He looked right at me, at the abraded fabric on my sleeve where his massive pack had just snagged me, and simply shrugged before speeding away.
That shrug was a declaration.
For weeks, this courier had treated the public Greenbelt Path like his personal velodrome, a silent missile of entitlement on a souped-up e-bike. My friend Carol and I had started calling him the Trail King, the self-appointed sovereign of the S-curve. We were just serfs, expected to dive for the ditch when his highness approached.
His arrogance assumed the world would always yield.
But what this king of the trail didn’t know was that his downfall wouldn’t come from a citation, but from the brutal elegance of tactical urbanism, my deep knowledge of municipal permits, and the quiet, methodical application of pressure-treated lumber.
The Morning Blur: A Jolt of Adrenaline Before Coffee
The trail smelled of damp earth and yesterday’s rain, a scent that always felt like a clean slate. It was 6:15 a.m., and the only light was the pale, watery gray that comes just before dawn. My breath plumed in the air. Beside me, Carol, my neighbor and walking partner for the better part of a decade, was mid-sentence about her son’s baffling inability to load a dishwasher.
“I mean, it’s a machine built for spatial reasoning, Zadie. He’s an engineer. It defies logic,” she said, her sneakers crunching softly on the gravel.
“It’s a performance,” I said. “Weaponized incompetence. Mark used to do the same thing with laundry until he turned an entire load of whites a delicate shade of Pepto-Bismol pink.”
Carol laughed, a sound that was usually the loudest thing on the Greenbelt Path at this hour. But today, it was cut short by a high-pitched electronic whine. It was a sound that didn’t belong here, like a mosquito in a cathedral. The whine grew louder, closer, an insistent, electric hum that scraped at the morning’s peace.
He came out of the gloom, a dark shape moving at an impossible speed. A flash of a sleek black frame, a glowing red taillight, and the silhouette of a rider hunched over handlebars, a massive, boxy backpack fused to his spine. He wasn’t pedaling, just coasting on pure power, a silent missile on a trajectory that intersected directly with us.
“On your left!” The shout was an afterthought, a barked command already past us as he sliced the air where we had been a half-second earlier. The wind of his passage tugged at my jacket.
Carol stumbled to a halt, pressing a hand to her chest. “Good Lord. Where did he come from?”
I watched the red light recede, a furious little star vanishing around the next bend. “From the seventh circle of hell, apparently. The one reserved for people who think public paths are their personal velodrome.” The jolt of adrenaline was sharp and unpleasant, a sour taste at the back of my throat. My morning peace was already gone.
The Doctrine of Assumed Yielding
The second time was two days later. Same time, same pre-dawn light. We’d just passed the little wooden bridge over the creek when the whine started up behind us again. This time, it was accompanied by a shrill, digital *ding-ding!* that sounded less like a friendly warning and more like an alarm signaling a critical system failure.
I instinctively pulled Carol toward the grassy shoulder. The bike shot past, a blur of motion. The rider, a young guy in a helmet and wraparound sunglasses that seemed absurd in the dim light, didn’t even turn his head. He just kept his focus zeroed in on the path ahead, as if we were nothing more than inconveniently placed shrubs.
“He has a bell,” Carol noted, as if this were a point in his favor. “At least he’s trying.”
“That’s not a bell, Carol. That’s an electronic demand for capitulation,” I said, my voice tighter than I intended. “It’s the auditory equivalent of a middle finger. It doesn’t say ‘pardon me.’ It says ‘get out of my way.’”
She sighed, the weary sound of someone who preferred to let the world’s small injustices roll off her back. “Oh, Zadie. He’s just a kid, probably late for his delivery job. They’re all in such a hurry.”
“So are EMTs, and they use sirens, not entitled little pings. There’s a ten-mile-per-hour speed limit on this path. He was doing at least twenty-five.” As a landscape architect, I’d helped design parks like this one. I knew the regulations by heart. These paths were designed for meandering, for co-existence, for the very peace this kid was shattering every morning. He was operating under the Doctrine of Assumed Yielding: the belief that his need for speed superseded everyone else’s right to safety and quiet.
