Echoes of Ottawa
Following the Trucker's Convoy with a short story.
In case you missed the small warning in last month’s Croc Bite, here’s another.
Read on, and you’re in for a time-sensitive opinion piece on the Canadian truckers parked around their parliament in frigid Ottawa. As you probably know, this hubbub started as a protest against a government mandate forcing 16,000 of them to get an mRNA vaccine for Covid-19, or self-isolate for a period of time after crossing the border (i.e. effectively forfeit their job).
It's snowballed beyond that, growing to a broader push against restrictive measures worldwide.
In short—and with the hope that this, like all protests stay peaceful, measured, and aimed at proper targets—the crocodiles on my shelf are all for it.
When they’ve got something to say, I’m not one to muzzle them.
Read on for the editorial, or scroll down to where I tackle ‘La Conchita’ a short story that echoes some of the measured, stubborn, and increasingly noisy energy up north.
Part One – An Editorial
Even with Putin, Ukraine, Byron, and a disconcerting number of Olympic crashes all clamoring for attention, you’ve probably seen a headline or two… no doubt something about the capital of our friendly, northern neighbor under siege by thuggish, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic truck drivers.
If you ask CNN, the New York Times, or Prime Minister-in-hiding Justin Trudeau, that’s all they are—a fringe minority of raucous, out-of-character Canadian deplorables.
Just more crazies, types who clearly aren’t following the science.
That Ottawa residents have been triggered to tears by nonstop honking, that border roads have been barricaded, and that mayor Jim Watson declared a state of emergency, with hundreds of police officers confiscating fuel and gathering evidence for what might be a tsunami of prosecutions, is all unfortunate.
But across Canada, families are cheering.
A hundred yards beyond the fray, Canada’s parliament is gearing up for a vote on ending federal vaccine mandates.
Nearby, and from Europe and New Zealand to a cross-country convoy headed to D.C., like-minded copycats are firing up their eighteen wheelers.
If you’re following the story on your own, (plot spoiler… act two starts with gofundme waltzing off with 9 million of the Convoy’s fundraising), there’s a good chance you’re cheering the truckers on. Short of getting maple leaf tattoos, many, (though I don’t expect all) of us are at least hoping they, and the largely vaccinated, extensively locked down Canadian populace they speak for, win the concessions they want.
Jerseys On
Even with many countries moving to end restrictions and declare Covid-19 endemic, all of this still needs saying.
Shelf of Crocodiles stands with truckers, nurses, policemen, teachers, parents, ethics professors, and anyone facing soft or hard pressure to take, (or not take) an mRNA vaccine or lose their job, their social life, their ability to shop and dine, or (and considering what all of that amounts to) their de facto citizenship.
Rather than the being mark of the beast, mRNA treatment might be the silver bullet.
Getting it could be warranted, prudent, or perhaps unnecessary.
Those are matters you’ve weighed, researched, and probably already decided… and either way, I’m not asking you about it.
It’s private.
And that’s the point.
Much more than noise, nuisance, freezing cold revelry, or trolls with a Confederate flag—and acknowledging that even family-friendly mass gatherings are unpredictable, and can turn of a dime—we fear the real time consequences of ineffective lockdowns, and the coming peril of demonizing, separating, and sequestering the non-vaccinated, Warsaw ghetto style.
That most, not all governing and cultural elites still favor that and, by some surveys, want those who won’t give voluntary consent to a sweeping medical experiment rounded up like prisoners, warrants action.
Especially when they’ve already taken twenty-three months of pot shots at rights articulated in the Constitution, as well as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
With government overreach, collusion, and cartoonish double standards—not to mention not a mass graveyard of jobs, businesses, families, school years and livelihoods leftover from 2020—the time for scorched earth measures against an endemic virus that’s deadly for some but clearly here to stay is long, long past.
As is rote compliance, buttressed by pressure, shows of compassion, and shaming.
That mRNA treatments, (among other kinds) lower the risk of death for infected, at-risk individuals is wonderful.
But the whole point of Ottawa—and the reason you’ll see more clips of people cheering on freeway overpasses as semis honk at them—is that in lieu of fighting themselves, many are recognizing that it’s time to support the fighters who, as I write and publish this, are still out in the big rigs, camping, freezing, and rejecting serfdom.
