i don't care about your vacation :)

an open letter from service industry workers in the aftermath of labor day weekend

It’s almost forty minutes past our trip end time and I’m on my hands and knees scrubbing out boats while the group watches as the sun sets.

We got a late start due to a nearby medical emergency, so my co-guide and I chose to stay late and run the trip in it’s entirety anyhow, adding on an extra half hour or so to our evening. It’s not an obligation of ours to do so and take our own time to stay, but a choice we made; we don’t get paid for the extra time.

At this point we have well fulfilled our late start time and change, and I am tired.

They watch the sunset while I scrub and it has already been a long day at the end of a long summer. Earlier, I walked in on a man complaining about me to my boss because he didn’t like my answer to a question he’d asked me— “which direction should I paddle?”. I’d given him quick and honest route advice to the best of my ability in the moment, but he apparently hadn’t liked it.

It felt terrible.

The sun sets, and I do the math on just how late we are now (very, over an hour). There’s no place open in town to get food past nine, and I don’t have dinner ready save a backpacker meal and my camp stove in my car. We still have probably an hours worth of cleaning to do, and it’s near dark. We’re their ride back, and we can’t leave until they do.

Gently, I say to the group, “Thanks so much for coming out with us guys, and I really appreciate your patience earlier with the emergency delay. We’ve really got to get moving in the next few minutes here, my co-guide and I have quite a bit of cleaning yet to do tonight.”

A woman, girl really, probably 24, looks at me and says, “Well our trip started late, and it was really wavy and not what we imagined. We drove 10 hours to be here and it’s our vacation so I think we can stay on the beach and watch the sunset as long as we want.”

I think that my expectations about my vacation matter more than your time. I think that you should stay late because I drove ten hours to be here. I feel entitled to your time and your labor, and your well-being means nothing to me.

“Okay,” I say simply. I do not cry here to my credit, though I would very much like to dig a hole in the sand and simply die there.

I return to cleaning boats while they stand on the beach. I make it all the way back to the shop and don’t cry until they start complaining to my co-guide about how it wasn’t what they thought it would be, it was too wavy and they couldn’t go in to every cave and and I walk alway and lose it behind the boat shed.

I’m crying not necessarily because these particular people are difficult, but because of the collective stress of the summer, and the way they’d spoken to me earlier, and time after time of being talked about like I’m not even there, like I’m an animatronic and not a human. Time after time of being told implicitly by strangers that their expectations about what Lake Superior sea cave paddling should be is more important than being kind to me.

That their vacation matters more than treating me like a person.

I remember their names, because I make a point of learning everyone’s, even on a half day trip. I do not speak to them again after my simple “okay” because I do not care if they think I am rude, or bad at my job, or unkind. I do not give a flying fuck about their vacation.

I do not care if this is their one trip a year and it needed to be perfect and they’re having a rough time at work. I do not care if their relationship hinges on this trip going well, or how much money they spent on a bucket-list trip.

We did the entire route; we stayed well later than the initial delay accounted for. We ran the best possible tour to run in the conditions given. They got their sea cave photos and we paddled in the sunset.

Sometimes, coastal kayaking trips happen in the waves. Sometimes, wilderness adventure trips contain both wilderness and adventure. I don’t know what to tell people at a certain point.

The sea caves were literally carved out by wind, wave, and ice erosion. What makes them so remarkable is how exposed they are to the forces of nature; by nature of the beast, there is a good chance you will kayak in waves.

The Labor Day crowd tends to be particularly rough.

I think there’s something in the air as we all realize summer is almost gone. It’s the perfect storm—

On my end, the service industry end, we’ve all worked a long summer and the cumulative effects of that leave our patience a little thin (there’s just not that much left of me to give, and I’m tired of being spoken of like I’m not even there).

On the tourist end, it’s also been a long summer, and this is the last chance to really make something of it. Maybe you woke up and realized it’s August and it seems like everyone around you is having a magical summer and making the most of it except you. Maybe you find some Instagram video about the sea caves taken in July and decide to hop in a car and drive ten hours and make that happen for you too. Maybe you’re not really in a place to be kind or understanding to the person who explains to you that they’ll still take you out, but Labor Day is fall weather up here— it will not be calm like in the video of July.

And I get that, and I’m trying to find grace for that, because I too am not in a place to be super kind or understanding. I get what it feels like to be running on fumes.

Read: Arctic Tourist Destinations: From Wilderness to Disneyland

Ultimately, I think there’s a disconnect in wilderness destinations between the general public’s perception of nature and the reality of it.

When you grow up mostly isolated from the wilderness (most of the people I encountered this past weekend were from Chicago), and your primary exposure to the outdoors is Instagram, and blog posts, and your Pinterest vision board, and your local state park it’s easy to get the idea that the Wilderness is this beautiful, magical, controlled place.

I think sometimes people come with the expectation that their sea caves half day trip on Lake Superior will look a little like a Disney ride— you’ll have an easy paddle to and through the caves while your guide regales you with fun facts about the region. You’ll see the beautiful caves and take photos. There will be no waves, and there will be no hard paddling. There will be no rain. We exist in a snow globe, and because it’s your vacation that you paid for, and made up a script for in your mind, you’re entitled to a vacation that looks like your invented script.

And there’s nothing I can do to make the Wilderness behave how someone expected it would based on the trip they invented in their head. It seems obvious to say, but it isn’t. The best you can do is enjoy things as they are, find beautiful in the place and your own experience.

sunset from Manitou Island

Truth is, I actually do care about people’s vacations.

It means a lot to me that I get to share a place that I find incredible, to help other people develop a relationship to Lake Superior, to learn more about their own place in the wild.

It’s just really hard to facilitate that meaningful relationship when people come with such a fundamental misunderstanding of what wilderness is;

Wilderness is the sun setting over breaking surf and water echoing through sea caves and blisters and bugs and dirt and stars and dancing northern lights and sleeping with sand in your hair and being uncomfortable and feeling close to how your ancestors must’ve lived thousands on thousands of years ago, that gut feeling of “this is the earth and I have a place in it”. The wilderness is risk, and fear, and joy, and thunder rainstorms, changed plans and letting go of knowing what something is going to be like and learning to accept instead how things are.

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I’m not sure what the lesson in all this is for me—

It’s been a very long summer and I’m ready for it to be over and done with. I’m more ready to settle in and down than I have been in a while, and I’m hoping that one day I’ll be able to think about this past weekend without feeling… small.

I hope that I can look at it and try and remember how much a person’s vacation means to them, and that people sometimes say awful things they don’t understand the impact of, and it’s not personal.

In the meantime though, it feels important to share here. A shocking number of people find me at work as a guide through my travel writing/blog, and I’m sure I have sent quite a few people up to visit Grand Marais, and Bayfield, and other cute Great Lakes small towns.

I love sharing travel and trail guides and helping people find fun things to do, but I also think it’s important to talk about the reality of life in those towns for the people who live and work in them, and to remind visitors that the people behind the counter are people too, and deserve to be treated well.

Anyhow, as well roll into the fall season remember not to yell at baristas, and to remember that people in small tourist towns are doing their very best❤️