Are You Going? OK, I'm Going
Folks started calling, thanking Travis for standing up.
At one of the anti-lockdown rallies he attended in his home province of New Brunswick, trucker Travis Macleod spoke with a teenager from Miramichi now confined to a wheelchair. "Jasmine Comeau is young, just graduating" from high school, he says. After she received her second COVID vaccine dose in late 2021, her health declined sharply.
"I met her in Moncton, and she gave me her flag and said, 'Would you please take this to Ottawa.' At that point, I wasn't even going yet. But that kind of tipped the scales. So now I was going. It didn't matter, I was going." The two-by-three-foot Canadian flag bears Jasmine's name in her own handwriting, along with the date of her vaccine injury.
As soon as word got out, Travis says his phone blew up. People started calling, thanking him for standing up. "It was a snowball of effects that happened so drastically fast," he says. "It exploded."
Encountering another trucker on the highway, that chap "was hollering at me on the CB. 'Are you going? OK, I'm going.' So he ended up taking two trucks and following me to Ottawa."
Travis' blue, 386 Peterbilt bobtail joined the Freedom Convoy when the trucks from Nova Scotia arrived in Moncton. A few hours down the road in Fredericton, he says,
It was crazy. The parking lot was full. The overpasses were full. The ramps were full. People were throwing bags of food in my window. Sandwiches, crackers, cheese, you name it. We had to just creep through with the trucks.
That night, when we got to Edmundston, it was the same way. The amount of people was just overwhelming. I really don't know what the temperature was the day we left, but it was bitter cold. They were out there in snowmobile suits.
All along their route fellow Canadians would say to him, "I can't go. Please, let me help." Travis smiles fondly,
I had a group in Fredericton. From Saint John. And they'd pooled a bit of gas money together. They got this money together, and they wanted to help. And I didn't wanna take anybody's money. I said, 'No, I'm not doing this for money. That's not why I'm here.'
In the end, he accepted their gift. Later, in Ottawa, "every time someone come to my window and slid a five or a ten or a 20-dollar-bill in the window I'd get out and take it to a homeless person," he says. "Every day, all day long. I wasn't there for money, I didn't want no money."
next installment: Abundance of Accolades Part 1: What Were People Thinking?