I Never Saw the Sun
Three weeks parked between Ottawa skyscrapers was no picnic.
I’ve mentioned Nova Scotia trucker Jeff before. He’s always lived rurally except for brief stints in smaller communities. For him, three weeks in downtown Ottawa with the Freedom Convoy were rough.
“I don’t do well in a city,” he drawls. His Western Star was parked outside Place de Ville, a 22-storey office building at 112 Kent Street, just south of Queen. There’s a parking lot on the other side of that street, but tall structures everywhere else.
“We didn’t see the sunshine,” he says. “There was the odd sunny day, but it refleced off the buildings. We were parked between skyscrapers and we couldn’t actually see it.”
Jeff dug his truck out of a snowbank and drove in from Nova Scotia with his friend, Josh. There was no heat other than the bit that kept the windshield from icing. His feet were so frostbit, he says, “I still don’t feel my toes.”
The bunk in back was built for one person, not two guys. More than a week in, he says:
I got a friend of mine that was coming up to visit to bring me another bunk mattress and some two-by-sixes. So I put a second floor in it and that's where I was sleeping. I had to cut the screen out of my top windows because it was the only way to get the boards and the mattress in.
February 14 was memorable. First, it was Valentine’s Day. Second, the Emergencies Act was invoked that evening. It also started badly for Jeff.
I woke up a few days after we had built that. I had six inches above my face and I was claustrophobic. I'm not normally claustrophobic, but I'd been cooped up. And I bailed out of there. I jumped down and into the driver's seat. Josh never woke up, he had the bottom bunk.
I looked around and it seemed like the buildings had moved a hundred feet closer together. And I made my mind up then: we're going home. I said, ‘I can't do this anymore. I'm done. This is it.’
A short while later Jeff reported he’d received “a hug and a thank you from a stranger” - a young woman who was thanking the truckers for fighting for her two-year-old daughter’s freedom. “Hold the line!” She wrote on his truck door.
When he posted a photo of the two of them on Facebook, he said the encounter had strengthened his resolve. Later, he told me:
I’m a country boy. I’ve trucked all over North America over the years and I cannot sit in one spot. I was in that spot at that point for 16 days, and I have a hard time sitting in one spot for three hours.
If it wasn’t for her, I would’ve left that day. She’s the reason I stayed.
Very good to hear his story!