Natural Born Heroes

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.

Unless you had Paddy’s palate, that is. “He hated horta,” says Artemis Cooper—but he had to respect it.

Oddly, I’d discovered a living handbook of the ancient Cretan eating arts in the form of a ballerina prowling Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. When she’s not teaching dance in Manhattan or choreographing new pieces, Leda Meredith likes to walk the park in both winter and summer and stuff her backpack with foraged findings: garlic mustard and pepper grass, lemony sorrel and asparagus-like pokeberry shoots, gummy mallow leaf and tangy lamb’s-quarter and delectable ginkgo—yes, ginkgo, those horrific gooey globules that litter city sidewalks every spring and stink up the bottom of your shoes.

“I have to race Koreans for the ginkgo,” Leda mentioned when we set off into the park one September morning. “If I’m too slow, all I’ll find is the remains where they field-dressed a pile. You take the fruit, squeeze off the yellow squishy part, and save the kernels for roasting. Delicious.” I figured the early autumn cold snap meant we’d come home empty-handed, but within four feet Leda had already spotted prey. “Lamb’s-quarter!” she exulted, easing a leafy clump out of the lawn. She singled out a strand and pointed to the powdery coating on the arrowhead leaves.

“They look dusty, right? That’s your identifier.”

“I’ve seen this all over every lawn I’ve ever mowed,” I said. “It’s edible?”

“It’s like kale and chard,” Leda said. “It sells for seven-fifty a pound in the Park Slope Coop, but guess what? It’s growing in the sidewalk right out front.” Leda squatted and came up with a fistful of another weed I’d seen forever. She pointed out its tiny pink flowers and the dark smudge on a slender droopy leaf which resembles the smudge of an inky thumb. “Lady’s Thumb. It’s a little bitter, but chop it into a salad with some sorrel and it’s wonderful. It’s from the buckwheat family, so it’s packed with nutrients.”

As a girl, Leda learned the art of foraging from her Greek immigrant family in San Francisco. Leda’s mother was a ballerina with a Los Angeles ballet company, so Leda was raised mostly by her grandmother. “Every spring, there came a moment when Yia-Yia Lopi, my great-grandmother, stubbed out her Kool menthol cigarette and declared that it was the right day to gather horta in the park,” Leda explains. “The timing had to be just right: too soon and the leaves would be too small, too late and they’d be too bitter. Yia-Yia was the expert on when to go because she’d grown up picking wild edibles in Greece.” Back in the kitchen, the women steamed the greens and mixed them with olive oil and chopped garlic. “Their eyes would gleam,” Leda notes. “The first wild greens of spring were better to them than chocolate.”

Leda followed her mother into dance, winning a full scholarship to the American Ballet Theatre and later signing with the Manhattan Ballet. But she still kept roaming the parks for feral foods, once shocking prima ballerina Cynthia Gregory by sliding in next to her at a dinner party with her arms covered with raw scratches from reaching between thorny branches. During downtime between dance tours, Leda would spend months harvesting olives with her relatives in Greece or traveling Europe and California as a seasonal fruit picker, happy to be surrounded by fragrant, pluckable, biteable life. She began taking classes in ethnobotany at the New York Botanical Garden and studying with the yup-that’s-her-real-name herbalist Susan Weed. Leda would lead her friends and fellow dancers on all-day hunt-and-picks, then bring the famished hikers back to her apartment and teach them how to cook their haul. As her performance career came to an end, Leda realized she’d been working on her new calling since she was six years old.

“The parks department has a limited weed-control budget, which is great for me,” she says. Leda now leads foraging tours and teaches classes at both the New York and Brooklyn botanical gardens. “People have no idea what’s right here,” she adds. Streams and ponds all over the Northeast are thick with watercress, a leafy green “superfood” that outscores spinach and chard as the most nutritionally dense of all vegetables. Often, however, wild watercress is mistaken as a nuisance weed and either discarded or ignored.

“Like this—” Leda points to a cabbagey mess I’ve grown to hate on sight. As a kid, I scraped my knuckles bloody every summer trying to dig those things out of sidewalk cracks in front of the house. “That’s burdock,” Leda explains. “It grows in cities where nothing else will, and it’s fabulous.” Burdock has a long, thick taproot that’s a bear to unearth, but take it home and slice into a stir-fry and you’ve got a plateful of the Japanese delicacy gobo.

The challenge for beginners is knowing what you’re yanking. Crete alone has more than a hundred varieties of wild edible greens. Many look identical but have different flavors and aromas, not to mention nutritional and medicinal benefits. “Stomach problems, skin disorders, breathing difficulties, even emotional uneasiness—you can treat them all with so-called weeds,” Leda explains. “It’s too bad we’ve developed this mentality that if it’s free and natural, it can’t be good.”

