Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - More Postcards from Canada – Tofino & Halifax

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

You asked, we listened! So, this week on the pod, we’ve got two more of Stuart’s love letters to this country, what we call his Postcards from Canada.Ad-free listening is here! Listen to the pod ad-free and early, PLUS a whole bunch of other goodies – like virtual parties, Q&As, listener shout-outs & more. Subscribe here: apostrophe.supercast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the apostrophe podcast network. Hello, I'm Jess Milton, and this is backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Welcome. We've received a beautiful letter recently, and I wanted to share it with you. It came from listener David Norenberg. I'd asked for feedback on the podcast. I asked you, the audience, what you liked and what you didn't like. I asked if there was anything specific you'd like to hear.

And David answered that call. Hi, Jess, wrote David. My request for What Else is to include occasionally one of the opening monologues where Stewart introduced some quaint little Canadian town. I was listening to the Vinyl Cafe from Northern New York. I ventured to Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto for culture. I fell in love with those cities, but Stuart helped me fall in love with the whole country. When I met my future wife in Canadian, deciding to immigrate was easy, and I often wonder

how many other immigrants found the vinyl cafe an integral part of their transition. That came to us from David in northern New York. I'm so glad people still ask for these stories. I call them postcards from Canada. We used to open the live vinyl cafe concerts with these essays. They were Stewart's love letters to this country. They weren't always about landmarks or tourist stops. Sometimes they were about a river or a coffee shop, a person. Sometimes they were about how a place made him feel. People still write to us about these essays.

They say they're planning road trips based on Stewart's postcards. So today, we're bringing you two more postcards from Canada, two postcards about places or people that make you feel big things. In the first half of the show, it's about a place that filled Stewart with big feelings. In the second half of the show, it's about a person that made him feel that way. We'll start on the West Coast in one of the most breathtaking places I've ever been. When Josh, my husband, when Josh and I daydream or fantasize about picking up our life and moving somewhere else entirely, This is what we fantasize about.

This is where we would run off to, to escape to. This is Stuart McLean with Tefino. From the Claquit Sound Community Theater in beautiful Tefino, British Columbia, it's the Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean. Come on. Thank you. My goodness, thank you very much. The Claquit Sound 72C. community theater. I never knew 72 people could make so much noise. Thank you very much.

Well, it takes about three hours to twist your way from the port town of Nanaimo on the developed east side of Vancouver Island, up and over the Beaufort Mountains to the rugged west coast, to the remote town of Tafino, British Columbia. The day we make the journey, it is foggy and raining. In other words, no different than any other winter day. And the further we drive, the thicker the fog and the more relentless the rain. Soon after we head off, we pull over and slosh around the nature trail at Cathedral Grove, a little stand of towering trees, 800-year-old moss-covered Douglas fir that bring to mind forest creatures too primal to name. And then we drip back to the car and continue.

Somewhere past Port Albarnie, Jess, who was sitting in the passenger seat, says, I feel like we've been driving through a car wash for the last hour. Pretty soon the waterfall spilling down the rock faces beside the road have become so common that we've stopped pointing them out. Pretty soon we're passing signs warning us to slow down because of water ponding on the road ahead. By the time we finally pawned in. into Tefino, the moss and the rain and the fog have conspired to make us feel as if we have entered some forgotten prehistoric world. And then we check into the Wiccan Innes Inn, and all notions of prehistory

vaporized. After five minutes, alone in my room, which I spend staring at the gray, roiling Pacific, I begin to wonder if I've just checked into my favorite hotel anywhere. The Wic, hangs off the rocky edge of the ocean like a private yacht. My room, an ocean view, feels as if it could at any moment, haul anchor and sail away, which, of course, it could. Nothing comes free of charge, and the price of admission to this paradise is the uncomfortable knowledge that at any moment

there's a one in ten chance over the next 50 years, the Cascadia fault line will finally give way, and there will be a cataclysmic shutter up and down the coast. There are little blue signs with white graphic waves along the highway. In other places, they'd be pointing the way to the beach. Here in Tafino, they're pointing to the tsunami evacuation routes. Don't even think about it, I whisper urgently to Jess, when she almost hands the keys of our rental vehicle to the hotel valet.

