We Felt Free
We Felt Free
In Ottawa it felt 'like a huge weight had been lifted off your shoulders.'
Rich Ocelak is an aircraft mechanic who resides an hour’s drive west of Hamilton, Ontario. He and fellow mechanic Dan headed to Ottawa on Friday, January 28th entirely independently. They arrived, he says, “a few hours behind the southern Convoy from Windsor and Sarnia. We got there thinking we’re gonna park, we’re gonna sit here for the weekend, and then we’re gonna go home on the Monday.”
But that’s not what happened. Weeks later, they were still holding the line on Wellington Street in Rich’s van, a 1996 Mitsubishi Delica imported directly from Japan.
"I love camping, and I love road tripping," he explains. In Canada, vans aren't normally four-by-fours, nor do they run on diesel. This one is and does. The fact that the steering wheel is on the right rather than the left is no big deal. He got used to that quickly. "Since you're sitting on the opposite side, you don't have that line of sight when you want to pass somebody on the highway. But when I'm driving that, I'm in my happy place. I'm never in a hurry."
The van isn't winterized, and is normally used in mild weather only. Before leaving home, they’d stuffed it full of "insulated coveralls, toques, jackets, extra sweaters. Layers and layers and layers.” There's a bed in the back, but it isn't large. “Dan and I are good friends,” laughs Rich, who was forty-eight at the time. “But it could have gone either way. Two guys crammed in a van for three weeks. It went really well. We made it work.”
On one occasion, those tight sleeping quarters were even more so. Peter Terranova, a retired trucker in his late seventies, was parked directly in front of them on Wellington. 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.
One evening Peter's vehicle had "started idling really rough and it just quit on him," Rich says,
So there was three of us now crammed in the van. 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 get the gas out of his tank and put some fresh stuff in.
And 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.
During the drive to Ottawa, they'd wondered what the mood would be like when they arrived, only to discover an atmosphere of Hope, says Rich,
Cuz for two years we'd been oppressed, we'd been depressed. It felt like we were never going to get out of this. And then you get to Ottawa and it was like a huge weight had been lifted off your shoulders. Finally, you felt free. We didn't know how this was gonna play out in the end, but we felt free.
The first weekend, the horns were going nonstop. Trying to talk, you couldn't talk in a normal voice, you're always screaming over the horns. So I ended up losing my voice. I had a job I was supposed to be at. Well, this is a good excuse to call into work sick. But I had to find a nice quiet spot to make that call, cuz I didn't want them to know where I was at the time.
And then the protest went on for a week. So I ended up taking some vacation days, then more vacation days, which went on for three weeks.
next installment: Forced Vaccination
