I could barely hear what Marlene Haley was saying because the truck was so loud.
With me buckled in the passenger seat of the Merry Dairy’s ice cream truck, we were headed westbound on Highway 417 towards Frank Ryan Park in Nepean.
While the diesel motor grumbled so loudly that we had to yell at each other, I thought it was a perfect time for her to tell me about why, 14 years ago, she left a career in education to open an ice cream business.
“I loved teaching, but I had this idea, like, ‘Oh, I want to start my own business; maybe I do ice cream in the summer and still teach in the fall,” she told me.
After buying a truck in the summer of 2012, she began delivering homemade frozen custard and ice cream to Ottawa neighbourhoods. Haley quickly realized that her idea was going to be bigger than she’d thought.
“That summer there was a real energy and a real desire to track down trucks and try new things,” she said, noting how the business found customers through what was then known as Twitter, where a new location would be posted every day.
In 2017, Haley said, they finally got a storefront on Fairmont Avenue, just west of Little Italy.
Ever since, the Merry Dairy has become the kind of place with a constant line — one that has to have a sign cutting off orders when it’s near closing time.
I had heard about their popularity before I’d even tried the ice cream.
But I’d also heard about how generous they were, hosting “name days” with free scoops for some lucky individuals every so often.
So, on this precariously overcast Saturday, I rode along with Haley to find out more about their latest feat of generosity, a “pay what you can” pop-up for Ottawa neighbourhoods impacted by Canada Day flooding that they’ve been doing for two weeks. I even scooped a few.
The scene at Frank Ryan Park
As we neared the park, a little girl and her mother noticed us driving by their house, and they ran right to my window.
“Can we have ice cream?” the girl called up to my throne.
“Frank Ryan Park!” I yelled to her over the noise.
I would later learn — while she was trying and failing miserably to stop a soft serve cone with chocolate sauce and sprinkles from dripping — that this girl was five and her name was Moyrah Fleurant.
It was her first time trying the Merry Dairy, and, if it meant anything, she was a lot more interested in talking to me before she received the cone.
“It’s so funny how that happens,” Haley said beside me, laughing as a lineup appeared in front of the truck.
Also in front of the truck was a crate filled with ice cream pint lids, each bearing a different-coloured sticker.
Customers were encouraged to take whichever lid colour corresponded with the amount they could pay, no questions asked, from full price to free.
For the hour I was there, customer traffic remained steady, with a line of about 20 or so ice cream seekers.
But I noticed that, even after getting their cups or cones, neighbours didn’t disperse. They unpacked picnic blankets. They ran across an open field with their stumbling toddlers. They met each other for the first time.
One couple told me they just moved into the area that morning, and this was their first walk around the area together.
That couple had just met Alycia Douglass and Daniel O’Brien, renters in the neighbourhood.
“We love that the Merry Dairy have recognized that a lot of people here are going through some difficult times, and ice cream solves a lot of problems, at least in the moment,” Douglass said.
For that moment, ice cream solved their flooding damages, which they estimated at about $15,000.
“I remember seeing basically like a kiddie pool in our room under the stairs. It was bad. We had things that were floating,” said O’Brien, a musician, and some of his equipment was floating that day.
While the two were still hesitant to open drum cases and see the full extent of the damage, they agreed that it had been an overwhelming month for the neighbourhood.
Talking to a handful of others waiting in line, it appeared that Douglass was right — it seemed that everyone was either still dealing with severe flooding or knew someone else who was.
Alison Bullock, who used to restore photos for Library and Archives Canada, said she used that expertise to help bring back to life her neighbours’ soaked family photos.
On the way to the park, Haley told me that bringing the truck to neighbourhoods was special because, when people shared a treat, they probably weren’t going to be talking about things they’d been dealing with, like flooded basements.
Later, I was scooping cones with Sofia D’Ippolito and Vitor Olveira.
Though Olveira used to be a real-estate broker and a civil engineer in Brazil, we all laughed that the 16-year-old D’Ippolito was really the one running things.
“Two regulars. Both swirls. One with sprinkles,” she told him, and he got right to it.
Meanwhile, the group of neighbours in the park was still growing.
Haley had said that these pop-ups sometimes became inadvertent block parties.
Between scoops, from my spot inside the truck, I watched that happen to a neighbourhood that needed it.
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