Serendipity

Dinghy scoots along the headland at Trinity, Newfoundland.

Serendipity: An aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident

I'm a huge believer in serendipity when it comes to living life. By this, I mean you make a decision to go one way and everything changes, usually for the better.

That's what happened today. We did a favor for a friend in Maine. We'd offered to go to the little town of Trinity in Newfoundland after listening to our buddy Gayle talk about her genealogical search for ancestors in which one relative was born in Cuckold's Cove, now called Dunfield, which is next door to the town of Trinity. We offered to stop by the museum in town to see if we could find anything for Gayle.

We came into town late on Sunday and were depressed to learn the only campground was 'way too small to accommodate our rig. We had to retrace our tracks to the main road and then head for a provincial park that was five kilometers up a washboard-like gravel road. We arrived at the park tired and, thankfully, there was a site available. It turned out to be one of the best campgrounds we have discovered in Newfoundland.
Early on Monday, we set out in the car for Trinity and discovered a jewel. It is the quintessential little harbor town built into the shoulder of the hills surrounding Trinity Bay. Each house has been preserved and was painted tastefully and individually. Everywhere we turned there was a pleasing view. The sun was coming over the big Anglican church in town, creating a biblical sparkle when I captured it creeping out from behind one of the crosses on the roof of the church. A woman worked lovingly on her rock garden and we stopped to chat. She and her husband recently retired from the U.S. diplomatic service. She had been stationed in Denmark, she said, and that country has an intricate ferry system. They liked what they saw when they came across on the ferry to Newfoundland and life eventually took them to the waterfront of Trinity. They bought a beautiful house there and now she gardens here in the summer and returns to Washington, D.C., for the winter.

We visited the town's museum and the young girl said we were in the wrong place for genealogical information. She spoke in that extraordinary dialect that seems to be old-fashioned Irish-influenced English. She pulled out a map and showed us where we should go. We did. Then we met a young-ish man on the third floor of a Georgian-style brick building which houses the archival collection of the Trinity Historical Society.

We told him our mission: Find the relatives of the Morris family which dated back to the 1700s in the Trinity area. He said not a word, but leaned over a file cabinet and, after a few minutes, said “Here he is...along with all of his relatives.” I gasped and asked how it could be that easy. “We have fanatics who love genealogical research,” he said with a laugh. “They have worked on every family in town.” Then he added, “Most genealogical researchers tend toward the fanatical.”

While he was photocopying the multiple pages he suggested that we return to the museum and ask the girls there to allow us to photograph the ship's bell on the second floor. This bell was all that's left of the Effie M, a ship built by the Morris family in Trinity that went down with all hands in 1907 right offshore in a nasty nor-Easter. A Morris was among the dead and his daughter, we discovered received a payment from the government of 20-pounds for several years. We made our way back and the young girl took me upstairs where she showed me the bell and the story of the destruction of the Effie M.

So our little side trip ended up being a highlight of our journey.

We drove around the harbor to the lighthouse so we could photograph the town from across the water. While I photographed, a little sparrow-like bird with a fluffed-up chest kept harassing me, probably because I was too close for comfort to her nest.

We headed north to the end of another road which took us to Elliston, which proudly claims to be the “Root Cellar Capital of the World” in case there is a competition for such a title. We think root cellars are wonderful devices but we certainly wouldn't make a trip to a town to look at the outside of root cellars. What they ought to be promoting are the puffins that live on islands so close to shore you can sit on the rocks and watch them nest and throw themselves in the most ungainly way off their island and fly with their red legs straight behind them. There are more than 2,000 pairs, all of them mated for life. They produce one egg per couple per year and everyone was sitting on their nest area, awaiting the arrival of junior.

Meanwhile black-backed gulls, herring gulls and kittiwakes all fly around and stand in a threatening way very close to their nests, hoping to grab an egg or even a chick.

We had a great lunch in an old fishermen's meeting house where the menu offered a Jigg's Dinner. This meal seems to be unique to Newfoundland and is described thusly: Salt beef with turnips, potatoes, carrots and pease pudding. It triggered in my memory having eaten pease pudding as a kid back in Scotland. But I couldn't place what was in it.... so I asked the waitress. She explained it as green peas that are boiled to a pulpy cream and poured over the dinner. We didn't order it!

We ended up in Bonavista, where we found The Matthew, a full-size replica of John Cabot's ship that brought him and his crew of 20 men to New Found Lande in 1497.

Cabot was an Italian, Giovanni Caboto was his name, and I couldn't understand why the English king would pay him to sail west on behalf of England to find a new route to Asia. We went through the entire exhibit and visited aboard the ship without this being explained. So I returned to the front counter and posed the question to the woman there. “No one has ever asked this,” she said.

She fumbled for an explanation and we eventually uncovered that Caboto tried to get a ship financed by the King of Valencia in Spain. No go. So he took his family to Bristol, England, where he gained English citizenship and, because he was known as an outstanding navigator, King Henry IV backed him for the trip west.

So this peninsula which we would have passed by on our way east to St. John's, the capital, turned out to be a treasure trove of rich experiences. Serendipitous.

On Tuesday, we stopped at the little town of Dildo on the Avalon Peninsula. Dildo has little reason to exist if it didn't have that name. Jo refused to be photographed under the cut-out of Capt. Jack Dildo down on the waterfront. “It's a guy thing,” she explained.

Now we have just arrived in St. John's. It's raining again.... but we feel good about making it all the way across the province. We have another week to explore the Avalon Peninsula before catching the long ferry back to Nova Scotia (that's a 17-our ferry ride through the night).