While the Nov. 29 snowstorm brought traffic snarls, crashes and power-outage for most; for New West resident Margaret Vegt, it brought two new friends.
Vegt, a resident of Queens Avenue, vividly recollects how the particular evening unfolded — it was a Tuesday; the weather forecast included 10 to 15 centimetres of snow and a wind chill bringing the temperature down to a frigid -9 C.
At around 5 p.m., Vegt remembers looking out her windows to see cars in a gridlock on the street.
“Every 20 minutes, I'd look outside, and all these cars were standing there, and they didn't move!” she said.
What she saw made her "sick.”
The lane behind her house was "just a stream of cars"; and every street was backed up, she said. From her house, she could also see that Royal Avenue was all blocked.
“Nobody was moving,” she repeated, as if in disbelief.
“At around 7 p.m., I got really antsy and I thought, 'I've got to do something.'”
Vegt took bottles of water that were in the trunk of her car, and walked up and down the road outside her house offering them to commuters — “and just chatting with them, and checking to see if they needed to use the bathroom.”
“I said to them, ‘There's my house. Just go ahead and go to the bathroom.”
Some did. Among them, Vegt said, were two women ("maybe in their 30s") who raced into the house, used the facility, and went back to their car.
“That was it for a while,” she said.
Going the extra mile to help strangers
An hour later, Vegt went out again to check the situation. "The same cars were still there. It was driving me crazy. So I brought some apples and all the food — bread, crackers and so on — I could find at home.”
Some were really hungry, some weren’t; most just needed water, she said.
In hindsight, Vegt said she felt “kind of silly” about her impulse to just go out and help strangers in the bitterly cold night.
But later, she learned that it wasn't just her. "The arena in Queen's Park was open, and some religious groups in Queensborough had opened up their temples for people to come in…”
“So, more people did what I did. That made me really happy…because I kept wondering why nobody else was doing it,” said Vegt, who has been doing refugee work with World Renew (the humanitarian aid arm of the Christian Reformed Church) since 2000.
Three hours went by, and the traffic didn’t move an inch. At around 10 p.m., she heard a knock.
At the door stood the two women whom Vegt had earlier allowed to use her restroom.
“They asked: ‘Is it OK if we crash in your house? Floor is fine.”
Vegt learned that Summer Wang and Carrie Sun didn’t have enough battery in their electric car to make it back home to Maple Ridge.
“So we just said, ‘Sure, we've got several beds upstairs.’ And they stayed the night.”
A friendship is born
Though generally wary of letting strangers into the house, that evening, Vegt recalled, “Everybody in the (traffic) line seemed genuine and real.”
Also, that night was nothing like any other she had seen before. Vegt, who had immigrated from Holland when she was four years old, had never seen snow bring a traffic chaos like that in the 30 years she has lived in New West, or in Richmond or Surrey before that.
“Some of them (who were stuck in traffic) said they were in the lineup for about four hours. I could imagine what was going through their minds,” said Vegt.
The strangers that Vegt had welcomed in, soon became friends — their brief time together was enough for Vegt to realize, “They're the nicest ladies ever!”
The following morning, Sun and Wang were out by around 7 a.m., and had a smooth drive back to Maple Ridge; and Vegt, a teacher associated with John Knox Christian School in Burnaby, went about her routine.
But the three kept in touch; texting back and forth, said Vegt.
More recently, almost over three weeks after the storm had forged their friendship, Sun and Wang dropped by Vegt’s house on a weekend to catch up... as friends.
“They came with this load of Chinese apples, pomelos, cookies, and just so many treats,” said Vegt.
After that evening sharing conversations and laughs, Vegt was convinced that she had indeed made new friends.
"We got along with each other really well,” she said.
"I think we'll have a little relationship going."
