Supporting Our Truckers
BBQ joint sent Sheldon to Ottawa with mouthwatering fare, then sent more.
Part 1: Time to Move On!
As the Ottawa protest dragged on, maintaining morale was important. Some truckers had to leave, and some began thinking about it. "I keep telling all my guys," Sheldon told a podcaster on Valentine's Day, "You gotta dig deep some days. If you just think about the big picture it's easy to get lost and compromise with yourself. It's not gonna be that bad, I can go home."
He encouraged everyone, he says, to remember their personal motivations, what he termed the "selfish reason" they'd joined the protest. In his case, his daughter would be graduating high school later that year. "I don't want her having to wear a mask at grad. I want her to have a normal graduation this summer, I want her to be able to hang out with her friends."
A young person he knows had already experienced a COVID graduation, he said, and it was dismal. "It was very, very cold - the way the school treated her graduation." A handful of relatives were permitted to step inside a room, "And they just basically gave her a diploma and that was it." Sheldon's son was only a year behind his daughter at school. "I want my kids to be able to celebrate," he said. "That's my selfish why."
During the podcast, Sheldon did a stellar job of explaining what was happening on the ground in the nation's capital:
Some of these streets downtown are full of semi trucks, and then other streets are completely empty, because they've been barricaded off at the ends by police. So you walk one way down one street and it's full of trucks, full of traffic, full of people. And you make a left turn and the street's empty. It's almost like walking through a ghost town.
Normally, he says, "People usually don't scare me." But he admits to some uncertainty at the beginning:
The first time I walked downtown, I was a little bit scared. I wasn't sure what it was going to be like. Was it going to be full of hoodlums? Was there going to be violence? And all I see is moms and dads walking with kids. I see people talking and laughing and joking around with each other.
I'm like, Wow, this is better than any amusement park I've ever been to. This is better than any Canada Day celebration. It's better than lots of family gatherings I go to, because people are fighting at family gatherings.
There's no division here. We're all united. It didn't matter what colour of skin you saw. And sometimes you can see what kind of religion people are because of what style of clothing or dress that they have. It didn't matter. You could talk to anybody.
One evening he encountered a cluster of men "wearing leather jackets, some sort of motorcycle club. Any other time and setting in this world I would probably have never walked up to them." Extending his hand, he told them his name, said he was from Manitoba, and thanked them for being there.
"All five guys just shook my hand and said, 'This is all about freedom, and everybody deserves freedom.'" The men had definite French accents, he remembers. By then plenty of rumours had swirled about "the military coming in" in the middle of the night to arrest the truckers. "The threats were there," he says. "It just felt good to have people from all walks of life, even people I normally wouldn't be on the same page with."
Sheldon told the podcaster about "a Polish gentleman" who, concerned about their safety, had supplied "three dash cameras for our street. One for my truck in the front, one for a truck in the middle, and one for a truck at the back."
There's no question their support was organic, deep, and wide. Sheldon was in the habit of eating lunch once a week at Blue Haze, a small BBQ joint near his home. After vaccine passports had been introduced, owner Jason Dornbush had continued to welcome him regardless. When Sheldon mentioned he'd miss the next few weeks because he was heading to Ottawa with the Freedom Convoy, Jason erupted:
'Are you kidding me?' He just got really excited. 'I'm packing a whole bunch of food for you to take with you.'
Stuff that was pre-cooked. He gave me a whole box full of food. When I was in Ottawa, I started feeding people this pre-cooked BBQ food. After I was out there for about a week, week-and-a-half, a guy I know from church calls me up and says, 'Sheldon, I'm coming out to Ottawa. Do you need anything?'
I said, 'No, man. I'm good, don't worry about it.'
He was, 'No, no. I'm driving out. What do you need?'
I said, 'Well, I'm gonna call Jason and see if you can get me some more food.' So I called up the owner of this BBQ joint, and he put together a big, big cooler full of food. Like six, seven hundred dollars worth of food. And he sent it over there so I could feed people.
next installment: We’re Supposed To Be Able To Choose