The signs that signal summer’s end were generally subtle here, in one of the nation’s hot East Coast tourist destinations, where re-enacted American history, impossible roller coasters, swirly water slides and brand-name outlet stores compete.
One signal: hand-lettered signs of “employment opportunities” to replace the summer help along Richmond Road, which has enough chain motels and restaurants to host a spontaneous franchise conference without inviting anyone from even a block away. Another: the loading-in of school stuff in the outlet malls, where the permanent “employment opportunities” signs sometimes have been supplemented with handwritten signs saying the very same thing.
It’s September; do you know where your summer went? Even as afternoon shadows grew longer on beaches all over the country, as the days became perceptibly shorter, as Americans — accustomed to setting our mental cycles by school-year time — finish their summer fun, the nature of the places we were going had begun to change.
For more than a decade, college students, the worker bees of tourist hives, have been called back to the classrooms either the morning after Labor Day or well before that, leaving a big hole in the staff schedules at places where August vacationers flock.
This academic exodus occurs — in perfect “they’ll do it every time” fashion — precisely at the two-week period when many families with school-age children are betwixt and between: camp has ended, and grades K through 12 are yet to begin.
The perfect time for a family vacation.
If you’ve vacationed during the last two weeks of August, you may know what I’m talking about; the problem is spotted along the boardwalks and streets down the Shore. The phrase that best describes it is “bad service,” and it’s usually a passing frustration but not a vacation spoiler.
In Williamsburg, where so many vacationers flock from all along the Eastern Seaboard, I was curious about how the operators of attractions handle the last weeks of August.
The Virginia town has three genuine Big Deals: Colonial Williamsburg, the milelong historic area that was the state’s colonial capital; Busch Gardens, with rides and attractions and its running theme of life in 17th Century Italy, France, Germany and England; and Water Country USA, the slide-and-splash park owned by Busch Gardens, which doesn’t have anything from another century or from any other place at all, unless you think of yourself as a pile of loose tea being hurled into Boston Harbor. (I’m omitting the outlets, which are not part of an official Big Deal, even though no solid American can pass up the lure of Liz and Tommy and Jones, and even Maidenform. Including me.)
At Colonial Williamsburg, where 938,000 paying visitors came last year to see the goings-on along the streets and in the 88 buildings, an employment vacuum is no simple matter. The place is filled with actors in colonial dress, speaking period English and taking the roles of 18th-century folk. You can’t just run down to an employment agency and find someone who plays a fife, binds books or knows how to put type together letter by letter.
“We hire summer temps, not necessarily college kids, although there are a good number of them,” says Patrick R. Saylor, public relations manager for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. “But not to the same extent as beaches or amusement parks, so we don’t have the mass exodus of kids leaving after the second week of August.”
Indeed, during the third week of August, when I visited, every colonial wig seemed firmly in place. The printer, asked by a young boy about the mole on his face (which was, in fact, his own), said without a missed beat: “It’s a mark of stature in the community, son, and as soon as you get your own, the better off you’ll be.” He then told the boy’s dad to “look after your long-suffering wife.” The crowd was delighted at the repartee; so was the dad. The young fifer and drummer at the rebel military encampment seemed like natural fixtures in a place from another time, as did the officer who deputized groups of 50 or so visitors as recruits, then took them through a highly entertaining musket-shooting practice — the muskets here being much safer than tree limbs.
Colonial Williamsburg flips fairly quickly from one big season into another; as Thanksgiving approaches, the place gets ready for a Christmas push. So even though employees come and go, as Saylor says, the staple of visible workers — people who perform the basic service of being colonial — remains. “We cook right along,” he says.
At Busch Gardens, “everyone’s trying to get in their last round of summer and theme-park fun,” says public relations director Cindy Sarko. “It’s hard with the college kids going back to school. We’ve got a lot of kids heading back to school, and obviously that’s their first priority.” A bulletin goes out to the schools around Williamsburg for people who may want one- or two-week employment at the theme park or Water Country USA, Sarko says. “We anticipate it, and we . . . get by very well with it.”
To varying degrees. Busch Gardens was blessed with a big crowd on my recent visit, and everything looked to be efficiently run, but it was almost impossible to find people working in the park who didn’t appear to be occupied to the teeth.
Water Country USA was where the end of summer hit home like an unexpected overnight frost. During my visit there the next day, the Adventure Isle part of the park was closed; a park guard said not enough employees were on hand to open it. A young man atop the Jet Scream, where visitors usually have the option of shooting down one of four slides, was timing takeoffs on two of them; the other two were closed for the morning. Lots of the summer help had gone back to school, he said, and until that morning, he had been on the sweep-up detail. (This was more fun, he allowed.)
I can’t say that these closings dashed anyone’s good times, but I can say that on the climbs up to the tops of the slides, more than once visitors were talking about how slow the lines were, compared with times they’d visited before.
All in all, I’d say that Williamsburg handled itself well during this period. Along with my family and our cousins, I was in and out of several restaurants, and although the staffs were busy, the service was generally good. At the Harvest Country Buffet — one of the many popular all-you-can-eateries lining the same street as fast-food franchises and some higher-class dining rooms — the owner was taking it easy as a heavy night was ending. He said that some of the summer help had left, and that he was taking up the slack in the kitchen.
And after a busy (and presumably profitable) summer, he was looking forward to the end of summer. He will cut his food volume in half.
