Hiding from middle age in an Audi, and also in a secret government bunker.
This Car Sucks Young Blood
I’m driving down the spine of Virginia along Interstate 81 in an Audi e-tron GT. It is one of many electric cars from legacy automotive brands that will most surely eat into Tesla’s cachet and marketplace dominance.
This story originally appeared in Volume 11 of Road & Track.
I should resent this car. And, in fact, I do at the outset. It has a sticker price of $160,000 (that damn inflation!). It has no sunroof, nor any trunk space to speak of. Its GPS is mouthy. Its cup holder grips my seltzer can like it wants to recycle the thing right now, this instant. This specific e-tron is a color that I would trademark as Dishwater Nail Polish. Its bucket seat is pinching my ass hard, and none of the power seat controls manage to free it. Its steering wheel is covered in synthetic suede. A velveteen serpent of a wheel. It’s sexy to the eye, but freaks out my hands. I get the appeal of this car, but I miss my own. It’s a Hyundai. No parking-lot valet will gaze in awe at my Tucson rolling up to a hotel, but it is spacious and keeps me comfortable.
But the e-tron is determined to win me over, and it will eventually succeed. Twenty-four hours from now, I’ll understand why it inspires midlife crises and also cures them. And, mostly, I’ll understand that this thing is fast. I will go very fast in this car. I will grip that fuzzy wheel, cruise into triple digits without apology, and become speed. I will go fast enough to truly stop giving a shit about anything and everyone. Is it a gas-powered car or a coal-powered car? Who cares? I will leave it all far behind in the e-tron’s slit of a rear windshield.
First, though, let me tell you about the speck of worry that’s about to eat my electric dust.
The Audi e-tron GT is an absolute joy to drive on the heavily wooded roads near the Greenbrier.
Greg Pajo
I didn’t care when I turned 40. I know the rom-com trope is to dread the arrival of your forties and then endure all the “I’m gonna die ugly!” angst that follows their arrival. But my thirties were enjoyable, and numbers are just that. I turned 40 and didn’t give it a second thought. And then everything went to hell. Hair sprouted out of my ears as if they had been fertilized. I went deaf. I suffered a stroke (really). I got ED. Political news started to actually upset me. And a pandemic! I had to live through a goddamn pandemic!
They weren’t lying, I thought. Your forties really do suck.
Just before this jaunt, I turned 45. I completely lost touch with pop culture. Every doctor I visited was one who also does Botox injections as a lucrative side business. Meanwhile, I constantly had to give a shit all the time: about my family, about our finances, about appliances in our house not working, about politics, about the fate of the world, about who will be cast as the next Bond . . . it was exhausting. The less of a shit I have to give, the happier I am. I hate caring. Forty-five made me feel old, and I hated it. At the end of every day, I’d get a twitch in my left eye from all the subconscious worry. I couldn’t control it. One minute I could see out of that eye, the next flap-flap-flap-flap-flap.
The Greenbrier is nearly as old as the United States. Presumably, the lion is considerably younger.
Greg Pajo
This was not the correct time for me to stop taking my anxiety medication, but I had done so months earlier. I didn’t tell my doctor. I didn’t even tell my therapist. I told my wife, of course, but she’s no doctor. I felt just groovy without the pills, only I was suddenly quite unmotivated—to work, to write, to do much of anything. I had lost my, well, drive. In an epiphany that defied my mounting years, I put two and two together and went back on the pills.
Then Road & Track was like, “Hey man, would you like to drive a $160,000 car to a resort and tour a secret military bunker there?” I did. I had to go somewhere, anywhere. I needed to escape not just the world around me—both my immediate vicinity and well beyond it—but myself. The first part was easy. The second part, less so.
Damn you, Stanley Kubrick, for making every grand old resort feel eerily like the Overlook Hotel.
Greg Pajo
My destination for this assignment was the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, a town, thankfully, without an odor to correlate with its name. The Greenbrier is home to what used to be a top-secret nuclear-fallout bunker, designed during the Cold War both as a refuge for Congress in the event of a nuclear strike and as a temporary base of operations for the legislative branch of the U.S. government. President Dwight D. Eisenhower picked the resort for this bunker because it’s close enough to D.C. to be accessible, but far-enough away to be a safe haven. It’s gorgeous but isolated. The perfect hiding spot for Congress, and now for me.
Because I am, at heart, a true dad, efficient car trips please me. Scenic detours anger me. When I sense I’m making lousy time, I’m instantly annoyed. The Greenbrier was my quarry, but the real purpose of this trip was to divest myself of my usual driving mentality, to enjoy my time with the e-tron on the open road, and to discover things that, perhaps, I wouldn’t find anywhere else.
