I'm at the Front of the Line Here
'That truck isn't moving.'
Stephanie Pituley and daughter Kyra arrived in Ottawa on the afternoon of Saturday, January 29th. Stephanie says police directed them to the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway “behind the Parliament Buildings, by the river.” After sitting there for a few hours, she got on the radio with the occupants of another truck.
“I said ‘I didn’t come to Ottawa to stare at the river. I’m going downtown. Are you guys following me, or not?’” She says she placed an electronic pin on her mobile phone’s map app and handed the device to Kyra:
I said ‘Get me there.’ So [the other truck] followed us through downtown Ottawa. We did a bunch of zigzags. It’s a lot of one-way streets and you’ve gotta remember…I don’t know the city at all. So I did a U-turn in downtown Ottawa, and we were one of the first trucks [to park] in the downtown.
That’s as far as you could pull up, right, because in front of us were [police] barricades.
Having secured themselves a spot on Metcalfe Street, with a fantastic view of Parliament Hill three blocks away, they would participate in many cordial conversations with the officers on duty at those barricades. Stephanie recalls an early one:
I remember the one officer we spoke with. I walked up to him - you’ve kind of got to break the ice. Because they don’t know you, they don’t know what to expect.
I was like, ‘I’m Stephanie. I’m from Manitoba. My daughter and I are here. Just so you know, I’m at the front of the line here. That truck isn’t moving. It’s not going anywhere. It may be started to keep us warm, but I won’t be moving it.
‘And if we don’t move, nobody else gets through us. So I just want you to know that no one’s going to be ramming your [squad] car, that’s not what we’re here for. We all have a family, we all want to go home.’
And he’s like [laughing] ‘Oh, that makes me feel so much better.’
CORRECTION: The original version of this post mistakenly said they arrived in Ottawa a day earlier, on Friday, January 29th, 2002.
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