It has only been an hour with a shove in his hand, and the splinters are already making a mocking out of the freshly out of high-school worker. He thought the safety gloves would keep his hand safe from the perils of the job, but even a safety net has its cracks. The boy never learned that growing up, and, up until recently, he never really did tiring manual work. The most Rowan had to deal with were some grueling house chores or lifting moving boxes. His parents were of the idea that it just comes natural for boys, that he’ll develop strength by just being.

-” Ah, but it’s an hour drive to the center. I can’t take him there for practice everyday ”. That was the getaway card his father would always use to exit any type of sports conversations, merely brushing the topic aside. Rowan’s mother would try to nudge the boy into playing with the kids around the neighborhood, which he would have liked, but the closest field or park was five miles away, translated in over an hour on foot. Maybe less with the chained up bicycle. Another topic which, whenever it came up, the boy’s parents would quickly toss it out the car’s window or replace it with something else.

-“ No…too dangerous”, they said in their encore fears.  A few minutes later, though, a reminiscence would also start to bubble underneath; “ Do you remember dear, that people used to know to drive before? Remember when we could go on our bike all around the town without having to look out for any maniac with a license?”

-” Yeah, but I mostly remember giving you lifts on my bike all around this place” the father replied with a slight melancholy in his tone, before aggressively pressing the pedal at the green light.

—–

After a while, though, the monotony of the digging became a routine for the boy. To pass the time, Rowan would get more and more lost in his memories, playing the car rides like an episode on repeat. Rarely, though, he would press next. Something happened in the world, but he was too young to understand it, but somehow so were his parents. His dad would hear whispers at work, paranoid adults who would weep their sorrows during breaks. Soon he would join them among their ranks. At home, he would talk only about the “pending crisis on the loom, boy oh boy”. Then a few months in, the for “for sale” signs would start to grow in front of many houses around the neighborhood. 

The list of friends who could aid him in “growing up”, like his parents seem to think, was dwindling with each new sign. Totems of desertness, as even after they disappeared, no one would move in the sold houses. No new families, annoying old people to tell not to bike in the middle of the road; and no kids to bike with.

At some point during this purge, the grim signer came, at long last, for his home as well. He didn’t know at that age, but his parents fought for quite some time before they had to give up their home. And the fights. They completely lost in front of the world event and, soon afterwards, his father lost his job as well. 

Rowan didn’t know at the time, among many other things, how little money they actually got for the house. A pittance of a sum compared with the total they paid for the mortgage. Still, it helped to cover for a small rent at the outskirts of the city. At the same time his mother became more of an outdoors person, and frequent user of the bus- work- home system, but that still wasn’t enough though. Besides the house, he also learned that they didn’t actually own a lot of their things, and that they were borrowed on someone else’s money. Which they had to pay back, even now. 

That was how Rowan grew up from a boy who couldn’t ride a bike, to a man who couldn’t ride a bike and had to work for it as well. After months of searching, he finally got a job repairing broken roads. He wasn’t great at it..at first, but his newly found tenacity helped him out in the end. After a while, he moved up a ladder, into the cabin of a road compactor. The boy finally built some muscles, become healthier, which his parents barely noticed now. But his future girlfriend did, so he thought that it kind of balanced out in the end.

Rowan thought that things were starting to go the way they were supposed to. He will make it to a position which pays well, marry his girlfriend and move with her back into the house, or at very least, the neighborhood he was forced to leave from.

—–

-” I don’t want to live in the suburbs“, she replied when he casually mentioned his plans. “ Honey, my work is here, my friends are here, I don’t see myself being able to endure the, uh, time it would take to go from there to here by bus or…”

-” There are no buses…well, maybe till the outskirts, possibly. I haven’t checked in a while to be honest”. It never actually occurred that his old world is just that, old at this point. He only thought of the goal, but what else has changed along the way that would make it harder for themselves?

-” Also, Rowan, you are only a highschool graduate and I barely finished my BA degree. Last I checked, getting a loan is much more difficult for us.”

A few tenacity powers here, some fiery discussion there, and lot’s begging somewhere else, Rowan managed to loan himself a modest house into a whole new state, but without his ex-girlfriend by his side. Or anyone else, for that matter. But at the very least, “the mortgage is much more manageable than before”, he half-glassed his thought process. He achieved one of his greatest dreams, sort of, but there remained something else that was bothering him. Which he re-discovered by an accident, followed by him losing his driving license for three months and having to pay the bump of his neighbor’s car. 

