Odd connections fill the writing life

Being a journalist fills one's life with strange encounters and connections, if not relationships. We meet people briefly, let them (or cajole them to) entrust us with their stories and then we're gone.

We laugh and have a good time with people who could be friends or acquaintances, but are really just sources. But are they? Do we invest something in that person's story too? Honestly, I'm not sure.

The winter keeper at Many Glacier Hotel recently died in his sleep while visiting his ailing mother back East. Steve Lautenbach was 37. In a story written by Chris Peterson at the Hungry Horse News, it was noted that Lautenbach was featured in many local newspaper stories and local and regional magazines.

I visited Steve at Many Glacier Hotel with a photographer in February of 2007, biking and hiking in the seven miles from the nearest plowed road. I spent a weekend wandering onto the middle of a frozen Swiftcurrent Lake and being thoroughly creeped out walking the halls of the deserted hotel.

Steve hosted us in his cabin, fed us heaps of pasta (one of his few over-stocked items) and only requested that when we make the trek in that we bring some beer and a few oranges.

It was, all in all, a strange weekend. But it made for a great story, which appeared in Montana Magazine almost exactly a year later. I don't know if Steve ever read the story. I had a copy forwarded to him via his employer, Glacier Park Inc., but never got any response.

I only heard from Steve twice after my visit — both times before the story appeared. Once to tell me he had left the Park and the company and again, barely a week later, to tell me that leaving had been a horrible mistake and was back in Glacier and going to be back at the hotel for the winter.

So where does this put things? I don't know. We certainly weren't friends. He was a source and I was a reporter. I hope I didn't cause him any embarrassment by relaying his tales about ghosts in the hotel. I hope he liked the story and enjoyed the weekend, as it will remain on my short list of great memories and unique opportunities that being a journalist has given me.

It's rare to meet someone who knows what really makes them happy. Steve knew. He said, the last time we spoke, he'd do this forever if they'd let him.

He wanted to make a movie about his odd life looking after the hotel all winter. It would have been, I think, a very good one.

—Alex Strickland