Trinity
"Trinity is what you imagine when you imagine an old Newfoundland village. The disorienting thing is that it actually exists."
I drove into Trinity in the early evening and the light was doing something specific — long and amber and coming off the water in a way that made everything look slightly oversaturated, like a photograph taken in a more dramatic light than you’d expect from a Tuesday in July. The village sits at the inner end of Trinity Bay and it has barely changed in two hundred years. Not metaphorically — architecturally, structurally, in the actual pattern of its streets and the placement of its buildings, Trinity looks more or less the way it did in the 1850s when it was a prosperous merchant town trading salt fish to Portugal and the Caribbean.
The preservation here is not the aggressive, interpretive kind. Nobody has installed a fake blacksmith or charged admission to the oldest house. Trinity is simply a village where the buildings happen to be old and beautiful and well-maintained, and where about four hundred people live their lives around them. The Ryan Premises here has been converted to a small inn; the Lester-Garland Premises on the waterfront is a museum that traces the history of the merchant trade. But mostly what you do in Trinity is walk. The roads are too narrow for two cars and the paths between houses run down to the water and along the hillside and you find yourself stopping constantly because the view is always a little better than the last one.
Whale watching from Trinity is some of the best in Newfoundland. The bay concentrates food — capelin and krill driven by currents against the headlands — and humpbacks feed here through June and July in numbers that are not guaranteed but are reliable enough that companies run daily tours from the wharf. I went out on a flat-calm morning and we found humpbacks within twenty minutes, three of them working in loose coordination through a ball of fish, their blows hanging in the cold air long after they’d submerged. A minke came alongside the boat for thirty seconds, rolled to show us one eye, and left.
The Rising Tide Theatre company has performed outdoor plays in Trinity every summer since 1993. The productions use the village itself as a stage — the church steps, the harbour, the merchant houses — and the plays deal with the history of Newfoundland fishing life with a specificity and grace that feels earned by the place. I saw a production about the cod moratorium — the 1992 announcement that ended commercial cod fishing — that reduced people in the audience to tears, because half of them remembered exactly where they were when they heard the news.
When to go: Late June through August. Whale watching is most productive in July. The Rising Tide summer theatre season runs July through August. The village can get busy in peak summer but never uncomfortably crowded — it is too small and too far off the Trans-Canada to attract large bus tour groups.