Awful climbs on crumbling footing, I’d begun to see, put Chris in a meditative mood. Several times along this same cliff face I’d been frozen in place, convinced there was no way forward that wouldn’t end in freefall, while far ahead, I could hear Chris’s voice fading around a bend as he motored along obliviously, chatting about his old job working with the homeless in Miami Beach or his recent fascination with clinical research into root causes of good luck. (Visual receptiveness is key, apparently, along with extensive kinship bonds.)
Personally, I was fixated on how George could handle a trail like this with a girl on his back. George couldn’t have weighed more than 130 pounds, but he’d once saved a friend’s daughter by piggybacking her up these mountains with the Turk and his Gestapo band hard on his heels. George had been standing sentry early one morning when he heard a patter of gunshots. The Turk had tortured a Cretan prisoner into leading them to a guerrilla hideout, but made the mistake of shooting at a villager they spotted on the trail, giving George a chance to sprint back and sound the alarm.
“In a moment all our men were gathered along the height, opening fire on a party of Germans and Italians,” George recalled. One guerrilla hollered to George to alert the nearby village. George arrived to find a friend’s wife fleeing with her two little girls, so George and another man hoisted the girls on their backs and ran for it.
They made the woods just in time. “The Germans, having cut off the upper villages, were streaming south from every direction,” George recalled. George headed toward a hamlet he thought would be safe, but veered away when he heard distant screams and the roar of flames. The Germans had already arrived and were burning villagers to death in their own homes. Slipping and dodging, George snaked his little escape party through the dragnet and reached the remote home of one of his aunts. There, the young girl slid down from George’s back to safety.
Purely on a strength and skill level, I didn’t have to guess what that rescue was like; I could feel it. My boots were struggling for grip along the same cliffs—possibly the same trail—and I was carrying a pack roughly the weight of a small girl. I hadn’t stood guard duty the night before or begun my day with a high-speed mountain traverse to save my friends from German stormtroopers, but already my legs were burning, my balance was shaky, and every step, no matter how slow, seemed too quick to be safe. That was the simple genius of the Chris White immersion method: it got to the bottom of the historical questions—the whos and wheres and whens of the traitor Alexiou, the guerrilla chieftain Bandouvas, the frightened young Katsias girls, the villages of Kali Sikia and Nisi—so we could then zero in on the far trickier mystery:
How? How did they actually pull it off?
David Belle had a clue. David grew up in the outskirts of Paris, in a rough neighborhood that was even rougher for half-Vietnamese kids like him. When he got tired of being roughed up by bullies, David decided to do something about it: he teamed up with a band of other mixed-race kids to create what he called a “training method for warriors.” His inspiration was a mysterious stranger, someone David had heard amazing stories about and, a few times, even seen in the flesh: his father, Raymond.
Raymond Belle was born in Vietnam to a French military doctor and a Vietnamese mother. During the First Indochina War, the Belles had to flee for the border. Somehow, Raymond was separated from the family and ended up, at age seven, as a boy soldier in the French colonial army. Training was savage and effective: “It was ‘Walk or Die,’” David Belle would say. “Survival of the fittest.” In the mayhem of a jungle fight against Viet Minh guerrillas, the boys were told, it would be every man for himself. “He started training like a maniac,” David recalled his father saying. “At night, when other kids were asleep, he would get out of bed to go run in the woods, climb on trees, do jumps, push-ups, balance. He would never stop, repeat his moves twenty, thirty, fifty times.”
It worked; Raymond survived the war, and when the French were chased out of Vietnam, he escaped on a refugee boat and made his way to Lyon. There, his jungle-honed natural-movement skills qualified him to become a member of the sapeurs-pompiers—Paris’s elite paramilitary rescue squad. Fearless and nimble, Raymond became the squad’s go-to man whenever a mission looked impossible. Once, he cat-footed far out on a bridge and managed to pull a suicidal woman to safety. What perplexed David wasn’t his father’s heroics but his mechanics. How on earth do you balance with one arm on a spider-web of steel when a woman is trying to hurl both of you into the river?
“When I was young, I was doing parcours,” Raymond explained.
“What is parcours?” David asked.
“Parcours, it’s like in life, you have obstacles and you train to overcome them. You search for the best technique. You keep the best, you repeat it, and then you get better.”
David had to figure out the rest on his own, because his superstar dad was rarely around. David teamed up with other outcast boys, and together they began re-creating Raymond’s survival challenges in the streets around their homes. They called themselves the Yamakasi—a Lingala word from the French Congo meaning “Strong man, strong spirit”—and their homemade training method for warriors would go on to become the open-air, underground fight club known as Parkour.
Somehow, this back-alley art with no rules, no training manual, and—God forbid!—no competitions traveled from the mean streets of France to a drugstore in Pennsylvania farm country. Like the original Yamakasi, the two guys I met in the parking lot were using their own bodies to discover the most animal-efficient way to fly over, around, and under the hard edges of the city landscape the way monkeys tumble through the trees. “I got into it because I was so fat,” Neal Schaeffer told me outside the Rite Aid. He’d begun partying after high school and by age twenty had bloated up from 175 pounds to 240. One afternoon, he was in the park watching some strangers “Kong-vault” picnic tables—they’d charge a table, plant their hands, and shoot both feet through their arms like gorillas and fly off the other side—and Neal was talked into giving it a try. Neal was shocked to discover that, even out of shape, once he got over his fear he could master skills that at first looked impossible.
Well, maybe not master. “You’re on this endless trajectory where you’re always getting better, but it’s never good enough,” Neal explained. “That’s what’s so exciting. As soon as you land one jump, you can’t wait to try it again. You’re always looking for ways to make it cleaner, stronger, flow into your next move.” Neal became a member of a local Parkour tribe that likes to train after midnight, when the city is all theirs. Whenever a police car prowls by, they drop to the ground and bang out push-ups. “No matter what time it is, no one bothers you when you’re exercising.” Within a year, Neal was so fit and trim he was able to scramble to the roof of a three-story building and hang off the flagpole like Spider-Man. “You’re back,” he told himself.
But if I really wanted to learn, Neal pointed out, I was in the wrong parking lot. I took his advice and found myself a few weeks later struggling to the top of a twenty-foot retaining wall in a London housing project while a woman half my size and twice my strength stretched out a hand to help me over the top. Ordinarily the climb wouldn’t have been that tough, but after two hours of Shirley Darlington’s wild urban obstacle course, my legs and arms were jelly. Every Thursday, Shirley blasts an e-mail to the hundred or so members of her all-female crew, revealing the secret location for that night’s challenge. She keeps the venue a surprise so her crew never knows what to expect, and she keeps guys away because the biggest threat to Parkour—as even the Yamakasi would agree—is testosterone.