After the earthquake we will have, I read, a mere 20 minutes to escape the expected tsunami. I don't want to spend any of them waiting at the front desk while some distracted clerk searches for our missing car keys. Or worse, standing in the parking lot just before the wave hits, staring at the red glow of our taillights as our valet heads for high ground. No one here seems fussed. Either everyone has their piece of humph. ground staked out, or they have embraced the idea that the privilege of this place is worth the risk. So I stand by my window, awed by the ocean crashing on the rocks below me, and the wind blowing the feathery plumes off the top of the waves and back out to sea. We have come here to the edge of the continent, to what feels like the very edge of the earth, during the famous,

stormy months, and we've had the good fortune to have arrived in the midst of a storm. They line up, the storms do, over the Pacific, back to back, and they build as they cross the ocean, and this is where they hit. Sometimes so hard that the wind shrieks and the rain comes sideways, the sea foam is blown into the forest, and even the towering old growth is set swaying back and forth. Today, safe in my room, I notice a family of 20 seals rolling in the surf on Chesterman Beach. There are binoculars on the mantle. This hotel thinks of everything. When I pick them up, however, I realize that my seals are actually black-suited surfers. Girls and boys who track the storms across the Pacific and arrive on the beach just before the waves. These days,

they come in numbers that can rival surfers along the California coast. I have been here a week now. I have shivered my way down the beach in my soaked through, previously waterproof rain jacket, sat by the fire and watched the mind-emptying ocean for hours on end. the waves coming one after another like the cars of an endless freight train, the spray and the foam and the seabirds bobbing in the surf like little canoes. And when, sadly, I must leave, and someone asks me what it's like here, I will tell them that in this remote little town of 1800 souls, wedged precariously between the forest and the ocean,

this place on the edge of everything. I ate in restaurants as good as restaurants in any big city and better, and stayed in the most elegant hotel I know. And just like they say, the waves are breathtaking, and the trees too. And if they push me for more details, if they say what else, what did you do, what did you learn, I'll tell them three stories. The first, about the evening I walked along South Beach with a beachcomer. Well, everyone in town is a beachcomer of sorts.

Everyone has their eyes out for the holy grail of beach detritus, the glass balls the Japanese used to use to float their fishing nets before they replace them with plastic. The ocean, says Pete Clarkson, the beachcomer I am walking with, is a great sorter. It sorts things out and groups them. Things that belong together arrive together. Pete started finding tsunami debris about nine months after the 2011 tsunami in Japan, sandals, children's toys, the top of a traditional tea table. and then one day a plastic shipping pallet. The pallet had Japanese writing on it.

A volunteer who had come from Japan to here to help clean the beaches was able to translate the writing. When he went home, he found the owner, who asked if he could have the pallet back. Part of me thought it was silly, said Pete, packing up a pallet and plastic wrap. Yet when it was returned to Japan, the pallet owner wept. He had nothing left from his little family business.

Everything had all been swept away. The ocean that keeps us apart also brings us together. I spent Thursday morning beside a cheery wood stove in a one-es-a-one, room cabin nestled in the dark green forest right on the edge of the beach. Giselle Martin is a member of the Kla-Oquiet First Nation. We talked about many things, about language and culture and wilderness and diet, and how all the old stories say it was normal for her people to have lived to 111 years in the days before European contact.

But the story I will tell, when I get home, my second story, is what Giselle said about salmon. Your people think of the salmon as a creature from the sea, she said to me. Many First Nations people think of it as a forest creature. Salmon are born in the forest, she said, in the little forest streams. And they spend their first years in the forest. They only head for the ocean as teenagers. As adults, they fight to get back to the forest to die.

Most of the nitrogen on the forest floor comes from salmon. The bears pull the salmon out of the streams and leave what they don't eat on the banks. Over and over again, you are reminded here that things are never what they seem to be. that the world is big and it is complicated. The seals are surfers. The salmon live in the forest. The most solid place you can imagine. All this rock, all these giant trees,

will one day be swallowed. We are small and unimportant. And time passes like a wave along the foam-flecked beach. And like any wave, we are here and then we are gone. And maybe the best we can do while we are here is sit by the fire and stare in wonder. I am so glad I finally made it to your town. I have wanted to come for so long. Now that I have been, I will come back.

And when I do, if the waves wash, me away, so be it. One day I will be washed away by the wave of time anyway, and time spent here amongst the waves is time well spent. I said I'll take home three memories of Tafina. The last one, the third, is of Giselle Martin, gazing out her cabin window through the Salal bushes and the Sitka spruce down to the beach and then across the beach out to the gray ocean. Tell me what you see, I asked, so I can describe it in your words. There is a silence, and I sit and watch as she stares intently out her window, and finally turns to me and says, what I see is that I have a lot.

to learn. That was Stuart McLean, recorded in Tifino, British Columbia in 2015, and I think that was the smallest venue we ever played, 72 seats. Such a fun night. We're going to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a couple of minutes with another postcard from Canada, so stick around. Welcome back.

