The only way to get to the Swiss hotel was to take the cable car up to Kühboden. I had made the reservation weeks in advance by phone from Germany, where I was spending several months in 1994 doing research at a German university.
It was a short walk from the top of the cable car to the hotel. Over the icy snow, K and I lugged two enormous suitcases and two large packs, which held everything we had taken to Europe or had accumulated during our stay in Germany.
An enormous cow pat curdled on the walkway just outside the reception desk, blocking the entrance to the hotel. From the size, color, and runniness of the cow pat, I was worried about the health of the cows.
I picked up the two heavy suitcases, walked back a few yards, ran straight towards the cow pat as fast as I could, and did a flying leap over it. Luckily, I got across safely.
No one was at the reception desk. I rang the bell and called out. No reply. I climbed the stairs and wandered around, but couldn't find a soul.
As was customary at European hotels, there was a row of keys on wooden pegs behind the reception desk. After waiting a while, I took down two or three keys, went upstairs to explore the rooms, chose one to my liking, and returned the other keys to their pegs. K and I moved in to that room. We didn't see anyone else that day.
Unfortunately, there was no heating that night, but we made do with whatever duvets we could find.
The next morning we went downstairs. Still no one at the desk. We eventually came across a tall Dutch lad, perhaps 20 years old, who had a summer job at the hotel. He told us that the owners had decided that since my booking was the only one, they might as well close the hotel and give the staff some time off. Everyone but the Dutch lad had taken the cable car down to the village at the foot of the mountain. The owners weren't back yet, since they had spent the night at a house they owned in the valley. The Dutch guy kept talking about the "Chef", which interested us greatly because we were very hungry, but it turned out that he meant his boss (the hotel owner), not the cook.
Though he wasn't the cook, and wasn't on duty, the Dutch guy made us a rudimentary breakfast. He said he felt bad that we had been stood up by the hotel owners. They shouldn't treat us that way. He believed that if we had been Swiss instead of American, the hotel would have stayed open for us.
As we had planned, K and I hiked from the hotel to a view of the longest glacier in the Alps.
The owners returned, and presented us at breakfast the following day with the bill for two nights. No apologies for closing the hotel on us. I protested that we shouldn't have to pay the full rate for the night with no heat, with no full breakfast or other services.
I can only describe the reaction I got from the "Chef" as exactly what you would expect if he were Basil Fawlty from the 1970s British sitcom "Fawlty Towers" (brilliantly played by Monty Python comedian John Cleese).
The "Chef" blew his top. We had a tremendous row in the middle of the dining room, surrounded by tables of breakfast-eating guests, "Basil" speaking the local dialect of Schwiizerdütsch, and me starting out in rudimentary Hoch Deutsch, but quickly switching to English since as a New Yorker I could only do our argument justice if I could fully use the speed and colorful vocabulary of my native tongue.
His wife "Sybil" tried to calm him down, if only to save face in front of the other guests, saying things that presumably translated as "There, there, Basil. Not in front of the guests," but to no avail.
When I had made the hotel reservation, it sounded promising that we'd be able to extend our reservation for a third night. But "Basil" told us that a traditional Swiss singing troupe from Winterthur had booked the entire hotel, and even though they booked at the last minute and I booked well in advance, they of course had higher priority than I did.
I insisted on paying only a partial rate for the night when the hotel was closed. We managed to get a room for the third night at the more expensive hotel next door (the only other lodging up there).
When we went back down on the cable car I was horrified to see, on the nametag of the cable car operator, the unusual last name of our curmudgeony hotel owner. It dawned on me that in this part of Switzerland, everyone was probably related to everyone else. Perhaps we were lucky that Basil hadn't put us on a blacklist that forced us to walk down the snowy slope with our heavy suitcases and packs.