In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

by Luke Bennett

  Every material of man grows at last mellow and beautiful, except concrete – as the years passed the site stared out of the heather like scabs of blindness. A concrete foundation is never sweetened by weeds or grass. It looks hot and hurt in the sunlight; it resents the gentle or the resounding kisses of the rain. (Mackay Brown 2004).

  Lehmann did, in fact, notice that almost nothing grew on the concrete summit of the Kommandoplasse. Weeds and grasses pushed their way through it, but nothing grew on it. She wondered why the various lichens and mosses that abundantly flourished on the larvikite rocks nearby shunned the concrete. The lichens gain no nourishment from the granite, using it simply as a material to anchor to. Why then does concrete, with its similar surface texture, provide no place for the hybrid organism?

  The closeness of video footage from this period suggests that Lehmann is on her hands and knees, lying sometimes on the unsteady surfaces of the peak, taking visual samples of the rocky textures and hunting down those rare, tenacious organisms that have found a foothold. The grades and granularity of the concrete began to trouble her, as if the process of blasting, pulverizing, mixing, liquefying and solidifying was only a precursor to a much longer process (a thousand years, perhaps?) of gradual and eventual erosion. Somehow, the passage of time would soon annihilate her and her children but would remain scandalously indifferent to the destruction of this fascist edifice. She was reminded of Virilio’s notion of ‘military time’ in which ‘the military institution is a cyclothymic animal hibernating during peacetime and awake for war’ (Virilio 1994, 21). While it is certainly possible that this site could be appropriated again for military purposes, Lehmann wondered if, perhaps, this site will always be military, it’s erosion part of a longer process of material transformation in which concrete particles, residues of TNT, RDX, petrochemical fluids and oxidizing metals will nurture and fuse with the organic landscape. This process has already begun, she observed. Whether humans remember or commemorate this as a military site is incidental – the transference of matter-energy is inevitable and unstoppable.

  EXTREMOPHILIC ORGANISMS

  Things are not right with Lehmann. From the 30th July, her journals begin to detail certain organisms that live thousands of years: mycobionts, bacteria and endoliths, persisting and quietly residing deep within the fractures of rocks, among the timeless minerals underground. It was not the existence of these extremophilic organisms that bothered her or that they are often indistinguishable from their inorganic habitats, but that their natural genetic mutability might be accelerated by this place.

  In her final journal entry, Lehmann imagines certain substances, residues of extreme ideology and military activity, leaching like heavy rainfall from the concrete and iron into the topsoil and granite, infecting the life that dwells beneath the rocks and contaminating the sub-surface stratum with an unstable mutagenic agency. ‘New life forms will grow, ones not simply indifferent but quietly contemptuous of human dominion, waiting and conspiring with other organisms in mutualistic union, before launching their assault on humanity’ (Lehmann 2010, 250). While describing the delirious, mutagenic potential of our military-industrial epoch on the subterranean world, Lehmann was surely imagining the vertiginous horror of deep-time, or perhaps the future as an endless inhuman abyss.

  THE END

  Lehmann’s geological and near-microscopic examination of Torås is exhausted. It began with acute and deliberate detachment, with her children mobilized as proxy researchers, and ended with solitary moments of physical propinquity and ecstatic horror. An uncharitable reading of this process might imply the psychological unravelling of a crisis or the sublimation of personal trauma, but with respect to Lehmann’s own fervently materialist logic, we can view the whole Torås enterprise as a geological interpretation of violence, one in which the organic world is merely accelerating the inherent violence of the inorganic. For Lehmann, Torås represented the most abysmal transformation of the mineral world, one that will persist for centuries as the calcified expression of extreme militarism and human brutality, a dark beacon of contempt and subjugation. Finally, and instinctively, she was appalled by the way it aped the ancient larvikite landscape she so adored, and hid in its contours and folds like lethal carcinoma.

