Block Captain
Organizing hot meals, chatting with the cops, disguising the port-a-potty.
Part 1: Time to Move On!
One awesome thing about Ottawa, Sheldon says, is that everyone had tossed away their face masks. "Guess what's hidden behind that mask? It's a beautiful smile. And smiles get morale up like you wouldn't believe."
Out there on Nicholas Street, "I just went into dispatcher mode," he remembers. "These drivers were just looking for a dispatcher, so they kind of nominated me to be the leader of the group," the block captain.
Each morning, he'd check in "to make sure everybody's OK." One of his goals was to ensure "all of our guys get one hot meal a day." When one of their drivers was under the weather, "I made sure he got a hotel room for a while."
At first, he says, "We were using the heated bathrooms on Rideau Canal, because that was right close to where we were, where the skate shops were." But those got shut down, "so one of our guys, he went out and got a port-a-potty, brought it back." It couldn't be placed directly on the street due to permitting issues, "So I said, 'Let's just put it on our trailer.' It was a nice clean one, freshly cleaned. Put it on the trailer and within minutes a police officer showed up" to say the city had banned them.
"I told the police officer we'd take care of it," Sheldon remembers. "The day before, some construction guys" had joined their block of protesters, "They said, 'Well, if it can't be in plain sight, let's just build a frame around it.'" After a quick trip to a lumber yard, "they built three walls around the port-a-potty and then we put a semi truck tarp over it." It now looked like a random piece of freight on the trailer, and the police said nothing more.
Their vehicles were parked in the two left lanes of a long city block. To their right, traffic continued to flow past them. "There's police officers in front of us, and police officers behind," Sheldon told the podcaster. "The intersection behind us is very, very busy. The one in front of us is a little bit of a quiet intersection. So I'll often go over there and talk to the officers." When it's someone new, "I just tell him who I am, what my name is. Here's my phone number. You don't have to worry about us. We've all got families at home, we just want to go home. We're gonna take it easy here and wait for this whole thing to resolve."
The cops, he says, often assured him "We're not worried about you guys." Having witnessed many protests over the years, officers apparently found it easy to distinguish between these honest, hard-working, law-abiding citizens and violent hooligans with darker motives. "Sometimes, when the police would see us coming around with Jerry cans," Sheldon adds, "they'd just kind of turn around and look in the other direction until we all walked by."
While the core Nicholas Street crew were primarily "hardworking farm boys" from the prairies, their block occasionally swelled to as many as twenty protesters. Some arrived for a celebratory weekend and then departed. Their presence was welcome, says Sheldon, who tried to make sure these short term protesters felt included while not losing sight of the fact that the main participants had a serious job to do.
Someone else from Manitoba had turned up "in a full-sized RV camper," he remembers,
There was another guy who was sleeping in a construction trailer, just a little one. There was a young guy who showed up with a farm tractor and a hay rack trailer, who lived twenty, thirty miles away. He was there the whole time. There was a guy from Newfoundland that came across from the rock in a pickup truck and an old camper he'd bought along the way.
Two guys showed up in a dump truck, with a tarp over the box. They were sleeping in the box of a dump truck. You know how cold it was, it was like minus-25 or minus-30, plus the windchill. It was brutal. They had a heater in there, and were sleeping in there. Just amazing guys to deal with and chat with.
One of the dump truck occupants had spent years in the Canadian military. "I love his perspective," Sheldon says, while admitting he'd initially misjudged the duo:
These guys are from Timmins, Ontario. And they're telling us about the drug issues in that community, how horrible an area it was to live in, if you weren't careful. When they showed up I thought I was going to be, you know, this good old Christian guy teaching them things, kind of being a blessing to them, encouraging them in a better lifestyle.
Well, I learned way more from them than they learned from me. Like how the military works. They were just explaining the steps, and they would have their radios on, would hear all the military chatter, the police chatter. I was like, holy crap. It just blew me away, their willingness to help out.
Another guy, he says, "showed up with his mom, and right away I gave this lady a big hug" when they first appeared in the heated trailer. He'd never been a hugger, Sheldon told the podcaster. But there, in Ottawa, he was "constantly giving hugs." The pair "came out from northern British Columbia," he explains,
His goal was to give fuel to people. He had a big slip tank on the back of his pickup. He was a bit of a - how should I say it - reckless cowboy in the way that he was going out and giving fuel to everybody.
He'd just constantly go back to the fuel pumps, fill up his slip tank. And then his mission was to go out there and just give fuel to people left, right and center. There was this little army of guys walking around with Jerry cans and just fueling people up.
next installment: Supporting Our Truckers