You Can See Me From the Moon (Part 1 of 5)

Hard working immigrant trucker's life was upended by the cross-border vaccine mandate.

Shortly after the Freedom Convoy protest was shut down, trucker Csaba Vizi did a couple of lengthy video interviews. Regrettably, one now seems to have disappeared from the Internet. Later, he was interviewed at length by the filmmakers behind the Unacceptable? documentary. More recently, I asked him some questions, while Anna, his wife, added her own valuable perspective. The end result is an informative, richly-detailed account of his Convoy experience. Part 1 appears below.

Csaba is the trucker in this photo. I took it in Ottawa, but didn’t speak to him there:

When Csaba Vizi was eighteen, people in his native Romania rose up against decades of Communist dictatorship. It was 1989, and governments were falling across Eastern Europe. He and his father were amongst those who took to the street, armed with axes. “Nobody was peaceful, everybody was angry,” he remembers, hastening to add that the violence in his city stopped at property damage.

After the head of the Communist Party was swiftly tried and executed, a new chapter of Romanian history began. Being ethnically Hungarian, Csaba and wife Anna moved to Hungary almost immediately. But there they were told they were Romanian. “What the hell are you doing here?” they were asked.

Fast forward 10 years. He’d been hearing good things about Canada. “Everybody was accepted from all over the world,” no one was told they didn’t belong. As a new arrival in the year 2000, he encountered plenty of warmth. “People on the street, they just say Hi to you. I was impressed. I came with probably $900 US in my pocket, and with lots of hope.”

Csaba says he found work within days. “I didn’t use welfare and stuff like that.” For about a year, he was employed in a factory, in the shipping and receiving department. “Then I decide to drive a truck. Cuz I like nice things, you know. I wanna provide good for my family. Wasn’t an easy job, with no proper English language, no experience.” But he worked hard, purchased his own home, and says his prosperous life was “like a dream.”

Sometime during his youth, Csaba saw a Coca-Cola advertisement featuring a bright red truck painted with a Santa Claus face. “It was a red Freightliner Classic. And when I decide I’m gonna be a truck driver, I said I wanna make my truck look like that.” His red Volvo is a 1999, “a very old truck. I own that truck for 19 years,” he explains. He himself installed 200-plus exterior lights. “It's very bright in the night. My trailer looks the same way. You can see me from the moon, man. You look down on the Earth, and you can see me” rolling down the highway. “That was my dream, to have a truck like that.”

For two decades, Csaba hauled groceries from Leamington, Ontario into the United States in his refrigerated trailer. Meat, ice cream, dry goods. He hasn’t been to California, he says. “But other than that, all over the place. Florida, Texas, many places.” Typically, he’s away from home for a week to ten days at a stretch.

He remembers the start of the pandemic. “At the beginning, we fall for that. We use masks. We use gloves. I was opening doors with my elbow.” Considered essential, he kept showing up for work when others didn’t. “I remember I was driving through Montreal at three o'clock in the afternoon. When usually the city's all packed with traffic. I was alone. I was driving through a dead city.”

Csaba was the sole breadwinner in a home that includes a wife and two daughters. But in January 2022, he was barred from earning a living. “Doing only Canadian work, it’s impossible,” he says. “The company doesn’t have enough Canadian work to keep you busy. So I’m without a job. On the other end of the sofa my oldest daughter was crying. She finished five years of nursing. She's not able to do her board exam because she doesn't want to get vaccinated.”

He says he had some difficult nights, when he was tempted “to do something really stupid. But I get over that. I said, ‘I gotta be strong for my family.’”

Csaba lives near Windsor. Detroit is directly across the Ambassador Bridge. He’d heard people were planning “to protest here in Windsor, to slow down the traffic going to the United States. I said, I'm gonna go there. At least I feel like I'm doing something. I was protesting over there for four days.”

It wasn’t especially effective, he admits. Three lanes of traffic lead to the bridge, and the truckers were staying out of the left-hand one. Traffic kept flying by, he says, until he independently and temporarily decided to drive in the left lane in order to slow things down, to “make sure somebody's gonna realize, somebody's gonna wake up.” The point wasn’t to inconvenience people, he says, but to be heard.

“I was full of anger,” he remembers. “I decide I'm gonna drive up to Ottawa. You have to fill up your truck with fuel, that's a lot of money. I don't care, I'm gonna go to Ottawa.” He didn’t know what would happen after he arrived. Nor did he know any of the organizers. “I simply just heard what time the Convoy is gonna leave from my area, and that’s it. I kiss my family goodbye.”

After attaching Canadian flags to his bobtail, he set out for the gathering spot, fifty kilometers (30 miles) from his home. “When I hit the highway, I saw the very first overpass. It was crammed with two, three hundred people. I don't know how to say it, but I realize I'm doing this not just for my girls. I gotta do this for everybody.”

A few hours later, at an overpass near London, members of the public were lining the highway. “There was people sitting, and a lady with a stroller right on the side of the road. I saw five or six old veterans with all the medals on their chest. They was saluting like this,” he says, raising his right hand. For the next twenty kilometers, “I couldn’t stop crying. It was very, very emotional.”

Csaba doesn’t know how many vehicles long the Convoy was when it reached Ottawa the next afternoon, but he’s certain “it was huge.” The police broke it into smaller groups, of about 80 to 100 vehicles, he recalls, before escorting them into the city. His own group was taken down onto the Sir John A Macdonald Parkway and instructed to halt near the War Museum. Parliament was a couple kilometers distant (more than a mile).

The next morning, intent on getting closer to the action, Csaba maneuvered his truck around some barricades. Eventually, he found himself a spot across the street from the Chateau Laurier, “that fancy hotel,” right where Wellington turns into Rideau Street. A fellow Romanian immigrant would soon park his own, bright yellow bobtail beside Csaba’s red one. Across the way there was a black and yellow trailer pulled by Eric, who was from East Germany and had witnessed the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Csaba says he can smell creeping Communism. Having grown up in a massive prison - with endless government restrictions and endless government interference - he knows all about tyranny. He knows that a society in which neighbours are encouraged to snitch on neighbours is a society in which everyone lives in fear.

Their section of the street was sparsely populated with trucks. With no block leader to attend meetings and keep them in the loop, they did their own thing. “That lady, Tamara [Lich]. I saw her one day on the street, I never talk with her. I act over there individually. Only when they said, ‘OK, everybody has to stay quiet for 10 days, and don't push the horn.’ I said, if everybody's doing that, then OK. I'm not gonna be a crazy guy to push my horn alone,” he recalls, referring to the court injunction that silenced the honking on February 7th.

next installment: Like a Big Bucket of Flowers