  TRANSFIGURATION

  Lehmann’s prostrate figure is unseen in the final footage from the 2nd August, and we know the alarm was raised by her children when she failed to return to the family hytte that evening. She was found at noon the following day by her neighbours, hidden in a hollow near the summit of the Kommandoplasse. We know little of her condition at this point, but it is possible to imagine the blustering warm winds coursing over her as she lay there, the fragrance of sun-scorched grasses and perhaps the harsh imprint of concrete on her cheek. There are no more journal entries, and her convalescence has merged into an early retirement from academic life and public speaking. Sometimes, however, she can be seen gingerly walking the hills and forests of Tjøme in the summer months, making notes and taking pictures of the landscape before her and imagining, perhaps, the hidden violence beneath.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bjørnskau, B. 2004. ‘Plutonic and volcanic identities in the Oslo Rift: A thermodynamic reading’. Journal of Asthenospherics, 15(10): 201–215.

  Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. 2010. The Coming Race. Rookhope: Aziloth Books.

  Clube, S. V. M. & Napier, W. M. 1984. ‘The microstructure of terrestrial catastrophism’. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 211(4): 953–968.

  DeLanda, Manuel. 2011. A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History. Brooklyn, NY: Swerve.

  Hirst, Paul. 2005. Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture. Cambridge: Polity.

  Keiller, Patrick. 2007. ‘Film as spatial critique’, in Jane Rendell & Jonathan Hill (eds.) Critical Architecture. London: Routledge, pp. 115–123.

  Larsen, Bjorn T., Olanssen, Snorre, Sundvoll, Bjorn & Heeremans Ramberg, Michel. 2008. ‘Volcanoes and faulting in an arid climate: The Oslo Rift and North Sea in the Carboniferous and Permian: 359–251 MA’, in B. Ivar (ed.) The Making of a Land: Geology of Norway’. London: Geological Society of London, pp. 260–303.

  Lehmann, Maria. 1994. ‘Magmatism, thermodynamics and mineralisation’. Journal of Tectonomagmatics 3(7): 13–21.

  Lehmann, Maria. 1996. ‘Zonation and morphology of the Oslo Rift’. Geomaterialism 7(6): 24–36.

  Lehmann, Maria. 1998. ‘A selective analysis of igneous transit across the Oslo Rift’. Transactions of the Institute of British Vulcanologists 16(6): 34–52.

  Lehmann, Maria. 2001. ‘The Agency of Rocks: Feldspar crystal-growth morphologies under simulated magmatic conditions’. Critical Geo-Science 14(2): 107–114.

  Lehmann, Maria. 2010. Unpublished Journal. University of Tønsberg.

  Ley, Willy. 1947. ‘Pseudoscience in Naziland’. Astounding Science Fiction 39(3): 90–98.

  Mackay Brown, George. 2004. Greenvoe. Edinburgh: Polygon.

  Schmitt, Carl. 1986. Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes. Cambridge, MA; and London: MIT Press.

  Sørlie, Rune. 2009. Festung Tjøme: Tysk okkupasjon av Tjøme 1940–45, self-published.

  Virilio, Paul. 1994. Bunker Archeology. trans. George Collins. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

  Woodward, R. 2004. Military Geographies. Oxford: Blackwell.

  Zalasiewicz, Jan., Williams, Mark, Steffen, Will & Crutzen, Paul. 2010. ‘The new world of the Anthropocene’. Environmental Science & Technology 44(7): 2228–2231.

  Chapter 7

  Bunker and Cave Counterpoint

  Exploring Underground Cold War Landscapes in Greenbrier County, West Virginia

  María Alejandra Pérez

  The Cold War’s shelter-making mania appropriated many forms and places. And it did so for a variety of purposes and with differing degrees of effort and achievement. In this chapter, by considering their remains and the people now attached to them, I compare two US fallout shelters situated within 14 miles of each other
in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. I do so in order to contrast the significance of their physical form, social function and afterlife. The approach that I take for my investigation is broadly autoethnographic (Butz & Besio 2009), seeking to understand the cave and the bunker through my own embodied engagements with examples of each form as interpreted through the lenses given to me by my own life course, by my training as an anthropologist, and by my research interest in the cultural practices associated with engagements with subterranean landscapes (Pérez 2013, 2015). This chapter, then, is a reflexive account of my own attempt to make sense of the remains of Cold War spaces of subterranean shelter, of both their affective materiality and of their culturally determined pointers to a recent geopolitical past that still has reverberations for both public and personal lives today.

