A real blast from the past

Barry Stone is blown away by a Cold War relic with five-star comfort - and a hidden secret.

I was 12 years old when I first read H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. It so enthralled me I remember being inspired to build my own device in my Melbourne bedroom using old boxes, tin foil, wire and enamel paint.

The fact I am unable to now give you a personal account of Richard Nixon's farewell speech to his cabinet and staff in the East Wing of the White House in August of 1974 is testament to the fact I couldn't get the blessed thing to work.

Thirty-something years later I was driving through the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia, 400 kilometres south-west of Washington DC on my way to visit the Greenbrier Hotel, arguably the finest hotel in the United States.

But it wasn't the Greenbrier's five-star service, three golf courses, falconry lessons or its 6500 acres of tranquillity I was craving. I'd driven across three states to get here because I'd heard they were in possession of a time machine.

The Greenbrier's machine had lain dormant, but far from neglected, 10 metres below the hotel's foundations for more than 40 years.

President Dwight Eisenhower had personally ordered its construction. An ex-Marine led the way, and when I saw it in three dimensions, I just couldn't take my eyes off it. It was beyond all my expectations.

The Greenbrier's time machine took more than three years to construct, beginning in 1958.

It was classified "top secret" and known only to high-ranking government officials who "needed to know". Technicians were told nothing of its true scope and intended purpose, only enough to allow them to complete their individual, specialised tasks.

A new wing of the hotel was built just to camouflage its construction.

The entire township of White Sulphur Springs watched it all happen around them - 50,000 tons of reinforced concrete, lorries coming and going day and night for almost four years, and the construction of a nearby runway long enough to accommodate jumbo jets to service a backwoods township of just 2000 people.

Everyone was watching, and nobody saw a thing. Alas, however, the Greenbrier's time machine was not a device built for time travel. It was a refuge. A government relocation facility. An honest-to-goodness Cold War nuclear bunker.

It was known as Project Greek Island and was constructed at the height of the Cold War to house all 535 members of the US Congress and their aides should the US come under nuclear attack.

It was built so the business of government could continue in the months after Armageddon, presuming, of course, that there would be anything, or anyone, left to govern.

It is a trip back in time to the era of Sputnik, McCarthyism and the Cuban missile crisis, a time of uncertainty and fear, preserved forever beneath the foundations of one of the few hotels in the country with a history of its own, big enough to compete on equal terms with the treasure over which it presides.

It all began humbly enough. Amanda Anderson was ageing and riddled with rheumatism when she arrived at the curative waters on the outskirts of White Sulphur Springs in 1778.

Slung on a litter between two horses she immersed herself in the spring and is supposed to have cried: "I'm cured, I'm cured", returning to her native New York in high spirits and, it is recalled, with great speed.

Rows of cottages were soon erected on the site and throughout the 1800s increasingly ornate residences grew to accommodate the elite of American society.

During the Civil War they were used as a hospital by both sides and, after Robert E. Lee surrendered control of the Confederate forces to William Tecumseh Sherman at Appomattox court house in Virginia in 1865, he retreated to the "Old White" to rest. After all, it had been a long war.

Then, in 1910, a magnificently columned, 250-room Georgian edifice was added, followed by three further wings in the 1930s that increased the Greenbrier's capacity to more than 600 rooms, making it the nation's premier hotel. Every president in the past 50 years has stayed there.

Activities today include skeet shooting, trout fishing in the hotel's private river, white-water rafting and falconry with the co-operation of the resort's own Lanner falcon.

There are gourmet cooking classes, tennis lessons with the hotel's resident tennis pro, or golf on the Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course. And, of course, there's the option of time travel.

A short ride in a hotel shuttle bus deposits you at the entrance to "a facility", the existence of which the US government denied for more than 30 years until it was exposed by Ted Gup, an investigative journalist for The Washington Post, in 1992.

You'd never know it was there. The steel blast door that conceals one very long tunnel is 45 centimetres thick, weighs 24 tonnes and is cut into a hillside adjoining the hotel. In its heyday it was, of course, suitably camouflaged. No wonder no one saw anything.

The tunnel is 133 metres long, but looks longer. Descending 18 metres beneath the West Virginia wing of the hotel you enter the 10,444-square-metre bunker.

Boxes of 1950s Pixie tissue paper still lie atop the dormitory-style lockers, and laminex-topped dining tables still sit on the cavernous dining room's classic 1950s black-and-white linoleum floor.

Fake windows depicting serene rural landscapes are everywhere in the hope of preventing its occupants from going mad.

There is a hospital, dental surgery, and a huge mural of the Capitol to broadcast to the nation from the bunker's own TV studio. And there is a crematorium to dispose of the bodies.

The bunker's power plant could provide power for 1100 people for 40 days, at which time, with the air supply and the Greenbrier's legendary five-star service presumably at an end, the guests would emerge to survey the result of generations of unchecked nuclear proliferation.

But isn't it nice to know that in these uncertain times there's still one extraordinary hotel that is able to offer something others can't: survival.

TRIP NOTES

Getting there: Most major airlines fly to Dulles International airport in Washington DC. By car from Washington, take Interstate 66 west to Interstate 81, then south to Interstate 64 at Lexington. Go east on I 64 to White Sulphur Springs exit. Driving time: 4½ hours.

Staying there: The Greenbrier Hotel, 300 W. Main Street, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, phone +1 304 536 1110, see http://www.greenbrier.com.

More information: Ninety-minute tours of the bunker on Sundays and Wednesdays, adults $US35 (NZ$47), children (age 10-18) $US15.

- © Fairfax NZ News