Six Questions with Deb Fleischman and Gary Miller: Finders of the Trove’s Armchair Treasure Hunt Prize

The armchair treasure hunt and book, Trove, by Sandra Miller, was published in September 2019.  Twice each month clues were released, until the final clue was released on Christmas Day 2019. These clues led Deb Fleischman and Gary Miller (no relation to the author) in search of a coded stone to claim Trove’s Jeweled Bracelet valued at $2,200.   They found the hidden stone July 16 2020!   A huge congrats!

I always love hearing from those who found treasure. Their stories inspire us all to know Treasures are out there to find and encourage us on our own journeys. I was so happy to catch up with Deb and Gary to ask them the following Six Questions about their treasure hunt adventure! Enjoy!

Six Questions with Deb and Gary:

• 1Q) First congrats, and Thank you for participating in Six Questions. When did you first hear about the Trove Treasure Hunt?  What inspired you to decide to take up the challenge? Had you worked on any previous armchair treasure hunts?

Gary: We heard about the hunt when Sandra announced it on her blog. We know Sandra and both loved Trove, so we decided to jump in. (Note: she played fair and we didn’t even ask about extra help.) But we’d never done anything like this. At first, it seemed impossible, like learning a foreign language. But Deb was relentless. She wasn’t giving up until we found that numbered stone!

Deb: The closest I ever came to treasure hunting was vicariously through watching that madcap treasure hunt, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World a million times on TV when I was growing up, but until I read Trove, I was not really aware of armchair treasure hunts except the intimate ones a group of my friends designed for our kids when they were young. We had them traipse through the woods finding and solving clues and it was a blast. I got interested in the hunt after reading the book. If the clues were in it, I’d find them. How hard could it be? Actually, truth be told, Gary HATES puzzles and when I tried to get him involved in solving the clues, he told me I was on my own. But I am not really the silent type and did a lot of “processing” out loud so at some point he caught the bug.

• 2Q) Can you share the highlights of how the clues led you to the location? Had you felt you solved every clue and knew exactly where to go or was there still some questions when searching?

Gary: Deb went to MIT. She has a mathematical and puzzling mind. I don’t, and I generally don’t enjoy puzzles of any kind. The first breakthrough was the clue about “the place of great tempest.” We both had read The Perfect Storm and seen the movie. How could it be anyplace but Gloucester? Some of the other clues made us, well, clueless. But the hardest clue was the first one: “a many-trunked maple, while small in stature, a New England staple.” There are BILLIONS of maples in New England. Which one was it? It drove us to the brink! At one point, the phrase “many-trunked maple” was banned in our house.

Deb: Gary privately claims he figured out the treasure was in Gloucester when we got the clue about the place being the sight of a great tempest. I’ve only read Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm a about three times and saw the movie a half dozen times so I am positive I figured that one out.Gary was convinced that certain other clues also pointed to Gloucester, and as it turns out, although we had the wrong answers to some of those clues, ironically, they led us to the right place.

For example, he thought the emerald lake referred to this emerald pool in the Hammond Castle Museum in Gloucester and that the falling mine was a reference to the inventor John Hammond, who was worked on weapons technologies during WWI. I thought the reference to Owls Head was a painting by Fitz Henry Lane in the permanent collection at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester. But as Sandra explained, emerald lake and owls head are the names of New England State parks. We definitely did not solve every clue.

I thought the 5 numbers math clue was all about matching the titles of the chapters with their corresponding chapter number, so I ended with up five numbers and could not for the life of me figure out what to do with them. I thought they must be coordinates of some kind and worked on latitude and longitude, patterns in Dog Town, another nearby place in Gloucester we had earmarked, which had numbers associated with former houses that had been demolished 100 years ago but were still on a map we found of some walking tour of the area.

We thought the many trunked maple was a metaphor for a ship with masts made out of maple until we found out masts were not made out of hardwood. We also thought the many trunks could be a metaphor for a family tree and thought some people named Maple were all buried in some cemetery in Gloucester. I could go on.

When I did the math on the final clue, zoomed in on a photo of the Tablet Rock and subtracted, we imagined we would just go there, look for a crack in that rock and find the stone. I KNEW it was there. It HAD to be. But we searched for six hours in the freezing cold and didn’t find it. That was on December 26.

We had booked a hotel on Dec 25 in Gloucester because we knew Sandra was releasing the final clue that night and I wanted to be there in town to be the first to get to the treasure. We searched for the maple tree in vain. First of all, the leaves were off the tree. It was winter. But when we looked down on the ground, all we found were oak leaves. Look, we live in Vermont. We know what a maple leaf looks like. But we were in the middle of a literal oak grove. Maples don’t generally grow with oaks. Maybe Sandra didn’t know a maple from an oak!

When we couldn’t find it after searching every crack in and around that tablet rock and beyond, we went to a coffee shop to warm up and found an elderly distinguished man reading a book. He just looked like a God to us, and it turned out he was a local historian of sorts, at least about Gloucester. We ran the clues by him for about an hour to no avail even though he did tell us some cool facts about Gloucester. Then we went back out in the cold and searched again for another 3 hours before giving up.

