between the buttocks where it cowers like a tiny, tortured tail.

Men who have braved a naked skydive, and there are several at Eloy's Skydive Arizona, confirm that jumping in the buff is no walk in the park.

With much grimacing and shaking of the head, one of them tries to explain the discomfort he suffered to his friends.

"There are these metal buckles on the harness that can be quite painful," offers Ash, a bleached-blond Australian, motioning to his groin. His subsequent description of a penis in flight calls to mind a fluttering fleshy windsock caught in the spokes of a bicycle.

But for naked women, Ash quickly adds, the rushing wind can provoke a decidedly different reaction. The men's faces relax as they exchange knowing glances. "Ah, the orgasm myth," says one of Ash's friends with a wide grin.

Some male instructors swear their female students have gotten off sexually, on their very first jumps, and fully clothed. They say that even when these women don't actually announce their climax, it's obvious by the flush that begins in the middle of their cheeks and the way the women moan all the way down to the ground.

Perhaps the instructors are ignoring the possibility that a student's extreme terror might provoke the same reaction.

At first, this whole female orgasm thing sounds like a story wily skydiver dudes might concoct to attract more women to the sport and the drop zone. Typical for skydiving, Eloy's about 80 percent young virile and attractive men. Unlike other extreme sports, women are physically at no disadvantage. Especially, the guys insist, single women.

Suspicions about the motive behind spreading spontaneous orgasm stories are soon erased in the drop zone bar. As the clock nears midnight, the climaxes come up again, this time in the words of a tipsy skydiver named Rebecca who tells a table full of guys it's happened to her.

Several times. Almost every time she does it naked.

All ears prick up.

She doesn't elaborate much, but when Rebecca makes her way out the door a short while later, a curious young skydiver is not far behind.

In an addictive sport devoted to pushing the extremes, it's not surprising that getting naked, whether painful or pleasurable, makes an extensive list of bizarre aerial antics.

Eloy daredevils are full of stories about landing on the backs of moving motorcycles, jumping from one plane in flight to another, leaping from office buildings and radio antennas, throwing themselves out of hot air balloons or into thousand-foot holes in the earth.

"You take a sip of wine and pretty soon you're going to want whiskey," cautions Greg Foster, an instructor who has recently found the need to add jumping off cliffs and bridges to his daily adrenaline fix.

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That there are junkies in Eloy should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the town's nefarious reputation. Once known as the per capita murder capital of America in the late '40s, the town of about 10,000 has become enough of a drug den in recent years to warrant deployment of a special DEA Mobile Enforcement Team.

Located halfway between Phoenix and Tucson, Eloy was at one time a booming agricultural hamlet. But years of cotton farming sucked the ground dry, depleting the water table. In protest, the desiccated earth erupted in giant fissures powerful enough to tear up the interstate.

Eloy's a hellish place outside of the drop zone. Even the town's name is indicative of the wasteland typical of this portion of the Sonoran Desert. "Eloy" is said to be taken from the Spanish pronunciation of a Biblical quotation, "Eli, Eli lama sabachthani?"

In English: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

But make one jump and you'll discover what draws people from all over the world to such an otherwise barren and inhospitable location. There's no better place in the world for skydivers to get high.

Skydive Arizona has the largest fleet of aircraft in the sport and an average of 350 jumpable days of sunshine a year. In 12 years, the drop zone has quietly evolved into a self-contained universe where world champions and drop zone rats jump side by side, then wash down a day's worth of adrenaline with warm mugs of cheap beer as one buzz melts deliciously into another.

Skydiving is about as big a rush as you can achieve without breaking laws or destroying a large amount of brain cells. It's a rapturous experience that many say is better than sex.

A University of Kentucky study, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, confirms that the brains of thrill seekers, such as skydivers, are stimulated in the same manner as those of drug users. This prompted NIDA to launch a television campaign hoping to turn young thrill seekers on to extreme sports like skydiving or bungee jumping instead of cocaine or acid. Perhaps they didn't realize that there is a price for any addiction, and that hooking people on skydiving can have a drastic effect on their futures, and their bank accounts.

Getting really good can cost half a million dollars or more, says Betsy Barnhouse, who has logged more than 2,500 jumps in four years and earned a spot on the U.S. Freestyle Skydiving Team. Barnhouse seems polite enough on the ground, but make no mistake: The girl's got a serious habit. Get her in the air, and the spark in her eyes could ignite a gasoline fire.

On a recent afternoon, Barnhouse struts onto the landing pad and hoists a turkey-size tumbleweed into the air, tossing it back into the desert whence it came. She then tilts her head way back to track one of her students, a middle-aged man named Bryce who descends to nail a perfect landing directly in the center of the large sand pit. His precision has her smiling proudly, as he steps delicately to one side, his orange-and-yellow chute falling to the ground next to him like an obedient puppy.

Moments later, a member of the Russian National Skydiving Team, resplendent in a red-and-black jumpsuit, touches down a few yards to his left. The stone-faced Russian is coming in too fast for grace and hits the ground running hard -- pumping his legs like a cartoon character-- nearly stumbling to compensate for his excessive speed.

Barnhouse erupts in a smirk that belies her competitive spirit. The Russians may be world champions in freefall, but they're not known for their graceful landings, she can't help but explain.

A former Nike employee and synchronized swimmer, Barnhouse takes jumping out of planes very seriously, and it's unlikely she would classify skydiving as an addiction. For her it's a sport worthy of respect. Yet as she speaks, her devotion to the rush is evident.

"I was in my 30s, and there were still things I wanted to do," says Barnhouse, trying to explain how she ended up jumping out of airplanes. "After my first tandem in Miami, I went right back up on the next load. Then I went home and packed up all my stuff." (Novice skydivers jump attached to a tandem instructor.)

Many of the people roaming the drop zone in brightly colored jumpsuits are actually doctors, lawyers and engineers in the real world, people who can afford to support a regular skydiving habit -- which easily costs more than $10,000 annually for the recreational jumper. "This is an expensive sport," Barnhouse explains. "So many of these people had lucrative careers."

As an employee of Skydive Arizona, Barnhouse trains at the drop zone for free. She is also one of the few lucky skydivers who has found a way to make the sport pay for itself. She works as events coordinator for the drop zone, and also coaches students like Bryce.

There are other ways to fund your habit, such as working as a camera flyer (videographer) or a tandem instructor where you get paid to jump.

Winning competitions isn't a way to pay the bills. Skydiving's not a spectator sport. The action happens more than a mile up in the air and is seen only by judges on the ground for the most part. Thus, the big advertising money that has latched onto other sports hasn't found its way to skydiving yet, Barnhouse says.

Barnhouse keeps one blue eye on the landing area as she dutifully goes over terms like relative work, freeflight, freestyle and sky-surfing, each a different style of making your way out of the plane and onto the ground.