04 April 2010
Pony Mount
(Mount Pony’s Entrance, in Cold War Days. Photo courtesy Federal Reserve.)
It is the morning of the Risen Lord, according to some, and the anniversary of the day that the system murdered Dr. King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. I got up early to watch the sun rise and feed the cat.
I don’t know what to make of the coincidence of the days in ancient times and my own, except to note it and move on. People around here take that a little more seriously than I can at the moment. I came down to the farm to check the mail and see if riding the bike in the country was less stressful than the madness and confusion on the path along the Potomac.
I checked Route 522 when I drove the Bluesmobile off Route 3. I surveyed the road before, and clocked a lazy five-mile loop from Refuge Farm into Mitchell and back around to the farm road last time I took the truck out to stretch its legs. I thought that might work as a training route, but no dice.
522 is not a particularly heavily traveled road, but busy enough to kill a cyclist on his own. Some blind low hills, oncoming traffic at sixty or seventy knots, that sort of thing. Not enough for three abreast, if you know what I mean. There was only a foot of asphalt outside the traffic lane on the right, and some of it was broken. Maybe the real bikers can handle that, but not this novice. I did not trust my mount or my instincts.
The back way showed some more promise. There is not much in the way of traffic, and the pavement is smooth. From the mailbox it is two miles, nearabouts, to the main road, with a spur to the south of another mile before it turns to gravel. In the other direction it is about the same up the hill to the heavy barricade at Mount Pony.
I’ll confess, Mount Pony is one of the reasons I am here. I was a Cold Warrior by trade for the majority of my working life, and so was the Mountain.
The history goes back a ways. They say there was a Civil War signal post atop the minor peak, used by both sides. The historical signs on the east side of the mountain say that Grant’s First Corps started out near here to head down the Plank Road to the encounter at the Wilderness in the Overland Campaign of 1864.
I would prefer to ride a circuit than a back-and-forth route, but safety first and fitness is not worth dying for, you know?
I pulled the bike out of the backseat of the Bluesmobile and walked it up over the gravel driveway to the mailbox. I put on my helmet and mounted the graphite-frame steed for Mount Pony.
A hundred thousand American kids collided with one another not far east of the Mountain, the great tide of humanity and the material of war sweeping under its flanks. I thought there might be a good ride over in that direction, but there was something I wanted to look at on my own side of the hill.
The Federal Reserve Board used to store a few billion dollars in small bills in the mountain. If you thought of it as Scrooge McDuck’s vault, you would not be far wrong.
The Fort was a 140,000 square-foot radiation-hardened facility that opened just about in the heart of the madness between us and the Russians. They commissioned the place on December 10, 1969, a 400-foot-long bunker of steel-reinforced concrete a full foot thick and covered by as much as four feet of dirt. Lead-lined shutters were provided for the narrow slit windows to be dropped to shield the windows against blast and fallout.
There was a peacetime mission for the Mountain. Seven main-frame IBM computers deep in the facility at the facility were operated by Fed’s Richmond branch, and was the central node for all American electronic funds transfer activities.
The darker wartime reserve mode was something else altogether, part of the shadow government that was supposed to preserve an enduring constitutional government in the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.
I peddled toward the mountain, luxuriating in the Spring warmth and the flexing of my major muscle groups. I looked down at the odometer on the handlebars and saw that it was not quite a mile to the upgrade that began at Woolen Lane. I headed up past the abandoned farmhouse, and downshifted to keep the wheels turning.
Until 1988, Mount Pony stored several billion dollars worth of small bills, intended to be used to re-establish commerce east of the Mississippi after the nuclear exchange. They had two-dollar bills shrink-wrapped and stacked on pallets nine feet high.
The long grade up to Mount Pony Road was a challenge to my winter-withered legs. Prior to July 1992, the bunker had a peacetime staff of a hundred people, most of whom lived right around here. Perfect situation, really, having a Federal paycheck this deep in the country. I wonder if they need a janitor up there now?
I met some of the people who worked at other sites that had never been activated before 9/11, having had entire careers in the silence of the empty underground forts.
Every Department and Agency had a fort. Congress was to camp underground at the Greenbrier Hotel at White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve was to come here, and operate an emergency staff of 540 for a month, hot-racking in two-hundred beds in men's and women's dormitories. A pre-planned menu of freeze-dried foods for the first 30 days of occupation was stored on site; private wells and an internal reservoir provided uncontaminated water following an attack. Other features common to all the facilities were bulk incinerators, underground small-arms ranges and helicopter landing pads to accommodate those fleeing Washington.
At Mount Pony, there was even a cold storage area for maintaining bodies unable to be buried due to radiation contamination.
I managed to scale the minor hill to the minor mountain, and looked left and right at the stop sign. A left would take me up to where the guard post used to stand inside the barbed wire. I pushed on the peddles and wondered if I could make it.
In the early 1990s, the pallets of money were gone along with the money to keep the lights on. People were scratching their heads about what to do with all the underground cities. I have a copy of the real estate brochure for the Mountain, which was offered for $4.2 million. I wish I could have taken them up on it.
Finally someone thought of a use for the white elephant I was peddling toward. In November 1997, Congress authorized the transfer of the facility from the Federal Reserve to the Library of Congress. It was a pretty slick idea, since the Library needed a secur, climate-controlled place to store its extensive motion picture, television, and recorded sound collection.
A Cold Warrior would not recognize the place. The original structure is all still there, of course, but it had been designed to be discrete. The new complex can be seen for miles, and sits prominently on top of the bunker. There are four major buildings, two of which are designed to accommodate nitrate-based motion pictures from the golden era of Hollywood.
The coolest one is the three-story Conservation Building, which I could see looming up the hill. It is constructed of glass, steel and concrete that curves out from the side of the mountain in a half circle embracing a reflecting pool. They saved the dirt from the new excavation and buried everything except the horseshoe in tribute to the Cold War past and the requirement for stable temperatures to preserve the media.
I was about out of gas by the time I made it to the entrance. I was tempted to stop and press the buzzer and see if they would open the gate, but instead I used the wide spot in the road to turn around. You would be interested to see the place. I will figure out how to get inside one of these days.
Looking up toward the glass building, I saw they are not worried about maintaining clear fields of fire to defend the place. The slope and surrounding landscape has been replanted with upland meadow and bioswale perennials, assorted native grasses and a dozen species of trees. It is pretty, if you care for that sort of thing.
I was curious to see how fast I could go without peddling a bit. According to the recorded data on the odometer I looked at after I rolling home, it is 24 miles an hour. Trust me, it feels a lot faster when you are only wearing your skin.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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