By the thirteenth loop, my hands were cement-scuffed and my head was spinning from being at knee height for so long, but the parade of hopping, bear-crawling, push-upping women showed no sign of slowing. I looked around for Shirley, but she’d disappeared into our midst. “The best Parkour coaches are invisible,” Dan told me. “They get you started, then get out of the way.” I spotted her again when three men took a seat on the wall and began sharing a smoke and loud comments on the women’s bodies. Shirley quietly peeled off from the circuit and trotted over to a swingset. She leaped for the crossbar, and in a blur somehow ended up squatting on top. It’s become her signature move, and it’s a showstopper.
Not long ago, she’d teamed up with Felicity “Fizz” Hood and Anne-Therese “Annty” Marais for an extraordinary YouTube clip called “Movement of 3.” In little more than two minutes, the three cat-leap up and over a seven-foot wall, land precision jumps on two-inch guardrails, execute a hand-to-hand traverse along a rooftop railing, and then Annty and Fizz catapult themselves through a swingset while the single mom who couldn’t do a pull-up when she began Parkour squats on the bar above their heads, perfectly balanced while blowing soap bubbles.
This time, Shirley lowers herself from the bar with such slow grace and power that the three mopes on the wall shove their cigarettes in their mouths so their hands are free to applaud.
Moving on! Shirley’s tribe is heading out, so I have to sling my bag on my back in a hurry and sprint to catch up. For the next two hours, North West London is our playground. Shirley leads us to metal benches, where we practice diving into shoulder rolls and popping back up on a dead run. She finds a beaut of a wall where we work on running arm jumps: running straight up the bricks, basically, and grabbing for the top of the wall, and hoisting ourselves up when momentum dies and gravity takes over. Well after dark, we’re all clinging to a railing as we traverse a cement wall in a hanging squat. My feet are slipping and I’m in danger of dropping off when Lizzi Chong tucks in beside me. “Get your knees higher,” she says. “You’re relying on your arms, but this is about legs.”
Step by step, we work our way to the end, then drop to all fours and bear-crawl on hands and feet back to the beginning; press out our fortieth or so push-up of the night; and get ready for another loop. I try to thank Lizzi for the help, but she waves me off. “I needed a hand to hold when I started because I thought it was too dangerous,” she said. “If I break an ankle, that’s my career.” But after her first class, she was hooked. “I could see the dance in it. The flow, the rhythms, the strength and danger. You’re always on the edge of fear, because your body senses it can do more than your mind will let it.”
By the time Shirley cuts us loose for the night, I never want to do Parkour again and can’t wait to come back. I didn’t just run and climb all over North West London; I still had its cement grit deep under my fingernails. This must be what George Psychoundakis meant when he said a true Cretan citizen is a dromeus, a runner, I thought. Someone who can handle any obstacle and circle his hometown like a guardian spirit.
CHAPTER 21
“WE’RE HEADING into ‘Evaders Country,’” Chris called back, leading us off the crags and across some jagged stone flats toward the Samaría Gorge: baddest of the badlands. “It’s where a lot of Allied soldiers hid after they were left behind by the evacuation.”
Samaría is a thunderbolt in stone, a thin gash that splits two rock towers and zigzags eleven miles upward from the beach until it crests on a grassy mountain plateau. It’s a terrific place to hide, because the walls are honeycombed with caverns; tuck inside one and dislodging you could be lethal. No one can get down to you from above, and coming up from below means crossing your kill zone. During the war, the Gorge became a free-for-all zone for Evaders, who could see pursuers coming from miles away and scamper down to the beach whenever they heard rumors of a rescue boat, and the “wind boys”—Cretan desperadoes whose only allegiance was to their own cutthroat gang.
George had his own run-in with the wind boys while he and another guerrilla were crossing the Gorge with a message for the Resistance. George played it cool, bantering with them cautiously from halfway behind a boulder while covering them with the pistol in his pocket, but his partner ran for it. The wind boys caught him with a rifle shot, and in the turmoil George vanished among the rocks and slipped off. Miraculously, George found his partner the next day, passed out miles away from a bullet wound through his arm. George got him to a guerrillas’ den, then pushed on with his mission.
The White brothers and I slept at the base of the Gorge, but not for long. By 3 A.M. we were up and setting off for the trailhead. Climbing the Gorge is daunting on a good day, especially when you tilt your head way back and realize you’ll be walking through those clouds overhead and still be a good way from the top. We took another look at the clouds, glowing in a milky moon. If they opened up, we were in trouble; we’d be pinned in a water chute where going back down would be as risky as pushing on up.
“It had to be terrifying for the Germans,” Pete mused. “Jumping out of a plane over an island full of born-murderers who all hate you. Survive that, and they send you into this place”—he jerked his head toward the rain-forest foliage around the dark trail—“to hunt men who are better at hunting you.”
Lovely. I wasn’t surprised by the scope of Pete’s empathy—his chosen career, after all, is nurturing plants and teaching learning-disabled adults to create with their hands—but it was eerie to suddenly be reminded how horrifying this wilderness used to be. It’s hard not to feel tiny and trapped at the bottom of a canyon, especially when you begin to sense all the invisible eyes once hidden by its caves and gnarled trees. The Gorge still has that feeling of menace and evil opportunity, at least until the sun comes up. By midmorning we were bumping into a few downhill hikers, and then a merry stream. Samaría has become a popular tourist route, but only in one direction: groups are dropped off at the top by bus, then picked up at the bottom by ferry and hauled back to their beach hotels.
Heading up, we were alone. We crested the trail by early afternoon, climbing out of the woods into a freezing mountain wind and a light patter of rain. We took a breather before pushing on to Lakki, a village somewhere on the far side of the grassy Omalos Plateau. As we tore into sardines and chunks of bread from our packs, we watched a man snipping something by the side of the road and shoving it into a blue plastic grocery bag. Pete walked over for a closer look, and discovered one of the special weapons of the Cretan Resistance.
“It’s nasturtium,” Pete reported back: an orange weed with tasty leaves and flowers. Like most places, Crete has weeds growing in every stony crack; but unlike most places, Cretans devour them. Weeds of all stripe—dandelion, purslane, chicory, sorrel—are picked and braised and tossed together in a peppery mix called horta. With a citrusy squirt of lemon and a little olive oil for fat and flavor, horta is a nutritional powerhouse of iron, calcium, omega-3 fatty acids, plus an alphabet soup of vitamins. For a man on the run, it was a life saver; superfood fixin’s were nearly everywhere, nearly any time, and always fresh and delicious.