The Hobo Diaries
Down and Out on Martha's Vineyard
You can idle for decades on a gorgeous island—comfy, safe, and warm—immersed like a Medieval mystic on a life-long spiritual path, and all of a sudden it feels as if you’ve been dumped on a water slide with a sign that reads: This life is out of your price range, sweetheart! Splash!! . . . Where ya gonna live?
In the spring of 2018, writer/reporter Holly Nadler gave up her year-round apartment on Martha’s Vineyard, even as everyone cried out, “Don’t do it! You’ll never find another one!” And they were right! Follow her around the Vineyard with her dear old thug of a Boston terrier as she lodges in a lilac-walled cottage, which is enchanting except for the fact that it has no running water. After that come several seasons with her impossible and dementing 98-year-old mother in Palm Desert, California; a month in Edinburgh, where she’s banished from a retreat on the Holy Isle; then back on the Vineyard for what she comes to think of as another Summer of Discombobulation. Is it possible to be a hobo and be happy? Well, yeah, as long as you can make people laugh as you write about it. And does it help redefine your spiritual path? Well, sure, because you’re a lifelong seeker, and you’ll never lose sight of the Divine . . . see it? It’s just around the next bend in the road. Or the next one?
Holly Nadler started her writing career at the age of eight in the San Fernando Valley, when she received her first typewriter and tapped out a few chapters of a Nancy Drew mystery. As an adult, she sold a couple of screenplays as well as scripts for prime-time TV comedies, including Laverne & Shirley and One Day at a Time. A move from LA to Martha’s Vineyard in 1991 led to six published books, notably Haunted Island, Ghosts of Boston Town, and Vineyard Confidential, as well as articles in national magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Lear’s, and Women’s World. She’s spent enough years of travel, particularly in Europe, to learn how to live out of a suitcase. She’s been married to—and divorced from—three lovely men and has a grown-up son, Charlie Nadler, a professional standup comic like his dad, Marty Nadler. She writes for the MV Times and still putzes around as a vagabond.
