But Kara Hartnett, 58, who with her husband, David, 61, own the Mainsail Motel and Cottages has never seen anything like the summer of 2020.

No one has.

We cant open all our rooms, she told me in their lobby the other day. We dont have the housekeeping staff. So I cant run at 100 percent. Were running at about 70 percent occupancy right now.

Her husband, sitting next to her, nodded and then added: We roll with the punches. I mean in my previous life, I was a new car dealer. So Ive seen it all.

But nothing quite like this. Nothing like a pandemic that has rearranged American life and transformed this slice of vacationland splendor into something more sober. Nobody is using the word carefree to describe this August.

And happy hour? Along the boardwalk, theyll settle for a few happy minutes.

I dont like it. I cant wait until its over, said Paul Gaunt, a 56-year-old caricature artist who has been at work in Hampton Beach for 29 of his 35 years. But freaked out? No. Im too busy taking one day at a time to be too freaked out.

One day at a time this summer has a cadence all its own.

At the penny arcade, machines still beep amid swirling lights, but the place is empty. A sign out front warns would-be customers to stay away if they have had a temperature of 100.4 or higher.

Rows of Skee-Ball machines stands empty, nobody scoring big and collecting yellow tickets to redeem for a stuffed Dalmatian. The photo machine is empty, nobody making goofy faces in photos that otherwise would have yellowed with age inside well-worn wallets.

Rows of salt-water taffy are on display, if you can recognize the flavors through large sheets of heavy protective plastic.

We did lose a lot of business preseason and were probably going to lose a lot of business postseason,' said Chuck Rage, a Hampton selectman who has owned the Pelham Resort motel since 1984.

We have a lot of regulars, he said. We have an older clientele so a lot of those people are a little nervous. For their own reasons, they have taken their deposits and put them toward next year.

But as August still stretches out ahead on the summertime calendar, next year seems so far in the distance.

And the reality of this summer is what confronts people like David and Kara Hartnett every morning, noon, and night at the Mainsail Motel.

What does that look like? It looks like this:

Thats for sure. Never like this again.

A lot of people around here would like to chisel those words into the beachs boardwalk:

People like the young man behind a pizza places counter who had no customers at noontime the other day. Instead, he shook his head and tapped his knuckles to the beat of Duran Durans Hungry Like the Wolf.

Dark in the city, night is a wire. Steam in the subway, earth is afire.

People like the guy manning a game of chance that dares customers to land two balls into a basket to win a prize.

Hows business? I asked. He looked at me the way you might look at a lost-and-rude pedestrian, a blend of pity and disgust. Its all right, he said with a look that conveyed something else: Get lost, pal.

Tom McGuirk, the 48-year-old proprietor of McGuirks Ocean View Hotel Restaurant and Pub, said this pandemic summer has meant revamping operations so dramatically that it was like starting anew. He had to buy new tables and chairs that now sit on the street.

We basically had like a few weeks to create a new restaurant, he told me. You dont usually start from the ground up in a restaurant and decide that youre going to do it in four weeks. All the tables. The chairs I had to buy. The menus I had to design. I needed menus that were disposable and other menus that were sanitize-able.

Is he staring at the ceiling at night?

God, no, he said. Weve been here 30 years. Were pretty well capitalized. So its not the end of our world. If we had bought this last year and we had to pay big mortgages, well, that could be the end of somebodys world. So I have to appreciate all the good things that we have.

Thats precisely the attitude that Kara and David Hartnett are maintaining down the street at the Mainsail Motel and Cottages, where theyve got 19 cottage units and 38 motel rooms. And each other.

Its a cloud youre living under every day, David said. We have masks. I bought a backpack with an anti-COVID spray in it.

Every Saturday, in preparation for new guests, doorknobs, railings, appliances, air conditioners, and remote controls get cleaned.

Its all part of the new routine during this fear-and-loathing summer of COVID on the beach.

God willing and science willing well hopefully have a vaccine by the spring of next year, David Hartnett said. And then itll all go back to being the way it was.

Thats a wish and a prayer that is being silently recited all along this breathtaking stretch of New Hampshires slender coastline.

Thomas Farragher is a Globe columnist. He can reached at thomas.farragher@globe.com.

More here:

A postcard from the pandemic: no day at the beach - The Boston Globe