This morning we drove north along the coast. It was a rousing 3 degrees Celsius this morning, warmer than it has been in a while, and the sun was trying to shine, which put everyone in high spirits. The giant piles of snow are starting to melt after two days of “warmth”, and there’s so much still that we haven’t seen. We meant to go to the very tip of the Avalon peninsula, but after the 12th time I had to pick up dropped cars from the floor of the backseat and after the constant tears because I never seem to be able to reach the right cars AND because I always give the wrong cars to the wrong boy, we had to stop earlier than we meant to. (To save my sanity.)
But we drove through Torbay, and on up a little to Pouch Cove, where we saw the sign for the East Coast trail and pulled off right beside a rural Canadian post office. Pouch Cove is a very small (population of about 1,000) town where we couldn’t find any stores, restaurants, or anything besides the post office. But, just south of it is Torbay, a bit bigger community, with an auspicious settler.
In the 1600s, one of Torbay’s earliest settlers was John Nutt, who came to Newfoundland to be a pirate. (Or something.) He originally came as a gunner on a ship from England, but he loved it so much that he moved his whole family here. It was after that that he started raiding English and French ships off the Avalon coast.
He began luring sailors away from the Royal Navy and then, in an entrepreneurial sort of way, offered his protective services to the English and French colonies on the Avalon coast. (Yes, the same place where he had started looting ships, and the same nationalities of the ships he had pirated before.)
But despite this seeming conflict of interest, George Calvert, the leader of the colonies at that time, accepted his help, which doesn’t make much sense to me, and may have not made sense to the colonists there. (The moral of the story must be that it never hurts to ask, even if you’ve actively sabotaged your shot, I guess.) Later, when John returned to England, he was promptly charged with piracy and was on the verge of being hung when George Calvert, who had by then been promoted to Secretary of State, intervened and saved his life. (Even as a pirate it pays to know people in high places.) So maybe John wasn’t such a bad coast protector after all.
It’s the sort of coast where you could imagine pirate ships just off the coast. The black cliffs run in steep, parallel lines and form rushing inlets and coves, and the sharp edges and angles of the coast offer limited sight lines and shadowed places to lie in wait.
One of the best ways to see the coast is to hike the East Coast Trail. It follows the Avalon Peninsula on the (you guessed it) East Coast, and runs for over 300 miles. If we had been here in the summer, we would have really tried to do a lot of it. We hope to be hiking with our boys for a long time, so we’ve started them young. In Hawaii we’d go 2 to 3 miles and they would handle it. But, even with snow suits on, they are not that used to the weather here. So we went along the trail here for as long as the ice patches and the seagulls kept the boys more interested than cold. (So, not that long.)
On our way back home we stopped in a coffee shop and deli in Torbay, signing the guest book as we ordered Irish stew (it is Saint Paddy’s Day after all) and fish cakes. Someone behind us exclaimed, “You’re from Hawaii?!”, and then a second later, “And you came HERE in MARCH?” And we all laughed comfortably together at the ridiculousness of Hawaii people in Newfoundland in March. Because it is a bit ridiculous. I told her that Lincoln keeps getting excited when we see the ocean and asking if we can go swimming, and she smirked and said, “My daughter goes swimming here!……..in August……..if it’s been a warm year.”
But we came here for views like these, for crumbling, dramatic cliffs that plunge into oceans, for bays that once held pirates’ ships and pirates’ battles. For tall, colorful houses above the icy cold water, and row boats pulled up onto damaged piers, likely from the windstorm last weekend.
Waterfalls run loud down hills from all the ice and snow melting, and the boys spent a good 10 minutes trying to understand the ice puddles on the trail. “Can we walk on it? Does it break? Is it water?” The deli had artwork on the walls of the bays dotted with icebergs, but we have yet to see them. So the ice puddles will have to do for now.
Hey, if it’s good enough for pirates, it’s good enough for us.
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