This summer ESPN and NBC Sports will televise "The X Games" in San Francisco, which is funny because these aren't, strictly speaking, sports events in which athletes compete against one another. Rather these are contests with the air, cold, gravity, where one's opponent is Nature itself. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez is author of Days of Obligation and an essayist for the PBS TV show The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Your dentist is climbing Mt. Everest. The mother of four is mountain-biking through the desert. The boy next door skateboards on asphalt at 60 miles an hour.

Beyond this summer's baseball scores or news of PGA tournaments or tennis matches something is going on in the world that newspapers and television sports casters barely know how to report as "sports." In those parts of the world where technology separates humans from nature, there is a growing hunger to fear nature, to remember what ancient people knew: Nature's power.

In an earlier time, Herman Melville wrote a novel about a whale lurking in the sea. In the century since "Moby Dick" was written, we have learned that whales are vulnerable to human will. So we love whales now. And yet, some part of us wishes we could fear the sea again.

Consider it the dark side of the environmental movement. Suddenly there are best-sellers about winter's wrath. Sebastian Junger writes in "The Perfect Storm" about fishermen off the Nova Scotia coast who encounter waves over 100 feet high. Or there is Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air," about a deadly storm that enveloped climbers near the summit of Mt. Everest.

It takes money to reach the top of Mt. Everest. Today there are accountants and doctors and advertising executives willing to pay. The base camp of Mt. Everest is crowded with Japanese and Germans, as well as Americans. Often these adventurers bring along cell phones and fax machines.

The line separating the adventurer from the athlete has conventionally been financial. Think of the very rich who fly their hot-air balloons across the sky, only to be rescued at taxpayer expense when their adventure deflates.

More importantly, what separates the adventurer from the athlete is an element of risk -- real danger. Athletics can be dangerous -- think of football or boxing or hockey. But the point of such sports is winning or losing, and the game must always be played within rules.

The adventurer, by contrast, plays an opponent more terrible -- call it life or death.

Today there are sports -- kids call them "extreme sports" -- where the point is less winning or losing than risking and sensation. Rock climbing, bungee jumping, sky surfing, street luge. . . The list keeps growing. Gravity, cold, the sky becomes the opponent.

Consider the street luge, riding a skateboard at 40, 50, 60 miles an hour, steering only with the body's weight. Participants speak of the exhilaration of gravity.

In his best book, "Into the Wild," Jon Krakauer tells the story of a teenager from a comfortable Maryland suburb who ventures between hot and cold. For a time he bicycles in the desert. Then this young man ends up in Alaska, where he ends up dead.

Why exactly, we never learn. All we know for certain is that here was a young man from a comfortable American suburb who needed to find himself, or to find God, in the far extremities of hot and cold.

This summer the smart guys with orange hair and blue sports jackets at ESPN and ABC Sports are televising what they call "The X-Games" from San Francisco. An odd idea, since extreme sports have arisen in opposition to regular athletics.

In many extreme sporting events, it's true, there are celebrities, even organized competitions. But while other American kids might want to get into the NBA and make a million bucks, most persons who are addicted to extreme sports belong on a very different page of the morning paper -- not the sports page, maybe the religion page, instead.

I know a kid, an "adrenaline junkie," he calls himself. Every weekend, he comes to the forest all alone. He leaps through the trees, from limb to limb.

How to explain the human need to jump through a tree or to climb a terrible ice mountain? How to explain why the bungee jumper howls with pleasure to feel herself falling, falling?

At a moment of history when human beings govern nature, many need to experience hot and cold, to feel the rush of air, to prove to ourselves -- at the risk of death -- that we are alive.