Actually, a closer look shows that this Cretan snack stuffed with wild greens packs more nutritional punch than just about any fruit or vegetable you can buy. When scientists from Austria and Greece performed a chemical analysis of a Cretan fried pie in 2006, they were struck by two things: the sheer variety of the filling and the sky-high levels of vitamins, antioxidants, and essential fatty acids. The bitesize crescents, called kalitsounia, are typically packed with a combination of fennel, wild leeks, sow thistle, hartwort, corn poppy, sorrel, and Queen Anne’s lace, all of it growing wild and calorically dense. “In most cases,” the researchers found, “the wild greens had higher micronutrient content than those cultivated.”

Even more intriguing: greens keep Cretans in harmony with two million years of human history. For most of our ancestral existence, humans maintained a healthy balance between omega-6 fatty acids—which provide a healthy amount of protective inflammation—and omega-3’s, which keep inflammation in check. Overdo it with omega-6 and you become high-risk for heart disease and neurological disorders. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a one-to-one ratio. Today, ours is more like sixteen to one. Since the proliferation of vegetable and soybean oils in processed foods, omega-6 consumption has been through the roof. Instead of a small fire to warm the house, we’ve created an inferno that’s burning it down.

Except on Crete. “By including daily wild greens in their diet, the population of Crete was able to supplement their diet not only with vitamins and antioxidants but also with essential fatty acids in a ratio similar to that kept by the local Minoan population 4,500 years ago,” the researchers found. “The traditional diet of Crete,” they add, “is similar to the ratio kept during human evolution.”

But for beginners, foraging is bewildering. Books aren’t much help: greens all kind of look the same on the page, and they’re usually photographed in blossom, when the pictures are prettiest but the prime plucking period has already passed. Luckily, Leda came up with a genius solution: let hatred be your guide.

“Do you have something around your house you can’t stand?” she asked.

“Nettles,” I immediately replied. “Burn nettles. I can’t get rid of it.”

“Stop trying. You’re lucky. Nettles are free spinach.” Cooking or drying neutralizes the sting, and what you’re left with is a tasty, leafy green that makes a great lasagna, pesto, soup, or pizza topping.

“If you hate it, you’ll recognize it,” Leda explains. “Start with two or three things you see all the time—like dandelions and Lady’s Thumb—and add things you hate, like nettles, and that’s plenty to keep you busy as you expand your visual vocabulary.” And like the “Evaders” on Crete, who scrabbled to feed themselves from the harsh stones of the Samaría Gorge, it won’t be long before you realize that everything you need to survive—and thrive—is right at your feet.

From the top of the Samaría Gorge, Chris White took aim for the hilltop village of Lakki.

By map it was only a few miles off, but that meant nothing on an island where geography is measured by degree of difficulty rather than distance. We found a faint footpath, but when it climbed into the rocky highlands and disappeared, we seized on a free guide service: goats. Goats head back to the fold as it gets dark, and since there was nothing else between us and Lakki, all we had to do was follow the coppery clong of their bells and they’d lead us right to the village.

“Wait wait WAIT!” Chris threw his arms wide to stop us. He was staring down at a long drop a few inches from his feet and remembering a crucial detail we’d forgotten: goats have a much different approach to risk management. Our guides had bounded right over the edge, hopping along a staircase of tiny perches that was impossible to follow without hooves or ropes. We had to back up and bushwhack a new route; which failed; so we reversed course; tried again; failed again….

By the time we got off the cliff, the bells were long gone. We found a dry creek bed and decided to stick with it, clambering over driftwood jams and rock washes until, just before nightfall, we reached the last hill below Lakki. Thank heaven. Fourteen hours of hard trail were coming to an end.

An hour later, Lakki was no closer.

The village was right there. We could see it; we could smell it as the woodsmoke from evening fires drifted down. But. We. Could. Not. Get. There. We’d pushed our way through brambles and climbed rock walls, but every route we tried was a dead end or a semicircle, dropping us right back in the creek bed. The stinking hill was bewitched.

To hell with it. Pete dropped to his belly and began to claw his way straight up, kneeing and pulling himself along like a man escaping quicksand. Chris and I watched, knowing he wouldn’t get far before he hit an unclimbable cliff and gave up. Then we shrugged, dropped to our bellies, and followed. Stupid movement seemed better than no movement at all. Instead of a cliff, Pete came to an ancient stack of lava rock, wedged nicely into the hill like a climbing wall, and on the far side, a muddy pen behind a lonely farm house. We crawled up and sploshed through and came out to find the road.

You pull any stunts out there, I thought as we trudged under the early-evening moon into the tiny village, you better know what you’re doing. We were filthy, exhausted, and shivering. It was hard to fathom sleeping a few hours in a cave and setting off to do it again—or racing up that hill, with a hostile German general in tow, to save our own lives.