When Is a Man Read Online Free

to summarize than properly explain—was about getting from Point A to Point B as quickly and efficiently as possible, regardless of what stood in the way, using only the body to conquer each barrier. Any man-made object counted as an obstacle. Parkour was both a celebration of architecture, of materials and texture, and a benign war against urban confinement. Walls, stairwells, and turnstiles were meant to corral the body into uniform, pedestrian channels, but parkour changed this by expanding the possibilities. A thin, decorative ledge could become a ladder, a means of travel. A wall of coarse brick or inlaid stone with protruding edges was easier to surmount than vinyl panelling or a stainless steel veneer.
    The leader, a whip-thin political science student named Nathan Cook, picked out their routes or found structures where they could spend their sessions honing certain techniques—balances and crawls, leaps and landings, tumbles and rolls, vaults and climbs. Nathan practised parkour for the philosophical aspects as much as the athletics. The youngest mostly wanted to emulate what they’d seen in movies. But even then, obsessed as they were by escalators, rooftops, and terraces, the teenaged traceurs and traceuses (there were three women in the group) were as likely to slip into the same esoteric jargon as their older counterparts. They spoke of reclaiming space, of a new interaction with their urban surroundings. Some called it the art of displacement—a bastardized translation, Paul understood, of the French term l’art du déplacement . A park bench, a concrete fountain, a fence: these things stopped being themselves, or only themselves. They also became pathways, blank objects redefined by the body. A psycho-athletic re-envisioning of architectural space.
    Which came across as total pretentious gibberish to most people, of course, but for Paul it was pure gold. How else to convince his department, or any source of grant funding, that he was studying something more than social misfits playing Spider-Man?
    Shadows flicked past his feet, olive green, brief iridescence. “They’re already here,” Tanner shouted. “They’re staging in the pools.” His friend became more animated—crouching low to squint into the riffles and then springing ahead, his feet finding the sure ground among the loose rocks and whirlpools. The bridge and the embankments of the logging road loomed in front of them, but for all of Paul’s flailing, he came no closer to it. The weight and play of the water tugged his feet down into the gravel. Worse was the rubbery constraint of his waders, beneath which his jeans had slid off his hips while the legs rode up, so that all the material gathered in goiter-like lumps around his thighs.
    Paul: swaddled like a gigantic infant. Hauling himself upstream to stagger on the spawning grounds.

3

    Once the sun was down, they returned to the creek, and Paul hung his lantern on a hook screwed into the frame of the measuring station. There was no moon for light, only a glow in the southwest corner of the sky, the bounce of Tanner’s headlamp on the water. The stream muttered and gurgled strangely in the dark. Where the current ran slower beside the beach, they’d installed the two box weirs assembled from pre-fab frames and cedar slats, each uncovered and designed with a single opening that faced either upstream or down. From the second weir, the fence ran the width of the creek, held in place by the rebar stakes they’d laboriously pounded into the creekbed.
    The measuring station was a simple frame of pine poles and two-by-fours, a square of plywood and a tightly fastened tarp for a roof. A wooden folding table took up most of the space, along with a large plastic cooler in one corner. There weren’t many scientific instruments, thankfully nothing complicated or intimidating: a weigh scale, a measuring tape, a waterproof notebook, and plastic