Time for another postcard from Canada. One of the things I love about these postcards is how varied they are. Sometimes the story is about a place. It's geography, it's history. Sometimes it's about a person. This next one is both. It's a postcard from Halifax, and it's about a remarkable woman named Ruth Goldblum.

From the Rebecca Cohen Auditorium in Halifax, Nova Scotia, It's the Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean. Thank you very much. Well, it's good to be back in Nova Scotia, and it's especially good to be here in Halifax. This province, the city, is a sort of second home to this show. Nova Scotia, you know, is where Dave hails from. So I've felt a lot about what I should say here on the show,

now I mean, to start, because, well, as you know, it is my habit to say something at the beginning. When I thought of all the things that I could say about being here, what I decided what I like to do is this. I'd like to take a few moments to say a few words about Ruth Goldblum. I thought you might feel like that. I thought those of you who are listening at home who do not live here and might not know Ruth, who might be wondering who she might be,

I thought you might be interested in hearing about her too. So where to begin? How to describe Ruth Goldblum. Shall I start at the beginning, which is never a bad idea? Or should I start at the end? When she died this summer, the plan was to hold Ruth's funeral at Pier 21, Canada's National Museum of Immigration. The museum that she pretty much single-handedly willed into existence was her wish to hold her funeral there,

but they had to move it next door to the Canard Center because the museum wasn't big enough. Over 2,500 people showed up. It was, by all accounts, the biggest and most joyful funeral in Halifax's history. That would be the end, I guess. though anyone who knew Ruth well, which would be every second person here in Halifax, anyone who knew her well would be hard pressed to say that her death marked the end of her. The beginning? Well, if you're going to start at the beginning, we would start on the 5th of December in 1923 in New Waterford, Nova Scotia.

New Waterford was a grimy coal mining town in 1927. and that was the year Ruth was born, kind of place where the main street was paved on one side and still dirt on the other. And the dirt side was the smoother ride. Ruth's family came from Russia, Jewish family, who came to Nova Scotia to New Waterford, of all places, looking, well, looking for what every immigrant family is looking for, looking for a better life. They were in the rag trade, Schwartz's clothing store. When I say they, Ruth's father died when he was 35, so Ruth was raised by her mother. Her widowed mother ran the store, and running a clothing store in New Waterford meant, well, it meant the phone might ring any time, might ring at midnight.

Deary, could you open the store? Isabel passed, because, of course, you would want to get poor old Isabel into a new dress as soon as you could, so she could be laid out fine in the living room first thing in the morning. Ruth's mom rose, Schwartz, knew everyone in town, knew their size and what they liked. Oh, Isabelle looked lovely and blue. But how much is that dress, Mrs. Schwartz? Why, it's only 2195. Well, Mrs. Schwartz, that's a lot of money.

Yes, it is, but that's a washable dress. Ruth was born into sales. But she trained as a tap dancer. She was something of a protege, although how much competition could there have been in New Waterford in 1920. Mother used to put her on the Sydney bus for her weekly lesson. Pretty soon she was dancing in every fundraiser between New Waterford and Sydney. One of the family's treasured childhood possessions,

a family heirloom of sorts, is a country. card advertising one benefit. Friday night it reads, Ruth Schwartz will tap dance. Police protection provided. She went away to college, supposedly to Queens, but she got off the train in Montreal instead

and talked her way into McGill University. Pretty soon she was bringing her boyfriend, a young medical student named Richard Goldblum, back to New Waterford for the summer. It's a great place for the summer. a young man who wanted to be a doctor to spend his summers. They hired him at the 50-bed Wood Frame Hospital, and before he knew it, Richard, the summer student, was delivering babies and suturing wounds and performing appendectomies. If they had any idea what I did down there,

said Richard, when I had lunch with him earlier this week, they would have thrown me in jail. There were only four doctors in town, and they still attended, well, whole. home births, for instance. The stories are legendary. The mother in the late stages of labor, her six or eight kids gathered around watching the action, watching to see if they were getting a brother or a sister. And when the answer was delivered, the littlest one looking up at the doctor, Doc, said the boy, how'd that baby get in the mutter's stomach? Well, said the doctor, your father planted a seed there. Boy thinks that over, and then he shoots the doctor a disparaging.

Look, don't give me that guff, doctor. My father's too lazy to mow the lawn. Richard told me that one. And how Ruth was the love of his life. Ruth, who loved to laugh and tap dance, should still do it at the drop of a hat when she was in her late 80s, up on the table at every second Halifax fundraiser. It is hard to describe her energy and humor, said Bob Ray, when I asked him.

