By the time I climb up after him, he’s twenty yards away, scuttling to the top of a giant rock overhanging the sand. “The secret to a good jump,” he says, “is a good second jump. Remember your springs—” And with that, he’s sailing through the air. He lands ten feet below with a deep knee bend, but instead of rolling or dropping to his knees, he bounces right up with a hop and tears off at a sprint. “You never see an animal stick a jump by flopping all over the ground,” he calls up as he loops back around. “Cats are running the second they land. If you do it the same way, you’ll decrease impact and be ready to flow into your next move.”
All that empty air below makes Zuqueto pause. “Caralho! Esse gajo e forte,” Zuqueto mutters. Damn! That guy is strong. Then he surrenders to trust and sails off over the rocks.
For Erwan, finding Itacaré was lucky, but no accident. He’d grown up in Étréchy, an old-worldish city in northern France that’s only twenty-five miles from Paris but still surrounded by tumbling rivers and old-growth forest. Erwan’s father worked in a bank during the week and loved to plunge into the woods on the weekends, taking his son on long, rambling hikes. “He would climb a boulder that was too hard for me,” Erwan recalls. “I’d ask him for help. He’d just shake his head and go like this”—Erwan lets his face go stony and crooks a beckoning finger.
Any soccer coach would have drooled over this tall, fearless, cat-quick kid, but those woodsy weekend boot camps with his silent father squelched any interest Erwan might have had in team sports. Instead he went the solitary route: first martial arts, earning his karate black belt by the time he was eighteen, then Olympic-style weight lifting, then triathlons. Oddly, the better he did, the worse he felt; he worried constantly that he wasn’t training hard enough and became enraged whenever he lost in competition. Erwan was still a teenager, but already his fun was making him miserable.
He needed a way out, and the werewolf of Paris just might have it. For some time, Erwan had been hearing rumors about a mysterious inner-city savage who roamed the rooftops at night and called himself Hors Humain—“Beyond Human.” Erwan asked around and eventually was led to Don Jean Habrey, the Fagin of a secret gang of young men who turned the city into their own wilderness park. Don Jean was pushing forty at the time, but Erwan couldn’t tell by his fight-ready physique and mane of thick black hair held back by a sensei’s headband. Soon Erwan was part of the tribe, learning a kind of urban guerrilla training that Don Jean called Combat Vital.
“It was like a ‘Fight Club’ of natural movement,” Erwan explained. “We would train most of the time at night so as not to be seen, climbing bridges, balancing on the top of scaffoldings, kicking walls to toughen our bare feet, moving on all fours, dropping off bridges into the Seine in the freezing cold of winter.” Combat Vital was equal parts hardcore conditioning and high-wire performance art, both without a net. Don Jean’s gang would hang by their legs from a pedestrian overpass and do upside-down crunches over speeding traffic, and climb to the top of apartment buildings to leap barefoot from roof to roof.
“There is no ‘try’ for this kind of practice,” Erwan says. “If you miss, you die.”
But Don Jean seemed unkillable. Over time, he graduated from secret midnight stunts into full-on spectacles, leaping from a helicopter in nothing but a bathing suit to swim around an iceberg off Greenland and, at age sixty, serenading the Loch Ness Monster with a one-man kettledrum sonata before free-diving into the freezing lake to look for it. For seven years, Erwan roamed Paris and dodged police by night with Don Jean and the Combat Vital crew. He spent his summers working the beaches of Corsica, selling toys and junk jewelry and stick-on tattoos to sunbathing tourists, eventually figuring out a way to become his own middleman; he designed his own plastic refrigerator magnets and found a factory in Shanghai to manufacture them. Soon he was earning enough in royalties to live on the rest of the year.
As Don Jean drifted toward showmanship, his student got serious about scholarship. Erwan’s eyes first opened to Combat Vital’s roots when he was prowling the secondhand-book stalls along the Seine and happened across an old copy of Georges Hébert’s L’Éducation Physique. He’d vaguely heard of it—there was talk among the Combat Vital disciples that Don Jean, and even the Yamakasi creators of Parkour, had gotten some of their ideas from Hébert. Erwan dug in and was electrified.
“Be useful”—genius! It wasn’t just a motto, Erwan realized; it was a law of nature, a first principle that explains how human history formed the human body. Suddenly it made sense: we’re weird-looking for a reason. Strip us naked and humans look more like insects than animals, what with our spindly legs and gangly arms and fat, round heads swiveling on top of peculiarly inflexible spines. We’re slow and weak and can barely climb to save our lives, and we lack all the really good stuff like tails and hooves and fangs. We’d be helpless if we couldn’t do three things: hunt, gather, and share.
Period. That’s it. Those three occupations have been the human career path since the dawn of time, and we’re still at it today. Shakespearean sonnets, Google, the Super Bowl, NASA—strip all human achievement down to basics and they’re essentially the same thing: we look for stuff, we hit it with a rock, we share the goodies and the info with the clan. We’re far from the baddest cats in the jungle, but we don’t have to be; for those three jobs, our bodies are the perfect tool. We can stand tall and pivot, allowing us to throw with deadly accuracy. We’ve got multi-jointed arms and awesome thumbs, ideal for gripping and toting. We’ve got language and literature because our necks are long, our lips are nimble, and our thoracic control is off the charts, all of it combining to allow the power of speech. We’re Mother Nature’s problem child, the species that can’t sit still, because our upright posture and rubbery legs give us fantastic running range. We are what we do, and what we do is move—up mountains, across rivers, through the snakiest rock-face wormholes. We can’t even stay put on our own planet.
Hébert didn’t invent this stuff, Erwan knew. Well before witnessing the Martinique volcano, Hébert had been intrigued by the ocean-going gymnastics of the gabiers, deckhands who wrestled sailcloth and scaled masts and wet rigging in wind and surging seas. Those guys must have been really impressive and great athletes, Erwan thought. Hébert also spent time in French colonies and found his ideal athletes in Montagnard mountain tribesmen in Vietnam and African hunter-gatherers. “Their bodies were splendid, flexible, nimble, skillful, enduring, resistant and yet they had no other tutor in Gymnastics but their lives in Nature,” Hébert observed.
Hébert wasn’t an inventor; he was an observer. That’s what made him so fiery about things like female strength, because he knew the truth was right under the nose of anyone willing to open their eyes and minds. “Young black African woman, where the magnificent development of the torso stands comparison with Venus,” Hébert argued. “What a marvelous ideal for the French mother!” Renoir’s paintings of bathing beauties drove Hébert nuts—why pretend women are nothing more than animated cream puffs? Men and women don’t have the same bodies, but they have the same motor skills. “The natural doctrine applies as much to girls’ education as it does to boys’,” Hébert insisted.