Sleeping beauty: Caretaker spends winter with Many Glacier Hotel as his only companion
19.02.2006, 09:34
MANY GLACIER - Steve Lautenbach stopped short, breath steaming bright in the chill gloom, and interrupted his story about the hauntings, listening hard through a silence that weighed like winter itself.
"Whisper, whisper, hissss, whisper."
Were those words, perhaps, some warning or enchantment? Or was it the soft rustling of a lady's gown?
“You can't help but wonder sometimes,” Lautenbach said, his voice breaking both the quiet and the spell alike.
At the far end of the hall, way down around the darkened corner, shallow rivulets of dry snow sloughed off a steep slant of skylights - “whisper, whisper, hissss, whisper.”
“This place is mystical,” Lautenbach said. “It talks to you. Sometimes you feel like it's alive - you sense it. Those mountains up there are just glowing, just powerful, and here it is. You have to respect it.”
Lautenbach is the winter caretaker at Many Glacier Hotel, a century-old ramble of more than 200 rooms that for six long months of isolation is his sole companion.
“This is my quiet time,” he said, “and it's hers, too. She likes it when everyone leaves, when it's just the two of us.”
Above and beyond, a jagged skyline of peaks tears at an impossibly blue winter sky, embracing the hotel from all directions. The spires strain upward, bony fingers reaching from a cupped hand, the great hotel perched like a treasure in the valley's rocky palm.
High above it all, afternoon sun shafts stream off mountaintops, gilding winter's world in evening sparkle and sculpting with light bright against deep-cleft shadow.
Here, Glacier National Park's grandest hotel is dwarfed by a wild expanse of wonder, and here Lautenbach is dwarfed by the sprawling breadth of hotel.
“We suit each other,” he said. “We fit.”
Outside, coyote tracks circle the building, the local morning news on Lautenbach's snowy front step.
In the first days of October, Lautenbach packed his aging Honda Accord to the roof and drove into the Many Glacier Valley once and for all.
“I'd never done anything like it,” he said.
He carried six months of toothpaste, six months of soap, of toilet paper, of books, enough to carry him through to the first of May.
“I had a list from hell,” he said, “and man, did I hit Costco hard.”
His grocery bill topped $1,200, and included chickens and steaks and bacon, a whole turkey and 100 hamburgers.
“I like meat,” he said, and to be sure, his freezer is noticeably light on veggies.
He brought a satellite clock that keeps time, temperature and date, “because otherwise, you lose track of time and start questioning yourself about how many days have passed.”
“In here,” he said, “time is a force of nature.”
In here, life moves at a wholly different pace for the 34-year-old New Yorker. In here, you have time to learn a lot about yourself, like it or not.
In here, his close-cropped hair has shagged out, and his usually clean-cut face has become lost in a woolly beard the likes of Grizzly Adams.
In here, Lautenbach keeps that Honda Accord shoveled out and even starts it once a week - “just in case.”
But you have to wonder why, considering that he's completely snowbound - that the wall of snow around his car tops 6 feet, that drifts the size of houses are set solid for many miles between here and the main road.
He admits he's in for the duration, then looks back at his neatly shoveled car and shrugs. “It passes the time, and I like to keep things in order.”
Lautenbach was just out of the Navy and looking for life's next adventure when he found America's parks nearly 10 years ago.
“There was a turning point,” he said, back in 1998, the year he lost a best friend to an accident and a girl to love's uncertainty.
“I needed a change of scenery,” he said, “so I got on the Internet and started looking for jobs. Yellowstone picked me up as an entry-level housekeeper.”
He hopped the Greyhound from New York to America's first national park, “and the rest of it pretty much fell into place.”
Lautenbach started at Old Faithful Inn, became assistant manager at Lake Yellowstone, later assistant manager at Old Faithful Snow Lodge.
“I fell in love with winter,” he said.
He stayed on at Yellowstone through 2002, and then took work with Glacier Park Inc., the private company that manages Glacier Park's historic hotels.
His first GPI hitch was as head of housekeeping at Many Glacier, overseeing a large staff and all 211 rooms.
“Winter's were tough,” though, what with living the life of a summer seasonal.
“Then they called and asked me if I'd stay on as caretaker,” Lautenbach said. “It took me a while to say yes, but now, hell yes, I'd do this forever.”
He spends his days skiing and working, playing guitar and working, splitting wood and working, shoveling and shoveling and shoveling and working. He's fastidious, neat and careful.
“None of the work I'm doing is rocket science,” he said, “but it all needs done, and it all takes time.”
Which he has in plenty.
Inside the great hotel, Lautenbach's been cleaning and remodeling and building, hanging doors and fixing furniture and shoveling the snow that blows into the rooms with every storm. He's even been working on building a better mousetrap.
Sometimes, when the snow's bad for skiing, he runs laps in the chilled hotel, tracking miles up and down its slanting stairways and dark corridors.
