Newfoundland - Day 2

Lovely day today. Woke up earlier than I thought I would after last night's party and all the excitement of the travelling and being around so many people all evening. Totally not my usual scene, and I was grateful to get away by myself after midnight or so and come to my room. This bed is super comfortable. It has one of those memory foam mattress pads on it. I'm going to get me one of those! It'll be a lot cheaper than buying a new mattress...and possibly a lot more comfy too!

Today for breakfast, we had bagels and cream cheese, and juice and coffee...plus a special treat that Larry made. Indian Candied Smoked Salmon. He did it himself. Just some fresh salmon filets, sliced into like the Indians do (in fact, I think Larry said he'd bought the salmon from some Native people nearby). They slice it across the filet and hang it over wooden dowels or branches to cure it a bit. Larry took the salmon and covered it with a mixture of salt and brown sugar and left it like that for six hours. When he took it out, the salt had extracted much of the moisture from the fish, and created almost a syrup. Once he rinsed all the salt and sugar off, he put it in his smoker out back and smoked it with maple and alder pellets. By this morning it was ready and man, oh man, that was the best smoked salmon I ever ate. It's not like lox at all. It's meaty and thick and flavourful and you can eat it like candy. I crumbled mine up and sprinkled it on top of the cream cheese on my bagel. Also had a few nibbles on it later on before dinner.

After breakfast, Larry drove us around King's Point for a couple of hours, showing us all the points of interest. Surprisingly, for a place as tiny as King's Point, there are a lot of places of interest. The Whale Pavilion was a highlight. Larry is the chair of the committee that got the funding to build it. It's just a long building, about thirty feet by...I don't know...sixty feet? Inside is the mounted skeleton of a full-grown humpback whale...it pretty much fills the inside of the building except for a five or six-foot perimeter all around it. The story is that this dead whale floated into the bay here, so they hooked it up to a fishing boat and towed it into shore. Then they stripped off as much of the flesh as they could and sunk the bones in cages to the bottom of the bay, where fish and crabs etc. ate away the rest of the flesh and "cleaned" it. You can still see a few spots on the bones where there was blood for some reason. Maybe the cause of the whale's death?

The thing I found most fascinating was seeing how much like a human arm the whale's "arm" was. The shoulder blade, just like ours, but about four feet across and fan-shaped, attached to the ball joint with the upper arm bone only about a foot long, the the "elbow" and the double bones of the fore-arm, and the four long, long "fingers" which were the fin. I took a photo of my own hand with my forefinger pointing along the length of one of the finger bones of the fin. My hand is about a third as long as a single finger bone of the whale's. Very cool beans.

After that we carried on and saw a Heritage House that had been donated by the family that owned it to the town of King's Point. They're still fixing it up for the public, but cousin Larry is also on the committee that's organizing that, so even though it's not open yet, he got a key and took us through. I have a couple of little videos I took of him telling a creepy story about the house. I guess someone hung himself there at some point.

Up the road, we got a drink of fresh spring water, right from the spring. It runs down the mountainside, and they've put a hose under the road to a tap on the shore side that's always kept running a little, and you can drink right from it. Tasted lovely...though I could taste a tiny bit of what can only be described as earth....only natural, under the circumstances.

After that, we went up to Joshua Toms & Sons general store which, I'm told, is the oldest operating business establishment on the eastern shore (which here refers to the areas along the coast, just east of the Great Northern Peninsula. Joshua Toms (now deceased) and his wife Delsey, who still runs the store, named all three of their sons Joshua. To differentiate between them in casual conversation, they referred to them as Jit, Jot and Jut...in order from youngest to oldest. Apparently, Jit is still alive and well in King's Point. Delsey's store is a marvel of old and new combined. On one shelf, I saw an incongruous box of dried Japanese noodles, and on the shelf next to it was an old squeezbox. The store even boasted a beautiful old pot-bellied wood stove, like you'd see in old western movies, and it even had a couple of chairs next to it, with four more chairs ready to pull forward if needed. An old tom cat crept in while we were there and took a nap in a cardboard box Delsey keeps on a counter behind the stove for him. "Weiner" as he's called apparently spends his days at the store and his nights at his owners' house down the road. So...joint custody of the cat :-)

Larry bought us all an ice cream, which we ate while we explored the store. I had a Polar bar...what we used to call an ice cream sandwich. Man it was yummy...haven't had one of those since I was a kid! There was a back room in the store filled to the rafters with all manner of stuff like you'd find at any flea market, and a few treasures besides. My favourite items were three old Salvation Army bonnets off in a corner.