• 3Q) It had to be such an awesome feeling to pull out the coded stone!  Will you share some of how you felt when you knew you found the stone to claim the treasure? Was it worth all the effort?

Gary: It was just unbelievable. We first came to Gloucester on Christmas Day and searched for hours in the frigid sea wind. Our hands were like Freeze Pops. And we went home feeling defeated. What we didn’t know was that we were just 100 feet from the treasure. When we found it, we just looked at each other and kept yelling “We did it! We did it!”

Deb: So, here’s the deal. The night before I told Gary that I needed to get out of Vermont and get to an ocean. Going Covid crazy. He wanted to go to Maine, and I said why don’t we go to Gloucester, which is also on the ocean, about the same distance, and we can look for the treasure too. “Let’s just review the clues again,” I said. “I’ll just go get my journal.” That’s where I had all my notes.

Gary’s heart had gone out of the chase and he made it clear he did not want to revisit any clues. I went on a manhunt for my journal, turned the house upside down and COULD NOT find it. Now it’s about 11:30 pm and I’m trying to read every clue and take some new notes based on my memory. Then I jump to the two after-hours clues Sandra supplied about a month or two ago, which we had read when she posted them but felt didn’t add anything new to the equation.

One of those clues was a fun one written in pirate talk. The first thing that struck me the second time round was the “fathom and a pace.” So, I looked them up and the former is 6 ft and the latter 2.5 feet. Ok. The treasure is 8.5 feet from the maple, which as Sandra had stated in one of those add-on clues, that sometimes a maple tree is just that. So, we figure, it’s summer. How hard would it be to find a maple even if it was “small in stature?” The leaves will be on the tree!

Then in the same clue I read about the “ups and downs”,” two of each.” And something about nearly sliding into the maple. So, we have to go up two hills and down two hills or up two boulders and down two, up two mountains…? And either we were in the right place at the wrong time or we were not even in the right state. Whatever, at least we would be by the ocean. I couldn’t sleep at all that night and we headed out the next morning to Gloucester with homemade chicken salad sandwiches for a picnic, treasure or no. We found it in about 20 minutes and that included the time it took to go back to the car and change into long pants and sneakers because poison ivy was everywhere.  

• 4Q) Besides of course finding the treasure, what was your favorite part of the Trove treasure hunt?

Gary: For me, it was sitting in our living room before Christmas working with our kids Maddie and Eli and Eli’s girlfriend Emily and trying to figure out clues. It was a real family time. I also loved discovering Gloucester, which a seriously cool little city.

Deb: Gary found the maple tree in no time but now that we found “a” maple, I was not convinced there was just one. Maybe there were more. We could have taken many ups and downs in different directions. BUT, then we saw a kid from out of nowhere sliding down a rock toward our tree. OMG. That sealed the deal. It was here and only a matter of time, seconds it turned out, before we found it. 

• 5Q) What was your least favorite part of the Trove treasure hunt?  Was there ever a time you thought about giving up?

Gary: When we came to Gloucester on Christmas Day, we didn’t realize EVERYTHING would be closed. Dinner was a bag of barbecue chips and a hunk of salami. See also “hands like Freeze Pops,” above.

Deb: Ditto. At the end of that day, we started to question everything. Even my math! Maybe it was in Maine or Rhode Island. Or if it was in Gloucester, maybe it was at the Eastern Point Lighthouse. In Ravenwood Park. At the spiritual rock, which actually has the word “spiritual” carved into the boulder in Dogtown! I was dejected and worn out and we had shelled out money for a hotel. Plus, I wouldn’t have a story to tell our kids.

• 6Q) Now that Trove is over, and the beautiful bracelet claimed, do you plan on working on another treasure hunt?

Gary: It was so much fun that I wouldn’t rule it out. But we are 1-0. Maybe we should retire undefeated. Meanwhile, I’ll be trout fishing.

Deb: I lOVE the bracelet!! I love that Sandra’s life is in those jewels. Though, I actually think I love the stone more. Finding that stone was so exhilarating. It was a personal journey with a beginning, middle, and end. The fairytale ending—the prince finding Cinderella. The shoe fit, feminism notwithstanding. It was also a literary conquest. I read Trove backward and forward 3 times. I was inside Sandra’s book. Her life. Her father and mother. Her marriage. Her own cartharsis. I could quote whole passages from it. I excavated that book like my own life depended on it, as I’m sure she had felt writing it.

If another treasure hunt beckons, I better start getting in shape now because it does take over your life. For a while this hunt was like a full-time job. I called park rangers. I called discovery museums looking for a snake in a den. I texted my friend Robby, a tree expert, asking him to help me identify the bark of a maple. I talked to the Cape Ann museum curator and the Gloucester librarian. I was obsessively online day and night looking for clues. It was all consuming. I underlined and took prodigious notes like I was back in college. It felt great to piece the puzzle together and get so many people involved. Frustrating when it led in 14 different directions. There is an OCD quality to it, but tenacity can be a great thing when it leads finally to discovery.