  THE BUNKER AND THE CAVE

  Benefitting from the proximity to Washington D.C. (at 400 km close, but not too close), Greenbrier County, West Virginia, was the focus of particularly intense shelter building activity between 1958 and 1962. Notably, Greenbrier County was the location chosen by US government officials charged with creating an appropriately ‘luxurious’ fallout shelter for members of Congress. Here, the exclusive Greenbrier Resort in the town of White Sulphur Springs was selected as the ideal place to build a large, but secret, shelter complex, hidden as a subterranean annex within the existing hotel property. This nationally important concrete bunker site was maintained on stand-by in case of emergency until decommissioned and declassified at the end of the Cold War, in 1992: the year that a journalist publicized its secret existence (Gup 1992). Tours to the Greenbrier bunker are now part of the Greenbrier County tourist trail.

  Meanwhile at the height of the ‘first’ Cold War, another fallout shelter was being readied within Greenbrier County, but this one was not ‘for the chiefs, but for the poor folk’. That is how Janie Morgan, the present manager of Organ Cave, described to me the decision to ready a portion of the cavern as part of the National Civil Defense Fallout Shelter Program. This conversation took place in the cavern’s large Chapel Room, which, according to the manager, ‘would have done nobody any good because it is too close to the surface [and the entrance]’. The readiness plan for this more improvised, less effective and arguably less sincere, public shelter reveals a less luxurious form of anticipated subterranean dwelling. In contrast to Congress’s citadel in White Sulphur Springs, Organ Cave’s provisioning list reveals this place as intended only as a basic shelter space, survival enabled only through the stocking of enough barrels of water, hard candy, morphine and crackers to feed 517 people for two weeks. During the Cold War these stocks sat timelessly awaiting use. But in the transformation of this site from shelter to visitor attraction, these provisions finally lost their contingent, awaiting-the-end-of-the-world nature; the time-capsule was opened. As Morgan put it: ‘When the cave guides discovered the candy, they ate it; the morphine was taken away; but we still have the crackers and they are still crisp’.

  MAKING SENSE OF THE BUNKER AND THE CAVE

  Bunker and cave, cave and bunker. I have visited these sites in southeastern West Virginia not once but many times, always thinking of them comparatively in ways that have not only challenged my assumptions about each but also made it impossible for me to settle on any one interpretation or meaning. Bunker and cave, cave and bunker. Not once or twice but repeated times, as I have sought to make sense of this very contribution you now read, and also, as I have explored the broader geographies that contain them. Unexpectedly, perhaps, these geographies are now woven into my efforts to make the state of West Virginia my adopted home. It is not just these geographies that are new to me (I am an immigrant from Venezuela), but also the ways the Cold War was experienced and politicized in the United States. I emigrated to the US with my family in 1991, a month and 15 days prior to the official dissolution of the USSR. In Latin America, what many citizens experienced was not a Cold War but a Hot War, with military, political and economic brutality often supported or even directly orchestrated by the United States in its effort to deter or destroy the communist threat in the continent (Coronil 2000, 359).