And the most amazing thing about this store... there wasn't a spot of dust anywhere. Delsey must spend here whole day going around dusting and cleaning and then starting over again when she's done.

Back at the house, we relaxed for a while. I had a nice long nap. Got up around 6 and not long after people started showing up. Dinner was fabulous. Susan had made around seven different types of salads, including traditional Newfoundland mustard and beet salads, which were essentially just whipped potatoes mixed with either mustard or beets. Tasty though. She also had a Japanese salad which had bits of uncooked ramen noodles in it that added a delightful crunch...I'm not leaving here without the recipe. There were also a couple of deep-fried turkeys. I didn't have much meat...wanting to concentrate on all the lovely salads, so I didn't get the choicest bits of turkey. It was my first time having deep-fried turkey. It was good, but I wish I'd tried a slice of the primo breast meat.

About an hour after dinner, I was invited outside for my Screeching In ceremony. During the afternoon, we'd dropped into the local liquor store to pick up some beer and wine. While there, I spotted some Screech, which reminded me I wanted to be screeched in, so I mentioned it to Daddy. Well, next thing you know, half the town has heard there's someone in town who wants to be screeched in. Happily, someone in my cousin's family has a bar in town, and they had the entire kit for doing the Screeching in Ceremony. Ironically, a codfish was not available, they not being legal to fish just yet...there's a two-week cod-fishery every spring and fall for locals only, and NOT for commercial fishing. So a cod wasn't available, so I was Screeched in with... well, I think I'll save that story for another post.

After the Screeching in, I spent another couple of hours socializing, and then followed step mum upstairs when she said she was going to bed. I came into my room and checked my email and then turned out the light to go to sleep. My mind was racing with all the events of the day and evening, and eventually I noticed something. I was lying in bed smiling. Just a little smile, but it was definitely there...and it felt really nice.

As I thought about the reasons I was smiling though, I started to get emotional, and then I started to cry a little bit. Not sad crying, not happy crying. Just overflow of emotion crying. I couldn't help it. I guess being screeched in turned out to be a much more emotional event than I'd expected. And apparently I wasn't the only one to be so affected. Larry's wife Susan told me that when my father came in afterwards, he was sniffling and misty-eyed! So sweet.

But, while the Screeching in was a big deal for me and made me really happy...and made my cousins happy too, it seems...my emotions are all tied up with so much more and so much bigger things. And it seems that my cousin Wayne embodies all those things completely for me, because I find whenever I think of him, I just start crying again.

In my Day 1 post, I referred to Wayne as The Sweetest Man in the World. He really is. All my cousins are sweet, lovely, wonderful, special people. But there's something about Wayne that sets him apart. Something I connect to in a very deep way.

When I was here when I was 21, I was sitting in the kitchen of the mother of all these cousins I have here. Wayne and Harold and Helen and Ron and Larry. At one point, Wayne came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders and just stood there like that for a while. I think he may have said something about how nice it was to have me with them.

Something about that very simple gesture just moved me to the core. It seemed to embody everything I'd ever been missing family-wise in my whole life. Just being part of a big, extended family to begin with. Having people who loved me even though they didn't know me. Feeling safe and protected and part of something that reached backwards and forwards in time. Feeling connected. It was a rather miraculous thing for me to discover these people and know they were my family and would accept me no matter what.

And that's what Wayne symbolizes for me, I think. Complete and utter and unconditional love and acceptance. He always, always has a tiny smile on his face, and his soft voice and his way of leaning toward you and maybe putting his hand on your arm when he speaks to you...I don't know. I always feel like I'm being hugged when I'm around him. He's one of those people who's just affectionate and doesn't mind showing it, and I've had so few people like that in my life that I guess I just glory in it when I experience it. If there were more people like Wayne in the world, it would be a much better place. I guess he also seems to symbolize this place for me, because that memory of his hands on my shoulders when I was younger always comes back to me when I think of my first visit here, and it's the strongest memory I had of this place for the last 29 years.

Somehow, even though I'm here making new memories of this place, I suspect that one will continue to be the most special.