Rock Star Truckers

Members of the public are showering the truckers with thanks. And with food, fuel, and cash.

I just spent a week in Ottawa. Talking to protesting truckers, attending their daily religious services, breaking bread with them in restaurants (usually small, ethnic places) that demand neither masks nor papers.

I spent a week watching these truckers being treated like rock stars by the public. People walk up to the cabs of these vehicles. They reach up to shake hands and announce some variation of: “We’ve just arrived in town for a few days. Thank you for starting this movement.”

Long before it was Valentine’s Day, people were tucking red cardboard hearts beneath the windshield wipers of these parked trucks. Strangers routinely pass cash, gift cards, thank you notes, and children’s drawings to the drivers. They offer them warm hats, sandwiches, chocolate, and home baked treats. A local adopt-a-trucker program is providing access to showers, and is doing laundry.

One of the earliest anecdotes I heard from a trucker, an oldtimer himself, was about a ‘little old lady’ who’d asked if a nearby Jerry can belonged to him. After he said she was welcome to it, she informed him her intent was to fill it with petrol and to wheel it back in a baby stroller covered with a blanket.

It’s a sweet story. But with a serious undertone. The French Resistance did that sort of thing. While living under Hitler’s boot.

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