Three Men and a Van
Protesters took care of each other. These are highly competent people, the ones who keep our world functioning.
Part 1: Frozen Ketchup and Brand New BBQs Part 2: Three Men and a Van Part 3: Frozen Bank Accounts Part 4: Why Aircraft Mechanics Went to Ottawa Part 5: Why Aircraft Mechanics Went to Ottawa (Part 2) Part 6: From Hero to Zero
Aircraft mechanics Rich and Dan lived in a van for three weeks as part of the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. It was tight quarters and, on one occasion, even more so.
Parked directly in front of them was a chap named Peter. In his seventies, he was sleeping in his car, which he’d driven from his small Southwestern Ontario community. In Rich’s words:
He was our official convoy dad. We looked after him. We met his daughter. She obviously had concerns about her dad. She said, ‘Please take care of him, just keep an eye on him. Make sure he’s staying warm, make sure he’s getting enough to eat…’ But we had that covered even before she had asked that.
While I was in Ottawa, I chatted with Peter. He told me with relish that his car had been repaired by two aeronautical engineers. Rich describes these events:
His car started idling really rough and it just quit on him. And so that night, he wasn’t going to sleep in his car so I had offered the van. So there was three of us now crammed in the van the one night.
We got up the next morning and we started looking at his car, trying to figure out what went wrong. Figured he might have got a bad batch of gas. So I went on a mission to try to find a siphon hose to try to get gas out of his tank and put some fresh stuff in. And I could not find a siphon hose. Nobody had one. I couldn’t believe it. All these truckers and mechanics and farmers and nobody had a siphon hose. So I was gone for about an hour and by the time I got back Dan had ripped into the fuel system, got a line off, bled it all out, put it all back together and got him going.
Peter was adamant he wasn’t leaving Ottawa until vaccine mandates were abolished, or the police forcibly removed him. In the end, says Rich:
He managed not to get arrested. I think he probably came to his senses, probably pressure from his daughter as well. You know: ‘you need to get out before it really gets bad.’ And as much as he wanted to stay and get thrown in jail for the cause, he left.
Part 3: Frozen Bank Accounts