And when he's bored, he said, he talks to the ghosts. When they start talking back, he's skiing out for town.
“Well, there's the lady who smells like perfume,” he said. “I try to smell for her. And there's the man in the top hat. I find myself talking to them, even though I don't believe in ghosts.”
When it comes to Many Glacier's historic haunts, Lautenbach said, “you never get a specific story, just vague bits and pieces.”
A summertime bus driver named Lucky keeps a yellowed article about an old-time winter keeper who was spooked by strange doings and a bathtub full of blood, “and Lucky, he made sure he brought that article to me before I came in for the winter.”
But Lautenbach insists the hotel - and any possible inhabitants - feels like home, especially at night when darkness reins in the expansiveness, making it feel close and comfortable.
“A lot of my friends say I'm crazy just for being here,” he said. “The story is Stephen King got the idea for ‘The Shining' while staying here at the hotel. But it doesn't seem threatening in any way to me; it feels like home.”
Still, the hotel does speak its own eerie language, creaking and groaning and moaning against a persistent wind. At one point, Lautenbach wrapped the lobby's great hearth in plastic, because the slightly warmer indoor air was howling as it rushed up and out into the Many Glacier winter.
“It was sucking air up,” he said of the chimney, “just whistling Dixie. It sounded like a wind tunnel, like the motor on a vacuum cleaner.”
And still, when the wind howls down off the Continental Divide, “it's like I've got neighbors. It sounds like there's a crazy guy living in the apartment upstairs.”
A loose screen door slams back and forth in the wind, a beam pops in the cold, a window rattles in its pane, a chunk of ice breaks off the roofline.
“The hotel is alive,” Lautenbach said. “She talks to you all the time, telling you what she needs.”
And as he mends and attends her, she quiets, content, he said, to have him cater to her every whim.
The Many Glacier Hotel was completed back in 1915, one of several built by the Great Northern Railway to increase ridership. In the 1920s, large parties arrived overland on horseback, stringing together a weeklong network of backcountry chalets, each staged a day's ride from the next.
Sperry and Granite Park chalets are still there, but many others have since been lost to time.
Built amid what early European visitors called “America's Alps,” the Many Glacier Hotel is a blend of rustic materials and Swiss chalet style, and its Old World architecture represents the paradox of the national park system - human development balanced precariously in nature's wilds, the one, hopefully, improving on the other.
In winter, especially, the aged hotel is something like a space station, a shelter a half-mile long end to end, a place from which to jump off into an environment not always hospitable to human folk.
It's a foothold, not fancy, and even summer visitors must learn to deal with it on its own terms. Not a few guests have left frustrated that there's no television, that the rough-hewn walls are thin, that the nagging wind finds every crack and crevice.
Guests either make peace with it or leave angry - and if they leave angry, Lautenbach said, they've missed the point entirely.
“She's temperamental, and I think she chooses her guests,” he said of the hotel. “She picks the ones she likes and she keeps them coming back.”
He's not sure why he keeps coming back, why he's compelled to isolate himself here for so long a stretch, but he's working on it.
“There's something about these old lodges,” he said. “I just love them. They've got so much character and class.”
Lautenbach leans against a massive bole, its timber propping up the heights of the lobby ceiling. The tree has soaked up winter's cold the past months, and radiates a chill that feels deep and old and patient.
It will take weeks, he said, for summer's staff to warm the old girl, to shake the chill out of her bones.
“I don't know whether it's this architecture or this environment that gets me,” he said, pulling his hand from the cold wood. “Probably a little of both, don't you think?”
Lautenbach skis down off a hard-packed drift that has piled deep the balconies on the hotel's second floor, hooting and hollering as he picks up speed.
His voice echoes off the surrounding peaks, echoes off the hotel itself, and then is lost in thunderous silence.
Water drips from eaves, and last night's icy snowfall rattles from Many Glacier's pitched roof. Then quiet.
Today dawned calm, but evidence of wind is everywhere, in the drifts and the sculpted snowbanks and the trees that grow, listing hard to the east, with branches only on one side.
He looks across frozen Swiftcurrent Lake, a sea of untracked white edged by willow, by dark subalpine forest, by rocky bands of limestone and by snowfield, summit, blue-sky cloud.
Below, the late-day sun feels warm - “Like summer!,” Lautenbach cries - and after a month of gray he's drawn out into it like moth to flame, unwilling to give it up as evening light lays claim.
He'll be back, he says, after dark, to ski under the moon while temperatures fall away into dark depths of space.
But first, Lautenbach looks back at the tracks he's laid off the drift, at the hotel buried deep and fast disappearing into shadow.
“Companionship is so important,” he says. “You don't realize how important companionship is until you've lived alone up here for a winter.”
The hotel settles, sighs as if on cue.
“Whisper, whisper, hissss, whisper.”
“Companionship,” he says simply. “You know, there's a lot to be said for it.”