Rowan quickly found out that the nearest bus station was a 20 min walk away, and he wasn’t exactly able to ask the next door neighbor for rides from time to time. So after some google searches later, Rowan got his brightest idea yet- riding a bike to work.

—–

A tortuous week later of not making any friends with the local drivers got to him more than he expected. He knew we would have to face adversities and hardships, but no one told him about the constant verbal abuse or the high number of people not respecting traffic rules. He at first tried to see if there was any way to hash it out at the police station, but the bored looking officer just glanced at him under her glasses, smirked and told him to return next week for now.

At wits end, Rowan, on instinct, jumped on his bike and decided to let the breezy air cool him down and maybe even inspire some ideas in his head. But the momentary peace was as described, momentary, as a cranky old man told him to “go back to those Dutch assholes”. Not exactly the muse he expected, but it did help him out.

Back at his computer he decided to find out exactly why his red beard, gray hair and medium height were mistaken for a stereotypical Dutch. “Dutch bikes”, he typed in firstly, only to discover markedly crafted SEO-ed shops. “ Do Dutch people use bicycles?”, he tried a second time, which garnered him more success. The obvious answer he got was that, yes, they do, for quite a while now. From that answer, he got deeper down a rabbit hole of trying to understand the history behind the act, how they achieved it and other facts. 

The research wasn’t the end all be all answer he wanted, but a seed was still planted inside his head, one that would need around two months to finally sprout. Unlike other idea seeds, though, this one wasn’t nourished with creativity or research or any type of positive thinking. It was more special than that, one that used spite and hatred, disgust and tiredness with the current conditions to grow into something special.

-” We just need a dam biking lane in this city”, Rowan thought after another gruesome day of toiling on the car dominated roads. Even if he was just one month away from getting his license back, he still felt the thorns prickling him inside to try to do something about it. “ If there isn’t one, you’ve just got to build it yourself!”

—–

The following day, Rowan took a day off and rushed towards the city council meeting, with hope that he could convince the mayor…or someone of his plan. But, before all of that, there is always a valiant guard that stands in the way. In this case, that guard was a 50-60 year old receptionist called Ana, who had the stereotypical chip on her shoulder, and icy stare at anything you would say to her. Before he could even say a word, the old woman was already handing him a file to him.

-” What..what is this?”, he asked, confused by her brazness.

-” It’s a form for your complaint, or request, or whatever else you want.”

-” That…I just wanted to talk to the mayo…”. The twisted tongue wasn’t how he wanted to make his first impression, and the unblinking stare of the woman didn’t help him get over it any faster. “Deep breaths, just take a breath”, he thought to himself on repeat.

-” Ok…I’m Rowan Mcguire and I want to propose the building of a bike lane, or several, around the town, in the areas where traffic is the most congested. I just want to help give back to the community, in any way shape or form I am able to.”

Amazingly, while she was paying attention to him, none of Ana’s wrinkled face muscles reacted to any of his words. After patiently waiting for him to finish his speech, she replied back.

-” I’m glad for you. Now, if you could take the form and write everything you just said that would move things along a bit faster. Is that alright with you, mister Mcguire?”

Dazed for a few moments, Rowan got the hint and took a seat in the empty waiting hall. His thoughts raced all around his head, he was slowly regaining control over his nerves, but the sweating was still an ongoing issue. He imagined that the ordeal would last a few hours maybe, with him having a nice, friendly talk with someone important, tell them about how he learned about the Dutch ways, maybe even impress them with his civic understanding. The tedium of waiting around for the birocratic song and dance was dreaded by him, but not at this level.

For the first 10 minutes with the file in front of him, Rowan understood the basic things it required of him, like the personal information, contacts, stuff like that. The second page, though, is where the real test began. It was like a time-machine, but a crappy one, that revived all the insecurities and uneasiness he felt while trapped in a bench, with only a pencil and a ticking clock by his side. For one exception, though. This time, he could ask the teacher for the answers.

-” Uhm, ma’m” he meekly said, trying to read her name from a tag or something visible.

-” Miss Rodney. Are you stuck somewhere, young man?”