And then he paused and he said, she was, you know, one of the greatest people I have come to know. Thoughtful and public-spirited, energetic and enthusiastic. Ruth and Richard moved to Halifax in 1967. where Ruth soon became the first woman chair of the Halifax United Way, the fundraising chair for the Children's Hospital, fundraising chair for Mount St. Vincent University, a woman's Catholic university.

I've never heard of Mount St. Vincent's, wrote J.W. McConnell of the Montreal McConnell Foundation when Ruth wrote to him and asked for a donation. But if they hired a nice Jewish girl to fundraise for them, they can't be all that bad. Everyone will give you a list of things that Ruth accomplished here in Halifax, the hospitals, the university,

the United Way, the symphony. And, of course, the creation of the National Museum of Immigration at the old Pier 21. Canada's Ellis Island. The place where immigrants arrived in Canada if they arrived by sea between the 1920s and the 1970s.

The disembarkation point. From there, or from here, they got on trains and dispersed across the country. The idea of taking that old terminal that was Pier 21 and turning it into a National Museum of Immigration wasn't Ruth's, but without Ruth wouldn't have happened. Ruth understood pretty much before anyone else that Pier 21 was an important place to preserve, that it would become a Canadian touchstone. She was for over a decade the heart and the soul of the movement to preserve it. And she remained the heart and soul of it once it opened. Having fundraised it into existence, having cajoled business men and business women and more than one prime minister to pony up what they

could pony up, Ruth decided if the museum was going to continue, there should be a $7 million dollar endowment fund. Someone decided they'd try to recruit seven people and get them to donate a million dollars each. A lot of people were skeptical about that. But Roth believed it was

possible. Routh believed anything was possible. She had this way of persuading people to do things. Here's a story. When her three children were young, before they moved to Halifax, when she and Richard were living in

Montreal. A young boy from the neighborhood knocked on their door one day and asked if they'd like him to deliver the Montreal Gazette every morning. Ruth thought that would be nice. She agreed to a subscription to the morning paper as long as the boy didn't leave it on the front stoop. She wanted him to bring it into the house and then upstairs into her bedroom. And he did for over two years. And when there was a family reunion this autumn, someone convinced the now owners of that old house

to allow the extended family to return for a tour. And when they arrived, there was the paper boy, an adult now waiting by the door, Gazette in hand. The point is, Ruth could get people to do things they would never dream of doing, just by asking. She never forced anyone to say yes. She gave them the opportunity to move outside of the margins. She allowed them to be their best selves.

And in doing so, she enriched their lives. She had a special relationship with everybody. And so today, here I am in Halifax. And I would like to say this. Here's to Ruth Goldblum. She represented the best of us. She was fiercely Canadian and fierce in her need to contribute. And she was fiercely kind and fiercely funny.

She believed anything was possible. And she went out and proved that was so. She was the daughter of a poor immigrant family who gave more back than she ever received. She was joyful, a tap dancer who refused to see the bad in people. She was intolerant of bad table manners and little else. She stuck her nose in other people's business. And if she could, she told them how to do their business better.

And now she's gone. And it would do us all good from time to time. To wonder what Ruth Goldblum would have to say, about our table manners or anything really, the way we talk to one another, the way we are tap dancing through the days. She was one of a kind. We are better that she was among us. We are diminished by her passing. That was Stuart McLean. We recorded that story at the Rebecca Cohen Auditorium in Halifax, Nova Scotia, back in 20. All right, that's it for today, but we will be back here next week with two Dave and Morley stories.

Something inexplicable happens when a man picks up a tool to do home repairs. Some force is yet undescribed by science, but nevertheless well known to women. It's a force that lures men away from their families and the things they're supposed to be doing to a place where hammers are being. swan. Maybe the act of a hammer moving through the air sets off a cosmic thrumming, only men can hear. Or maybe when a man picks up a screwdriver, he releases an odor. Only men with tools can smell. It's a musty, yeasty, sweet sort of smell with a handle leather in WD40. And men in their backyards raking leaves and men in their basements listening to ball games on portable radios are seized by this odor only they can smell.

It seizes them like the urge to migrate, seizes lesser species. And suddenly they're thinking, I don't belong here anymore. I belong in another place, and I should be doing something else, and I should take my coping saw with me just in case. Men can sense it when a wall is coming down,

and they can't help the fact that they have to be there to watch it fall, or better yet, help push it over. It's been argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall had nothing whatsoever to do with the collapse of communism. It was just a weekend project that got out of control. That's next week on the podcast. I hope you'll join us.

Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe is part of the apostrophe podcast network. The recording engineer is Holy Grail of Beach Detritus Greg Declude. Theme music is by Degree. Danny Michelle, and the show is produced by Louise Curtis, Greg DeCleut, and me, Jess Milton. Let's meet again next week. Until then, so long for now.