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A traumatic experience visiting Burns Lake

Is this the way that your community would want to be represented...presumably not.

Editor:

On the May long weekend my husband, 12 year old son and I were heading to Takysie Lake and stopped in your town for dinner before carrying on to the ferry.

We stopped at the A & W and saw a woman in the trees drinking. She stepped out onto the curb, staggered and fell hard in the middle of the road - her head bouncing several times on the pavement. Then she was almost struck by a vehicle.

We stayed there with her trying to comfort her until she was taken to the hospital. She was injured, in pain and scared. It was an event that shook us up. We couldn’t stop thinking about her.

After things had settled down, we had some dinner and made our way to the ferry. As we pulled up to the holding area we saw it was extremely full.

There was one slot that we thought we could fit into and as we got half way across the road we realized that our truck and trailer were too long.

As we were looking  to see if we could back up safely a horn honked. Just seconds later a pickup truck and trailer screeched up beside us and the driver stood half out of his truck and started yelling ‘get the f*** out of the way!’ at the top of his lungs. He then yelled some more and got back into his truck. Within seconds he was back out and yelling the same thing.

Back into his truck one more time, he then jumped out and came over to our vehicle screaming all the time that we were idiots and we needed to get the f*** out of the way! He ran up to the drivers side at my husband and stuck his face in and continued to scream at the top of his lungs. We thought that he was going to attack my husband. It was very frightening. This person was out of control.

When my husband said we were not from around here he suddenly backed down and apologized. By this time of course everyone in the ferry line up as well as at the takeout restaurant was hearing this person freaking out at us - it was extremely unnerving - we felt shaky and shell shocked - this persons reaction was so totally out of context for the situation. This all happened in a few minutes.

Sadly, our 12 year old son was in the back seat witnessing this aggressive and intimidating behavior. We had left home excited about our weekend and to have this lunatic accost us in such a belligerent way was, to say the very least, upsetting. Road rage and bullying at its finest.

We later found out from the ferry staff the name of this person and that he is a business owner in the community.

Is this the way that your community would want to be represented...presumably not. What would possess a person to lash out at another human being in this manner? I also wondered how the person sitting in his truck felt - were they as horrified as the rest of us were?

Despite this persons ugly attack...we ended up meeting some great people and had a wonderful time.

Hoping for a better experience next time...

The Zaporozan family

Fort St. James