It Looked Like Christmas
People were partying when the truck caught fire.
Sam the mechanic, part of a Nova Scotia group of truckers I interviewed recently, remembers the night Guy’s vintage Mack caught fire. The Rideau and Sussex intersection was hopping, he says.
There were people dancing. The vibe was intense. Guy and Mike were nose to nose and I was standing at Mike's door talking to him. I look over at Guy's truck and see smoke. Oh, he started his truck. I look up at the stacks, no smoke.
I walk over, open the passenger door and all the ground wires in the dash and everything was cherry red. I could see the reflection of everything on the floor. It looked like Christmas.
As Sam grabbed a fire extinguisher,
Somebody jumped up on the driver's side. I was in the passenger door when they hit the fire extinguisher. So I got a face full of fire extinguisher. I wasn't quite right for a week after that. Lost my voice.
Given a rose with a wire stem, Guy had tucked into the dash of his truck, which caused a short. He remembers thinking at the time: “They're gonna think we're burning trucks. There was so much smoke. So they unhooked all the batteries, every wire to the dash.”
He laughs. “Then there was no power to nothing.”
The Mack was later seized by police and impounded for seven days. Sam remained in Ottawa “till the last truck was out of impound. I made sure everybody that went was coming home.”
The day Guy retrieved his truck, Sam says the authorities “dragged it out of the snowbank with the tow truck. I had just got it running and they were kicking us out.”
Guy nods, “They wanted us outta there at six. Mine was frozen up. On those air trucks, you have to back the brakes off to move it. So when I drove out of there, I had one headlight, no brakes, no nothing.”