The S-Curve Tango
The real problem was the S-curve. It was a beautiful, necessary bit of design, a gentle switchback that navigated a steep, wooded incline just before the path opened up to the river view. It was also completely blind. You couldn’t see who or what was coming around the bend until you were practically on top of them. For walkers, it was a moment of pleasant anticipation. For a cyclist at speed, it was a game of Russian Roulette.
We were halfway through the second bend when he appeared, a phantom materializing from the mist. He was leaning into the turn like a professional racer, his tires hissing on the damp asphalt. There was no whine, no bell, no warning at all. He hadn’t had time.
Carol gasped and jumped backward, her foot slipping off the edge of the path into the muddy verge. I sidestepped hard, my hip bumping into the rough bark of an old oak. He didn’t swerve. He didn’t slow. He threaded the needle between us with inches to spare, his body a rigid line of focus.
For a split second, our eyes met. I saw a flicker of something—annoyance? Impatience? It definitely wasn’t apology. Then he was gone, the electric hum of his motor swelling as he accelerated down the straightaway.
I helped Carol back onto the path, her face pale. “Okay,” she said, her voice shaky. “That was too close. That was not okay.”
“No,” I agreed, staring at the empty path where he’d been. My heart was hammering against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat of fear and fury. “It’s not.” I could feel a hard, cold knot of resolve forming in my gut. This wasn’t just an annoyance anymore. This was a hazard.
A Name for the Menace
That evening, I was still stewing. I was sketching out a planting plan for a new corporate campus, but my pencil strokes were angry and jagged. Mark, my husband, came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders.
“Rough day?” he asked, kissing the top of my head.
“Rough morning,” I corrected. “We’ve got a menace on the trail. Some courier on a souped-up e-bike who thinks he’s in the Tour de France.” I told him about the S-curve, about Carol almost falling, about the look on the kid’s face.
“Just step aside earlier,” Mark offered, his voice full of the infuriatingly simple logic of someone who wasn’t there. “You hear him coming, you just move to the side.”
“That’s what we do! But he’s silent and he’s moving at the speed of sound. And besides, that’s not the point, Mark. Why should we have to cower in the weeds every morning because one person decides the rules don’t apply to him? He’s the one on a two-thousand-dollar motorized vehicle. We’re the ones with feet.”
Mark held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. I get it. He’s a jerk.”
He was more than a jerk. He was a symbol of a certain kind of modern entitlement—the frictionless, on-demand, get-out-of-my-way ethos that saw public space not as a shared resource, but as a personal conveyance system. Carol and I had started calling him the Trail King, a title delivered with maximum sarcasm. He had, in his own mind, claimed dominion over the Greenbelt Path. He was the sovereign, and we were just the serfs, expected to dive for the ditch when his royal highness approached. But a king can be dethroned.
Escalations and Entitlement: The Whisper of Spandex
The next Monday, the air was thick with the threat of rain. The path was slick, and a carpet of wet leaves made the S-curve even more treacherous. We were taking it slow, our conversation muted, our ears tuned for the tell-tale whine. We heard nothing. For a moment, I allowed myself a flicker of hope. Maybe he’d gotten a flat tire. Maybe his battery died. Maybe he’d been eaten by a grue.
Then he was there. No sound, just a whisper of spandex and the hiss of wet tires. He must have been coasting, saving his battery, which made him even more of a silent predator. He came around the final bend of the S-curve just as we were exiting it.
This time, he misjudged. Or maybe he just didn’t care. His handlebar, cold and hard, clipped Carol’s arm. It wasn’t a hard hit, but it was enough to spin her around. She cried out, a sharp yelp of surprise and pain.
He wobbled for a second, corrected, and then, without so much as a glance back, he engaged the motor. The whine kicked in and he rocketed away, leaving us in a wake of stunned silence.
I rushed to Carol. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”
She was rubbing her arm, her face a mixture of shock and anger. “I’m fine. It just… startled me. The nerve! He actually hit me and didn’t even stop.”
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