Sanctuary
After the handcuffs & the fingerprints: a rescue, a hot meal, a safe place to regroup.
Part 1: There Was Room at the Inn
Melissa was among the first to hear about the police raid early Friday morning. One of the Nicholas Street truckers who'd stayed overnight in a hotel room recorded some of it, and sent her video. "One of the guys was in his car," she says. "He didn't have shoes or a coat on when they smashed his windows and pulled him out. Some of them didn't have their phones, didn't have their wallets." Their trucks had been towed, "So what were these people supposed to do?"
After they began to be released, the sister of one of the Nicholas Street guys "went and got them and brought them here," Melissa continues. "But the city had blocked off all the downtown exits. So you had to be really strategic about which route you were taking. We mobilized, I'd say, four or five vehicles to go out and just look for people."
The police violence was a shock. "We were live streaming it," on the large screens at the front of the church, she says. "I'm watching the police with the batons and the tear gas. There's tears streaming down my face. I'm going, 'No, they're not gonna do this. No, they can't do this to their own people.' Crying out to God, 'Make them turn, turn their hearts.' I was just frozen in place, watching this happen on the screen."
Some of the protesters arriving at the church, she says, were
absolutely traumatized by what they'd just endured, what they'd witnessed. I went from seat to seat to seat, holding some grown men in my arms while they bawled their eyes out. I was like a pinball - getting Kleenex, soothing hearts, praying with people. And then the next group would come in.
We had hundreds of people in here. We were a holding tank for the bruised and the broken. There were guys just resting on the chairs. One guy here went and bought a bunch of phone chargers. Different kinds, for Android and iPhone, and just had them all over the church, in every plug.
Melissa remembers sitting with Bern - the Mennonite trucker from northern BC. Let us now switch back to his perspective, to his account of what occurred that morning. He was in the bunk of his truck, he says, with the doors locked. A friend had called to warn him police were approaching in massive numbers - perhaps fifteen cops for every trucker.
He tried to respond when the friend asked for his wife’s phone number, while simultaneously texting the other truckers in their group. “At that point I could tell I was really nervous,” he recalls. “My fingers weren’t as steady as they normally are.” And then the banging started. So forcefully that, later, he was surprised there were no dents. The police were shouting, “Get outta your truck, now!”
Bern poked his head outside his bunk curtain, “there’s cops all around my truck.” He tried to activate a camera, but it malfunctioned. “I held my pants out the window. ‘I need to put my clothes on first.’” After he stepped outside, he learned that the occupants of the trucks behind him had already been arrested. “So I saw my brothers being walked down the sidewalk, in handcuffs. It was really, really cold and windy and snowy that morning. They just kind of rounded us up.”
He felt a strange calmness. “And a lot of the other fellas said the same thing. Once it was happening, there was just this weird peace about it.”
He spent a couple of hours with his arms handcuffed behind his back, which was hard on the shoulders. By the time he was loaded into the paddy wagon, “I was so cold, I was just happy to have a heater.” Really, he says, “the only thing I was thinking of that morning was my son’s birthday."
For law-abiding citizens, getting arrested is a jarring event. At a minimum, people were shaken and disoriented. There in the church, Melissa sat beside Bern while he called his 15-year-old. “He said, 'I got arrested today.' And his son said—" She pauses, dabbing the corner of her eye. "'That was the greatest gift you could give me, dad. You’re fighting for my freedom!'
“I feel like my heart just smashed into his," says Melissa. Having shared these moments with Bern, there’s now a deep bond between them.
Melissa also remembers Guy and Mike - who came from Nova Scotia in the vintage Mack and the yellow Freightliner - arriving at the church. After hours in custody, long after their trucks had been impounded. "They were at that table right there," she says. By then, she was calling around,
And I found this woman who was willing to take the two of them in. It was a big networking thing happening here. There was a list, pencil scribbles, names in my phone. We were just trying everything to get them either hotel rooms or into people's homes. 'Can you pay for a hotel room tonight?'
The Freedom Convoy was transformative in many ways, for many people. "I feel like we were a hub here, for God to introduce himself," says Melissa. "This was his rescue plan for people's lives."
More than two years after the trucks left Canada's capital, she says she feels "so patriotic now. I feel like I actually have a stake in this country. I feel like I've done something." Her ringtone, she explains, "is a truck honk. When I hear the sound of truck horns, it makes me so nostalgic. Warm and fuzzy. And I do understand it was annoying for the people that lived there. I'm not denying that. But to me, it represents the cry of freedom."
This was, she says, "one of the greatest moments in Canadian history."
final installment: A Miraculous Time
<<looks up how to change ringtone to a honk>>