Great Expectations

To the editor: For me, perhaps the most beautiful moment of the year happens somewhere on the road through southeastern Massachusetts. It is spring, and I am making my way toward Hyannis and the ferry that will take me back to Nantucket. By the time I arrive at the terminal, get out of the car, and look across the water toward the island, something has already changed in me.

Everything is blue. The sky. The harbor. The water stretching toward Nantucket. The fresh fragrances of new grass and flowers permeate the air. And standing there, wide-eyed and waiting for another season to begin, every hope, every dream, every possibility seems alive again. It is always an energizing and exciting moment for me. I feel fully alive and believe all things are possible.

Then August arrives.

By mid-August, those great expectations have collided with reality. For those of us who work the Nantucket season, summer is something different from what it is for the people arriving on the boats. Visitors come here to escape their ordinary lives. We are here to help them do it. And I love much of that. I enjoy meeting people from all over the country and the world. I like telling someone where to find a quiet beach, where to watch the sunset, or how to spend one precious day on an island they may have dreamed about visiting for years. This is important work. The vast majority of visitors are happy to be here, and I am happy to engage them.

But there is another side of hospitality that I never completely understood until I lived it. There are people on this island doing extraordinarily demanding physical work every day—landscapers, housekeepers, construction workers, kitchen crews, dock workers and countless others. Their exhaustion is real and visible. But dealing with people all day, every day, can drain you too. Even if every interaction were pleasant. And they aren't.

Some things are simply part of the job. An alarm starts chirping in the room next door. Someone loses a key at midnight. A wedding party comes home celebrating a little more enthusiastically than the sleeping guests might prefer. You deal with it. Hospitality, after all, comes from the idea of welcoming the traveler. Someone has entrusted a small piece of their vacation to you, and you want to help make it wonderful.

But then there is that small percentage of guests. You know the ones. They don't leave their dysfunction on the mainland. They pack it carefully and bring it with them.
And somewhere around the middle of August, I find myself having conversations inside my own head:

No, I will not do your laundry at 10 o'clock at night.

No, I will not go into town, buy roses and scatter the petals down the hallway and across your bed so you can impress your girlfriend.

And no, if you simply decide not to show up at the last minute, I cannot magically make the cost of the empty room disappear.

Then I remind myself: They are travelers. They are guests. Be kind. Smile. And by mid-August, sometimes I find myself sitting slumped in a chair, gathering enough energy to get my mouth to move in a positive direction.

There is a kind of exhaustion that comes not from lifting something heavy, but from being available. From answering. From listening. From solving. From smiling when you don't particularly feel like smiling. From absorbing someone else's frustration without handing it back to them. That, too, is work.

On my precious hours off, I get on my bicycle and ride through town. By August, even that can become an exercise in patience—cars inching through intersections, pedestrians stepping into the street, bicycles coming from every direction, delivery trucks squeezing into spaces that don't seem large enough to hold them. Sometimes getting from one end of town to the other feels like a lesson Nantucket has devised specifically for me. Patience. Humility. Perseverance. Keep pedaling.

But then I reach Polpis Harbor or Wauwinet, where I keep my kayaks, and push out onto the water. Or I head out toward Great Point. Almost immediately, the negativity disappears. I am in a different world. And perhaps that is the strange bargain of a Nantucket summer.

In the spring, I stand in Hyannis looking across the blue water toward the island and imagine everything that might happen. By August, I am no longer imagining. I am enduring. But there is something valuable in that, too. Because eventually September will come. The streets will begin to empty. The bicycles will have room again. The evenings will grow quieter. One morning there will be a slight chill in the air, and those of us who made it through another August will recognize it immediately.

And someday, months from now, I will once again find myself on that road through southeastern Massachusetts. I will arrive in Hyannis. I will get out of the car or off the bus, will look across the water toward Nantucket with newfound energy, and I will feel that all things are possible.

Charles Dundee