“Some of the old Turkish bridges are still standing,” Chris told me. “You know about the one that saved George?”
“Sure.” It was one of George’s most nerve-wracking adventures. A traitor had given up George’s name to the Gestapo, so before dawn one morning, they came looking for him. Ordinarily George slept in a cave, never indoors, but he’d wrenched his ankle and decided just that once to rest for the night in his parents’ house. The Gestapo grabbed George before he could get out the door. But because the clan had various George Psychoundakises, everyone in the village was marched to the church, where the informant—muffled in a raincoat, his face covered—was waiting to finger the elusive Cretan runner.
“I was in front,” George would recall, “and I whispered to my parents and brothers and sisters, ‘Fall into line, and the ones at the back, dawdle.’” The line bunched, allowing George to casually move about forty yards ahead. As soon as the path curved, he jumped into a brook and took off, counting on the brush to cover his escape and the water to mask his scent. The other Psychoundakises were interrogated and eventually released while George ran for his life, dodging up and down the mountain on his aching ankle as he tried to find a way through the German cordon. After three days without food or sleep, he nearly walked into a dead end: just as he was about to cross a stone bridge, he heard a search party approaching on the other side. Instead of bolting for cover, George slid under his end of the bridge, then silently waded in the opposite direction as German boots stomped past overhead. On the far side, he scrambled out and escaped into the woods.
“We found it,” Chris said.
They found what—George’s bridge? I felt twin stabs of envy and admiration. George had never specified where the bridge was or what it was called; to him it was just another handy hideout in a pinch. So Pete and Chris plotted the reference points in George’s account, and then trekked village to village, café by café, asking around for anyone who could help them locate landmarks. Gradually, they connected the dots in George’s twisting escape route until they finally found themselves on the bank of a stream, staring at a span of ancient stone. “We had a fantastic celebration,” Chris said. “We jumped in.”
It was a triumph of sleuthing, all the more impressive because neither of them speaks Greek. Pete is head gardener at Furzey Gardens, in the south of England, where learning-disabled adults help care for fairy houses and miniature donkeys and artisanal beehives. He is fifty-four and has the graying good looks of an aging folk singer, which is handy, since he plays as a ukulele strummer and ceilidh guitarist. Between them, the brothers White had mastered nearly every humanist talent except foreign languages, so they’d pretty much pinned their hopes of communication on an introductory letter that Chris drafted and got a Greek buddy in Oxford to translate:
We are historians researching the Resistance, the letter begins. We are hoping to find caves in this area used by freedom fighters….
“Historians”? The truth was, we were totally amateurish, one hundred percent—and to follow in George and Paddy’s footsteps, it couldn’t have been otherwise.
. . .
The next morning, I caught Chris eyeing my feet. He looked worried, and I knew why.
We were at the spot where it all began, the beachhead where Paddy and his fellow agents of mayhem first sloshed ashore. They could smell the island before they saw it, the musky scent of wild thyme carrying far out past the breakers. Paddy hopped out of the raft before it beached, and by the time he hit land he was in trouble. The Sliver’s terrain is among the harshest in Europe, and not just because of the vicious climbs; beneath a dusting of sand and soil lurk strips of razory rock that can shred leather like piranha teeth. Just walking those few yards through the surf tore Paddy’s boots to tatters, so he had to spend his first week on Crete hiding in a cave until sturdier footwear could be found. He wore those out in a few weeks, and continued tearing through boots at a rate of a pair every month.
“Are you okay with those?” Chris asked, his tone making it clear I shouldn’t be.
“There’s this idea—” I began, but decided I’d better shut up. Chris and Pete had rugged mountaineering boots, but mine were super-lights with a thin sole designed for desert sand. Ever since I found out how often Paddy’s boots were destroyed by the rocks, I’d wondered why the Cretans’ held up so much better. Maybe the difference wasn’t the footwear; maybe it was the feet. Instead of depending on leather, the Cretans relied on skill.
Soldiers are trained to march, but George was free to tap into an older form of movement now known as Parkour, or freerunning. Freerunners don’t walk across the landscape; they bounce off it, ricocheting along in a steady, hip-hopping, acrobatic flow, treating planet Earth more like a launchpad than a landing point. Xan Fielding, one of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s comrades on Crete, encountered exactly that kind of antigravity gait as he struggled to keep up with an older, heavyset Cretan who “tripped daintily along from boulder to boulder, his body bouncing with every step like an inflated rubber beach toy.” Beefy old Stavros was so springy he seemed weightless and, Xan felt, a little sadistic. “I go much better uphill,” explained Stavros, who then found another gear as the slope got steeper and went even faster. Xan lasted thirty minutes. “After half an hour of crazy racing, tearing through scrub and stumbling over loose earth,” Xan grumbled, “I insisted on stopping for a cigarette.”
Stavros was using the same technique that a doctor from Boston had observed more than a hundred years earlier when he served as a volunteer during the Greek Revolution. Samuel Gridley Howe was used to watching American troops tromp along in rhythmic formation, but the Greeks were hopping all over the place. “A Greek soldier,” Howe commented, “will march, or rather skip, all day among the rocks, expecting no other food than a biscuit and a few olives, or a raw onion, and at night, lies down content upon the ground with a flat rock for a pillow.”
Wait. Skipping all day on olives and an onion—mathematically, how’s that even possible? The calories going in can’t equal the energy going out. George Psychoundakis would sometimes shuttle between the caves for twelve hours a day on a starvation diet, yet his mind stayed sharp, his muscles strong, and his endurance unshaken. During one escapade, his only meal was hay soup, made by boiling and reboiling scrounged-up animal fodder seven times to remove the toxins. Yet even on that zero-calorie concoction, he shot off the next day to summit a peak that would stagger an adventure racer.
The only explanation, I believed, was freerunning. The Greeks were getting free fuel and extra leg protection by relying on an ancient, elastic gait that looked playful but was deadly effective. I’d gotten my first look at freerunning back home in Pennsylvania, when I was in line at a drugstore and suddenly saw two bodies go sailing past the window. These guys had to be six feet in the air, flying by one after the other like they’d been slung out of a catapult. Moments later they reappeared outside the glass doors, this time swinging through the railings of the handicapped ramp. By the time I got to the cash register, I’d watched them hurdle, vault, tightrope-walk, and otherwise wring a crazy amount of movement out of those green bars. I hurried outside to catch them, but they weren’t leaving anytime soon.
“You start practicing Parkour,” one of them told me, “and whole nights disappear.”
That I could believe. From what I’d seen through the window, free-running was anything but free; it looked like a ton of fun, but way too showy. All those jumps and vaults seemed too complicated to allow any kind of flow, like skateboarders who kick-flip their decks over and over and never get the thing to land on its wheels. But that’s because I was making a rookie mistake, my new drugstore buddies explained. You can’t judge Parkour with your eyes; you have to judge it with your body. Once you learn Parkour’s basic moves, the world around you changes. You don’t see things anymore; you see movement. Take that alley across the street, one of them said. What’s in it?