-” Oh, yes. Here, at this question”, he mentioned, raising the paper as close as possible to her face, and pointing out the issue with his pencil. The woman wasn’t pleased with how close he brought it, and put some distance with a quick wave of her hand. A few moments later, though, she complained about her eyesight and snatched the file without hesitation after she couldn’t see the entire phrase.

The reaction wasn’t uncommon for the older folks, but it still did take Rowan by surprise nonetheless. Her squints did alleviate the situation a bit, making her already emaciated face appear even more skeletic than before. She understood what his problem was, and moved her judgemental gaze towards the man now. 

-” Are you really stuck at this stage? How do you think you would be able to buy some bikes…”

-” Build a bike lane”

-”…If you can’t even properly describe your intentions? Put into paper the words that are stuck in your head.”

She handed him back the file, and while Rowan understood what she meant, just not why- “ Why do I have to write all of this down? Why can’t I just put in a request for a talk?…I’m not exactly the type of guy to write down stuff like that”. Ana’s senses could tell that he probably meant well, but also that he wasn’t prepared to do it all now. 

-” Ok, listen, you don’t have to finish it all today. Just take the form with you back home, and come back tomorrow with it filled out. Ok?”

-” Ooook.”

-” Good. And you should probably take a few more copies…just in case.”

-” Uhm…yeah. Alright.”

—–

After a few months of remaining in a status quo with both the city council and requests to other parties, Rowan began a rotating door ritual. Firstly, by completing a form, editing it and leaving it to Ana twice a week. He would spend his free minutes, hours, in the waiting hall, all expecting a definitive answer. But at least he wasn’t as alone as before.

The first week was the hardest. During each visit, boredom and anxiety would crawl up his leg, up and up, until it reached the gut, paying him in palpitations as rent for using his stomach as a living room.  Ana would glance up from her highly lighted desk up to him, and couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for him. While he spent hours toiling away waiting for a response from someone higher up, she would try to get him to play some games with her. “It helps you pinch those minutes away faster. Then they will turn in a quarter of an hour, then half, maybe one…and so forth”.

Through this method, the man gained another skill he never thought he would learn, how to cheat at backgammon. Or how it feels when someone beats you by cheating, at least. The old woman tried to be coy about it, at first, but after their third, or fourth day of playing, she stopped bothering, as Rowan learned how to counter her by trying her tricks before she could do them. 

Staff from other parts of the building would start to join them from time to time, as even they become acquainted with the man, or as the mayor would name him, “asshole who keeps clogging my desk with useless forms’ ‘. 

—-

-” It’s been 4 months at this point, Rowan, you know that, right?”, asked the old man while trying to read the dice. “ You can’t be that naive anymore, right?”

The man would wait for a bit before answering, as per usual when the topic came up -”Actually I’ve been coming here for the free backgammon lessons, how to cheat at it for dummies. You’re a wonderful teacher, by the way ma’am”. 

-” C’mon, stop fooling around and tell me. Are you not tired by now?”

At that moment he wanted to give her a response, but was seemingly stuck staring at the board to think of one up. Or at least that’s how he wanted to feel, as he knew where the old woman was getting at. That all his endeavors were meaningless, that he spent hours, days of his life on a bunch of papers that were probably thrown out without the intentend receiver even giving a look over them. That all of his effort was wasted.

-” I mean, what else can I do Ana? It was obviously clear that no one cares about my request. But I’ve been in this town for quite a while now, and besides going to work, back at home, and maybe groceries from time to time, there’s nothing else I have done here. And…”

-” And?”

And he remained chained in his silent stupor for more than any of them were comfortable with. Rowan looked back at the woman and asked what she would have done, if she were in his shoes. He didn’t need a complicated answer, just something to latch on, something to make him keep moving. “ Maybe” she started, with a prolonged pause afterwards “Maybe just keep on trying. Maybe you won’t succeed, or maybe you will, next year…All I can give you are maybes. “

He hated that…but he also knew that those were the only things that still prompted his hopes. It wasn’t much, but for now, it was enough for him. “ There are many things that I wanted in this life, Ana, but I never got the chance to enjoy them, or live them. If it’s just one small thing, just one little thing, I think at this point it’s worth it.”

And for a longer time afterwards, the city hall’s building would be visited by a man on a bike, and sounds of rolling dices would echo around its chambers