Читать книгу That Wasn’t the Plan - Reg Sherren - Страница 25

Not that it always worked. Sometimes circumstances took over and you just had to go with the flow, hoping it didn’t mean swimming for your life.

One morning I was told to go down to a place called Witless Bay. There was nothing funny about Witless Bay. Over a hundred crab workers, upset with their employer, were off the job and in no mood to settle down. Just before we arrived, they had overturned a couple of pickup trucks.

We were down in the middle of the throng when one little fellow piped up to say, “Jesus byes, CBC is taking pictures of all we crowd! Let’s throw ’em in the harbour!” As if that weren’t bad enough, the water’s surface was covered in rotting crab guts and oil. It did not look good. This was definitely not the plan.

At that very moment, I came to fully grasp the old saying, “Sometimes the best defence is a great offence.” I decided to jump right into that little fellow’s face. Shaking my fist, I yelled, “You son of a bitch. You call us up and ask us to come down here and represent your point of view and this is the way you want to treat us? Screw you!” To be honest, pretty much all of me was shaking. I was scared to death we were going into the water.

Then someone else yelled, “No byes, they’re okay—leave ’em alone.” I quickly suggested to the cameraman that we should beat it, and we scrambled up the bank to our van. The RCMP arrived only to have the skinny constable from Marystown pull out his megaphone. “All right ye crowd,” he said. “CBC’s got pictures of all ye, and we’ll get their videotape and you’ll all be charged!”

After yelling to the camera guy to fire up the van, I jumped up on the bumper and shouted, “We don’t work for the RCMP—if they want our video they’ll have to go to court to get it!” With that we jumped into the van and beat a hasty retreat. The RCMP never did come after our tape, and I never again waded into the middle of an angry mob. We were lucky it hadn’t ended in a much worse fashion. We could easily have found ourselves swimming with the fishes that day!