  Bunker and cave, cave and bunker. The natural and the constructed? One, presumably, a space of life, of human origins, of shelter, of deep history, while the other, a space of short-term survival for some, of nihilism, of brutality? The one primitive while the other modern? In reality, and in particular with the two cases I present here, these apparent opposites juxtapose in surprising ways. It is in this spirit, this process of engagement – of the unsettled and open-ended quality of my meaning making – that I share insights from my repeated visits to the 61km Organ Cave, located just a few kilometres from the Greenbrier bunker, and the 10,455m2 congressional structure. Both as a method of research and writing, I draw on two sources. The first is what James Clifford describes as ‘ethnographic surrealism’ (Clifford 1981). The second is Fernando Ortiz’s ‘counterpoint’ (Ortiz 2001). In his 1981 article ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism’, US historian and anthropologist James Clifford examines the commonalities between ethnography as a particular methodological and epistemological sensibility towards uncovering and knowing the world and the avant-garde movement known as surrealism. Not only does he strongly argue that the commonalities are there, commonalities that are not just coincidental but also historically entangled in the art and intellectual movements of interwar France. Also, he suggests we consciously look to surrealism as ways to reconceptualize and approach the ethnographic project. To sum his message, he uses the metaphor of the collage:

  The surrealist moment in ethnography is that moment in which the possibility of comparison exists in unmediated tension with sheer incongruity. This moment is repeatedly produced, and smoothed over, in the process of ethnographic comprehension. But to see this activity in terms of collage is to hold the surrealist moment in view…. Collage brings to the work (here the ethnographic text) elements that continually proclaim foreignness to the context of presentation. (Clifford 1981, 563)

  But the juxtapositions, the method of collage that Clifford describes, are not sufficient in what I am doing here (nor is it unique to the French surrealist movement of the interwar period). Between bunker and cave there is not just juxtaposition, but a back and forth, a processual coming and going that sometimes underlines similarities, other times difference, but never quite settles. And so it is that Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz invites me to think of this study as a counterpoint, inspired by what he does in his allegory of the relationship between tobacco and sugar in the first part of his book Cuban Counterpoint. What does this allegory do? To the late Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil, who introduces the 1995 English re-edition of the book,

  [i]t is as if, through his playful evocation of the pleasures associated with sugar’s and tobacco’s consumption, Ortiz wishes to seduce us into enjoying the text with sensuous abandon. And yet, it is also as if, through the unfolding dramatic plot which compellingly recounts a story of colonial domination, Ortiz wishes us to read this text in the same way that he reads tobacco and sugar: as complex hieroglyphs that elude definitive decoding. Through the interplay of these two readings the essay may seem at once to stand by itself and to call for continuing reinterpretation. (Coronil 1995, xiii)

  And so, it is that I examine these rhythmic juxtapositions between bunker and cave – often, I admit, filled with sensuous delight while at the same time shocking with a sense of claustrophobic terror and doom (and on the delight of enthusiasm and play in engagements with place see and Holloway [2010], and Craggs, Geoghegan and Neate [2013] and Geoghegan and Woodyer [2014]). I focus on my personal engagements with the specific structures, materialities and histories of these sites’ concrete formations in the context of the broader history of geopolitical and economic dynamics that have appropriated and transformed Greenbrier County’s underground landscape. In both cave and bunker, limestone was shaped and moved: it was either dissolved (in the case of the cave) or blasted (at nearb
y limestone quarries needed for the bunker’s concrete structure). In the first case, mildly acidic water moves and shapes the limestone. In the second, high-weight-bearing trucks transport the limestone to the site of construction. Viewed comparatively, however, containment arises as a defining feature of the bunker. But caves? As part of complex hydrological, ecological and geological karst systems, caves are leaky volumes. They are difficult to seal and therefore make bad fallout shelters. And yet, in both cases of bunkers and caves, but also at radically different temporal and spatial scales, limestone continues its transformation. In the cave, this transformation is a sign of its growth. In the bunker, its ruination. Here, I focus not on stark distinctions between natural or human-made structures, but instead on their blurring and ongoing processes of material and symbolic transformations, some of them evident as we visit these sites today. I do so in a series of reflections, moving from one site to the other and then back, meandering, if you will, as if exploring a cave with curiosity, never certain about where new passages might lead (Phillips 2014). To conclude, I reflect on how my repeated visits have changed not just my understanding and appreciation of these sites and those who labour in them but my own sense of place, of belonging, of this state that I now call home, a process that continues, in good counterpuntal fashion.