Imagine it’s August. You’re on hour nine of a 14-hour double. You’re covered in a veil of sweat with a layer of backsplash from the dishpit. Your eight-top wants to split the check five ways. You pick up a plate from the kitchen window that burns all 10 of your fingertips clean off. You try to take out the trash, but you aren’t strong enough, and now your back hurts and your shoes are covered in the juice that had pooled in the bottom of the bag. You haven’t eaten in 10 hours, so you’re picking at the cold scraps left over on someone’s plate, but doing it over the trash so if someone walks by, you can pretend you were throwing it away.
Then it’s November, and the O.B. ferry is done running for the season, the tourists are gone, and along with them, your paycheck.
Then it’s January, and you’re on a different Island, oceans away. You’ve been living out of a backpack for a few weeks, and you don’t have a flight booked home.
Hospitality workers on the Vineyard dissect their year into halves. The summer season is spent meeting the every need of our Island’s abundance of visitors, but the off-season offers other possibilities. Some people tough out the winter as work dials back, some fly to Florida to bartend on a beach where summer never ends, some move to Vermont or Colorado to work on ski mountains. And others take their summer savings and see how long they can last across the globe.
Seasonal work offers this kind of flexibility, which is hard to find elsewhere. It comes in exchange for some modern luxuries — health insurance, stable income, maybe even a home, but you are afforded the freedom of travel if you have the bug. Many of the Island’s favorite bartenders and waitresses spend the off-season exploring a different country, where the American dollar is stronger, and they can stretch a summer’s earnings across several months until they return to the Island to do it again.
There are many different ways to globetrot, and each offers a very different experience. Here are two different sides of the same adventurous coin.
If you have indulged in a cold beer in Oak Bluffs, you may recognize Sophia Czarowicz. This past summer was her second working seasonally on Island.
During the season, Czarowicz’s busiest shift falls on Sunday, when she opened the Ritz Cafe and closed the Alley, ringing in a 14-hour double. After 7 hours of slinging PBRs and Pocket Dogs, she leaves work on Circuit Ave. and walks over to Kennebec, where she greets her regulars at the Alley and prepares for another shift with last call at 12:30, and closing sidework keeping her at the bar, occasionally until 2 am.
To Czarowicz, the trade-off is beyond worth it. “I definitely recommend,” said Czarowicz, “I mean, it’s the best situation you’re gonna get where you can travel for months and have a job waiting for you. It’s pretty intense on both ends, but yeah, 100 percent.” From diving with sharks in Thailand to cooking classes in Vietnam to getting a tattoo from the oldest living tattoo artist in the world in the Philippines, Czarowicz’s winter was filled with adventure.
In February, Czarowicz met up with Alexis Barnes, another bartender who also works at the Alley, as well as the Covington in Edgartown. Other than that, Czarowicz’s journey was done independently. “It’s lovely,” she said, “I feel like when I’m with other people I tend to give up what I want to do to make everyone else happy. So being solo, I can really just do whatever I want, whenever I want.”
The summer season is long and busy, and there’s only so many times someone can walk out on their tab, or send back their food, or tell you you should smile more before it gets to you. “I’m exhausted, but it’s worth it,” said Czarowicz. “I’m so drained by the end of the season. I think it’s so important to have a solid day off, because being overworked is bad for everyone.”
Czarowicz’s mother, as well as her grandparents, were born and raised on Martha’s Vineyard, which gives her the added advantage of someplace on-Island to stay. “I feel so lucky that I can do it, and I’m lucky that I have somewhere on the Island to stay for free,” she said.
Tatum Bryan is also a member of this seasonal shuffling cohort. This past summer she worked at Offshore Ale Co. in Oak Bluffs, and this year she will also begin working at the Lookout Tavern.
Bryan entered the service industry on the Island in 2020, when she was 17 years old, as a host at the Black Dog Tavern. This winter, after another summer of catering to tourists, she crossed the globe and became a tourist who was catered to.
Her journey began in January in Bangkok, Thailand. By February she was living in Hoi An, a small city on the central coast of Vietnam, where she was working at a hostel in exchange for housing. She ended her adventure in Lombok, Indonesia, where she leaned into the surfing lifestyle of the small island east of Bali.
“I’m so fortunate to have a place where I can come and just make a large sum of money through tourism that I can go and give back to an economy that maybe isn’t as fortunate,” said Bryan.
As opposed to Czarowicz’s fast-paced method of travel, Bryan moved much more slowly, stating that while she may have seen less of the world, her pace allowed her to fully immerse herself in the culture and community she came across.
“The purpose of my trip was to find purpose,” said Bryan “to find a place I love as much as Martha’s Vineyard, and I did.” She found this place on Lombok, Indonesia, in a small town on the south coast of the island called Kuta.
Martha’s Vineyard in the summer can be chaotic, especially with two service jobs. You’re rushing to work from work, and at work you’re rushing from table to table. In Kuta, Bryan was able to move slowly and intentionally, and the summer chaos paid off, because in Indonesia she truly had nowhere to rush to.
The pace of life in Kuta allowed Bryan to explore a more calm version of herself. As her work on the Vineyard starts once again, she feels more peaceful stepping into the season. “I feel like that version still exists a little bit in me,” said Bryan.
Although temporary, Bryan built a life on Lombok. She found a favorite coffee shop, knew her way around the neighborhood, hosted friends she had met on previous travels, and fell in love with both the people and the place she found herself in. She built a life she plans to return to come October, when work on the Vineyard slows and the summer visitors dwindle.
Looking forward to another season, Bryan plans to keep her head down, work 65 hours a week, and save her money. “There’s burnout mid-July, and then there’s a burnout around mid-August, and I just cry a lot, and I am angry, but I’m gonna try and fight the midsummer blues this year,” said Bryan.
While the summer tourists enjoy their vacation, taking in the beaches and the sunsets, industry workers both in the front and the back of the house are working hard to offer the Island’s guests the quintessential Martha’s Vineyard experience, one they themselves are often giving up.
So as the season begins to pick up, be kind to the people standing between your hungry mouth and your dayboat tuna steak, and ask them about how they spent their winter.
For the journalistic integrity of this piece, the author herself, Ella Munnelly, also packed a backpack and went out into the world to wander. After spending five months traveling through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Japan, she encourages everyone who is able to go elsewhere, try new food, and learn from the people you meet.