While the nightly sound of pots and pans clanging together in support of front-line workers may have disappeared from many neighbourhoods, Maple Ridge -Pitt Meadows residents within a two kilometre radius of Henry Hut’s Old Dewdney Trunk Road farm are still treated to the bellow of a fog horn every evening at 7 p.m.
The 81-year-old began blowing the horn around the end of March, 2020, and has only missed two evenings over the course of the past 15 months.
While the pandemic is still affecting the work of front-line workers, he wants to make sure they know he is thinking of them.
“The nurses are running their feet off, and there are people laying there who can’t breathe,” he said.
“What a job that is.
“They are very dedicated people, who don’t quit, and I want to support them in any way I can.”
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The impressively fit Hut hoists the metal horn from his barn each evening and places it on a trailer, before weighing it down with a nearby chunk of metal.
He then hooks up a hose attached to an air compressor and waits for it to be primed before letting off three or four loud blasts.
The powerful noise maker once belonged to a friend of his who lived on a tugboat on Vancouver Island.
“Once he retired, he took the horn off his boat, and said I want you to have it,” Hut said. The Pitt Meadows farmer was unsure of what he would do with it, but has made exemplary use of the horn since the pandemic started.
The neighbours do not mind the noise, and Hut has even gained some local fans when his daughters posted about the blast on social media.
“I’m not doing it for the fame,” he insisted.
People often ask when he will stop the nightly ritual.
“When I can sit in church without a mask on, then I’ll quit.”
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