Free speech, autonomy, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—when a federal government starts forcing medical procedures on its population, all bets are off.
If shrill honking citizens won’t get attention, what will?
And in the apt words of Hillel the Elder, if not now, when?
Supporting Fighters
If you’re on the fence, or if you haven’t already done so, make like Elon Musk and post a Canadian flag.
Or go to givesendgo.com and pour some maple syrup in the tip jar.
That is, support those in Ottawa risking imprisonment, financial ruin, and political prosecution to fight top-down discrimination, all over a virus with a 99.98 % survival rate.
One last jab, (sorry…) and then the soapbox goes away.
Places like Ottawa, Australia, Quebec, California, New York City, Seattle, Boston, Germany (of all places…), and other entities coercing businesses, alienating their workforce, and creating castes of citizens based on medical status, are courting disaster.
Without governing authorities showing some degree of restraint, faith and respect in individual citizens, and ownership of failed policies, the coming preference cascade may not be this family friendly… or should we say, Canadian.
Part Two - Some Protest Reading
Years ago, I came across ‘La Conchita’ a short story by T.C. Boyle first published in The New Yorker.
Flipping back to it—and without dwelling too much on Boyle’s literary prizes, eclectic perspective and detail, or plots that take place over three hundred years—the piece glimmers with no-nonsense heroism.
It’s got the flavor of that stubborn, volunteering spirit that’s making noise in Ottawa.
Told through the lens of Gordon, a curmudgeonly van driver who carries a Glock 9 and can’t stand Hondas, it’s a portrait of the disastrous 2005 mudslide that occurred off Highway 101 at La Conchita California, killing ten people and swallowing whole streets of a pebble-sized community.
Boyle drops us right on the job, where Gordon’s running late with the time-sensitive delivery of a human liver to a patient on life support.
The heavy-handed, but still ominous touches of a foggy morning and a rain-slicked road get our guard up:
“It was just past noon and raining, the ocean stretching out on my left like a big seething cauldron, the surface of the roadway slick beneath the wheels…
But this wasn’t just the rain.
This was one cell in a string of storms that had stalled over the coast for the past week, sucking load after load of moisture up out of the sea and dropping it on the hills that had burned clear of vegetation the winter before. I was already running late because of a slide at Topanga Canyon, boulders the size of SUV’s in the middle of the road, cops in slickers waving their flashlights down to two lanes, then one, and finally—I heard this one the radio after I got through—down to none.”1
When he reaches La Conchita, there’s an ear-splitting crack—and then the rumble of an entire hillside collapsing over the town. Stalled in mud and traffic, Gordon calls his client at the hospital, waits, and watches an ambulance arrive on the scene.
And when a young woman pulls him from the van to help dig her family out, he breaks into terror and action—with his best version of Lazarus leaving the cave.
“I was out of breath—heaving, actually—but whether my lungs burned or my shoes were ruined beyond salvage or repair or the finish on the car was damaged to the tune of five hundred bucks or more didn’t matter, because the whole thing suddenly became clear to me…
This was the real deal.
This was affliction and loss, horror unfolding the houses crushed like eggshells, cars swallowed up, sections of roof flung across the street and nothing visible beneath but tons of wet mud and a scatter of splintered beams. I was staggered. I was in awe. I became aware of a dog barking somewhere, a muffled sound as if it were barking through a gag.
“Help.” The woman repeated, choking on her own voice. “goddamnit, do something, dig,” and only then did she let go of my wrist. She gave me one frantic look and threw herself down in the muck, flailing at the earth with her bare hands.”2
It's visceral and unmistaken—a specimen of latent humanity brought to life with a defibrillator.
In the shoes of a character who’s initially disturbed by what he sees, but more worried about the cargo in his trunk, his reputation with clients, and competitive drivers eager to pounce on him, Boyle gives us heroic action from the inside out.
Soaked, muddy, and out of breath, Gordon digs until his hands bleed.
“I don’t know how long it was after that—five minutes maybe, no more—until I broke through. I was stabbing at the bottom of the hole like a fencer parrying with an invisible opponent, thrusting away, when all at once the shovel plunged in all the way to my first and everything went still.
