Like a Big Bucket of Flowers (Part 2 of 5)

Given $10k in $100 bills by a member of the public, Ottawa trucker shared the wealth.

Part 1: You Can See Me from the Moon

Photo taken by me, April 2008. Paris, France.

By his second day in the nation’s capital, Csaba Vizi says he’d “already talked with some people. And they calm me down, because I was still full with anger. They said, ‘We have to be peaceful.’ I said, ‘OK, OK. I'm gonna be nice. I'm gonna respect this. I'm gonna be peaceful, just like everybody else.’”

Fellow Canadians “did pretty much everything” for him, he remembers. “I got a lady who was taking my clothes and she washed them. I got people bringing my coffee in the morning. They bring me breakfast, lunch.” The celebrity treatment astonished him. “Some of them, they kiss my hands. Many of them, they ask me, ‘Csaba, can I pray for you and your family?’ I was just an everyday trucker.”

Thousands of individuals thanked him. Some checked in regularly. “People came to my truck every day to ask me how I am. You know, it was something which I cannot describe to you. I never thought people can be like this. We was laughing. We was crying. We was hugging each other.”

He was called a hero, he says, “but the truth is we was sitting in our warm trucks, in those extremely cold temperatures. And these people, they was walking, asking what we need. Bringing us all kind of stuff, their love. So we are not the heroes, man. Those people are.”

A chap saw him on YouTube, promising to remain in Ottawa until the bitter end. “He said to me I made him cry,” Csaba remembers. The next morning, this man reportedly used the last of his own funds to purchase a Jerry can. “He went to a gas station and fill it up with diesel. And he was walking five kilometers to give me that fuel. Can you imagine that?”

On another day, someone else asked if he could hop inside Csaba’s cab. They chatted for a few minutes. Mentioning the same video, this man told Csaba “he was touched right in his heart.” Then he placed $10,000 on the dashboard, in $100 bills. “He told me, ‘I want you to have it. If you decide to help others, it’s totally up to you.’ After he left the truck, I was shocked and, I don’t know, probably scared.” Shortly afterward, Csaba says,

I decide to just leave my truck, go down on the street. I start spreading the money all around. Not to the truckers. I give it to these people who, they drive their car from Alberta. And they volunteered over there to be part of the team who was cleaning the streets. You know, nobody paid them. I said, those people has to have this money. So I give money like it was a big bucket of flowers. I was just handing out flowers, piece by piece. Hundred dollars bills, man. And I feel good.

It's not like I never see $10,000 before, because I had a really good job driving a truck. But the fact that a stranger is coming to you, barely knowing your name. It was shocking for me. That's how the people was over there, man.

While he was distributing this cash, he says he took a break,

I get back in my truck to get warm before I leave again and somebody show up with a twenty dollars bill. And he said, ‘I want you to have it.’  So I accept his twenty and instead I give him $100. And the guy was completely shocked. He said ‘Hey, what the hell are you doing?’

I said, ‘Just a trade. I keep yours, you keep mine.

He said, ‘But why, man? Why?’

I said, ‘Because you are wonderful, that’s why.’

Csaba says he assured thousands of people, in face-to-face encounters, that he intended to hold the line “until the end. I had no idea what the ends means.” After two years of pandemic isolation, some were in desperate need of a sympathetic ear. “They told you their life stories,” he says. “Many people, they have lost a family member - a friend, a wife, a kid, you know. With some of them, we did laugh. It was like an emotional rollercoaster. At the end of every day, my heart was in pieces.”

The folks with sad stories “left their pain behind,” he says. Often, he barely had a minute to absorb what he’d just been told before “somebody else came and start telling their story. And at the end of each day, I talk with my wife. ‘How was my day?’ I said, ‘If I have to cry one more time this day, one hundred percent I'm gonna die.’ But each morning I wake up and I was able to continue.”

Early on, a certain individual would come by his truck late at night, amping up the anxiety. “He’d say, ’Oh my God, oh my God, tonight we gonna be attacked.’ First two days I fall for that, you know. The third night, I realized, No, somebody's playing with our heads.” Csaba believes the intent was to make the truckers too stressed to sleep and too exhausted to continue, so they’d throw in the towel and go home.

“I told the guy, ‘Hey, don't even come to my truck no more. I don't wanna see you here.” That was the last time this person, whom he now believes was a government agent, spoke to him.

During his second week in Ottawa, Csaba thinks someone deliberately put water in his fuel tank, under the guise of donating a Jerry can of diesel. “A couple hours after that my truck was shaking. My engine almost fall out. I was lucky enough to have some stuff with me which neutralized the water.”  Still, it took two days for his Volvo to behave normally again. “I was thinking it was gonna give up on me.”

Then there was the time it was vandalized at 3 am, while he was asleep in the bunk. His was the third truck to be attacked, he says. “They was ripping off flags. I had a nice 2x4 set up in the back of my truck, with a Canadian flag on it. When I woke up, I heard some banging. Because they was kicking the trucks. Two crazy ladies and a guy.”

Jumping out in his bare feet, Csaba intervened as the male attempted to smash the windshield of a nearby pickup truck with the 2x4. “And these people, they call us terrorists?” he says. The windshield remained intact, but Csaba’s feet suffered frostbite. Interviewed two years later, he says he still experiences a burning sensation, “Every time I go to sleep in the night I feel like a thousand needles in my feet.”

Earlier, he’d been assured by Ottawa police that the truckers’ right to protest would be protected. Yet two RCMP officers in a clearly marked RCMP vehicle watched all of the above transpire. The only time one of them got out was when Csaba confronted them. “I was angry, I was loud. I said, ‘What the f**k are you guys doing? Just sitting here, waiting for your shift to be done? You saw what happened?’”

He says the officer replied, “’Go back to your truck, because I don't give a shit.’ That's what he told me. So I knew from that day, they're not here to protect us. Nope.”

next installment: Come Help Csaba