This was the miracle: he was in there, the husband, and the little girl with him, preserved in a pocked where the refrigerator and stove had gone down under a section of the wall and held it in place. As soon as I jerked the blade of the shovel back his arm came thrusting out of the hole, and it was a shock to see this grasping hand and the arm so small and white and unexpected in that sea of mud. I could hear him now—he was shouting his wife’s name, Julie! Julie! … and then his hand thrust out again and she was there, the wife, clinging to it.”3
A few pages in, we’ve landed.
It’s not far from the horror, disbelief, and non-questioning valor of those first responders who rushed into the Twin Towers to put the fire out, and then ushered civilians down stairwells until the structures collapsed.
If I’m off or misfiring here, let me know in the comment section.
But I think of the truckers when I read this.
I fully, and willfully conflate duty, crisis-induced adrenaline, and heroic action with a stubborn, forceful, working joe protest that might be the equivalent of pulling frightened, bullied people from a mudslide.
I know, I know.
But as a tangential metaphor of pandemic policy and what it’s done to the lower rungs of families, individuals, students, and mom and pop business owners this last two years, I don’t think I’m that far off.
Of course this heroism applies to first responders, nurses, researchers, teachers working overtime and outreach volunteers—the tens of thousands who went above and beyond to dig others out the muck.
But there’s something straight and brusque about individual action.
On some level, it threatens the prevailing mindset—the psychological climate that pressured everyone into lockdowns, sheltering in place indefinitely, mask-wearing, and now the bludgeon of an experimental vaccine treatment or your job.
Is it an accident that those freezing in the streets of Ottawa are probably of the same milieu as California delivery drivers?
Or those who rushed into the inferno in downtown Manhattan?
If you ask historians like Victor Davis Hanson, who’s written and lectured about the millennia old gulf between blue collar types and zoom working officials, probably not. His thesis, by the way, is that the two need each other, just as the creative, free-wheeling Athenians needed the gruff, uncultured, pragmatic farmers to counterbalance the hasty decisions of the urban mob.
If I’m mixing colors here, I mention it because of a moment in the story, right after Gordon digs out the woman’s husband and daughter.
His phone rings and it’s the doctor in Santa Barbara, the one waiting on him to perform the liver transplant. As the doctor shouts and cusses him out, Gordon realizes it’s because he feels helpless, terrified, panicked about a patient who might die any minute.
Understanding that the doctor has no one else to take it out on, Gordon agrees to hand over the organ to a competitor—a real piece of work who’s on a motorcycle, driving through the stalled traffic to reach him.
The setup builds to a poignant ending, and gives something of a nod to the gaping divide between classes, general opinions on politicized pandemic policy, and the impotence that’s all the more shrill, forceful, uncompromising, because it touch what’s happening on the ground.
Dazed and soggy, Gordon hands the prize over.
“It took maybe three minutes, no more, before Freddie had the cooler secured… and then he was off, kicking up mud.
But I didn’t care about any of that.
I cared about the liver and where it was going. I cared about the woman who’d taken hold of my wrist and her husband and the little girl I never did get to lay eyes on.
And though I was wet through and shivering and my car was stuck and my shoes ruined and my hands so blistered I couldn’t make a first with either one, I went back up the hill—and not, as you might think, to watch the lucky man emerge from the hole in the ground or take a bow or anything like that, but just to see if anybody else needed digging out.”4
No frills, no frets, no social posturing.
All action, messy, aching, and glorious.
Kind of like a band of hated, stubborn truck drivers we might be thanking one day.
In case you missed it…
You can support the Freedom Convoy at givesendgo.com.
As always, thank you for reading.
Comment below, or clap back if you must.
If someone you know needs to read this, the crocodiles encourage you to share.
T.C. Boyle, Wild Child and Other Stories. Penguin Books, (page 24).
T.C. Boyle, Wild Child and Other Stories. Penguin Books, (page 31).
T.C. Boyle, Wild Child and Other Stories. Penguin Books, (page 34).
T.C. Boyle, Wild Child and Other Stories. Penguin Books, (page 35-36).