I didn’t find them. Not at first.
During my maiden voyage to White Sulphur Springs, I immediately retreat into standard Maryland-driver horseshit. I curse the bucket seat for waking up my sciatica. I stop off at a designated “scenic view” at the entrance to a great valley, one I’d always wanted to take in. Only I quickly discover that the view from the highway is just as good, if not better. Precious time lost. I get back on I-270 and let the e-tron reach 100, but only for a moment; I’m too scared I’ll get a ticket. I sweat finding a charging station (the e-tron’s range with a full charge is a shade over 200 miles, and my trip was a shade more than that) and how to charge the car, since this was my very first time driving an EV. When I reach a Walmart charging station and find out I can charge this fucker to nearly full in less than half an hour, I actually get excited to drive along Shenandoah National Park.
In exchange for allowing the secret bunker to be built on its property, the Greenbrier got a free additional wing for its resort.
Greg Pajo
So I do the right thing and drive the scenic route the rest of the way to the resort, along back roads that weave through bucolic hillsides, like a skier navigating fresh moguls. The e-tron is built for this exact kind of route. I’m now doing the driving you’d see in the b-roll for a commercial advertising an Audi’s cornering agility. I stop for coffee at a general store and discover that city dwellers have bought it to refurbish into an Airbnb rental, the new colonizing the old.
That’s fine. I just want to get back on the highway. I want to get where I’m going. The car is still merely a tool, the road still work. I have always treated driving this way. My romantic visions of extended trips—to Hollywood! to Mexico! to the Yukon!—are better off remaining daydreams, because my imagined affection for the road always dissipates when I’m in the car, no matter the car. For some people—and you’re probably one of them—the journey is the point of the experience, and the car is a paintbrush you use to compose the whole thing. I’m not that guy. I’m a destination guy.
And so, when I reach the Greenbrier just as the sun is setting, I feel relief. It’s a grand hotel—majestic, beautiful, old. The kind of place that feels like it discovered pizza just two years ago. The paint is peeling. The various wallpaper patterns came right out of your grandmother’s feng shui daydreams. A long row of cutesy gift shops past the lobby lends an airport-terminal vibe. I’m too young for this sort of place. Definitely. Totally.
It would be fair to describe the Greenbrier’s decorating as exuberant.
Greg Pajo
I go up to the lobby bar and order a burger from a bartender who may or may not have also worked at the Overlook Hotel when Jack Torrance stayed there for the winter. The burger patty is so dry that I eat the bacon and melted cheese off it and leave the beef to grow cold on my plate. Then I walk into the casino carrying a peanut-butter milkshake. I set down my shake at the blackjack table and proceed to lose $100, including every single hand where I double down. Then I go back up to my room, kick back, and watch some basketball. I feel great. So, so relaxed. As always, leaving the car was my reward for spending hours inside it.
The following day, that script would flip.
Join me for a tour around a nuclear apocalypse that hasn’t yet happened, won’t you? I meet with my tour group in the grand upper-lobby area of the resort, where grand ballroom after grand ballroom awaits future wedding parties and their drunken revelers. Our guide is a jolly fellow named Jonathan, who has given this tour for nearly two decades. You can tell he loves the job. I can see why. You get to tell the same dad facts, over and over again, to a new group of people each time, all of whom are fascinated. What middle-aged man wouldn’t want that?
As for the bunker itself, it resembles a middle-school cafeteria in both structure and decor. Jonathan takes us by the blast doors, through secret tunnels that look more like parking-garage ramps, and into an auditorium that would, when the bunker was still active, serve as the House chamber should the U.S. government be forced to relocate. In a nearby display gallery, Jonathan notes a small arsenal of riot gear. In case any members of Congress went feral from being trapped underground without daylight, he notes, this riot gear was included to help keep them in line. The irony is not lost on me.
This bunker cost U.S. taxpayers $11 million back in the day, plus an extra $3 million that Ike used to sweeten the Greenbrier’s pot, building a free additional wing of the resort in exchange for letting him build a safe haven from Armageddon. The government easily shrouded that $14 million expense by burying it inside a series of highly lucrative public contracts it already had with the C&O Railway, which owned the Greenbrier at the time. C&O, now CSX, would eventually sell the resort to billionaire Jim Justice, who just happens to be the current governor of West Virginia. New and old, forever cannibalizing one another.
Jonathan tells us that it was surprisingly simple for both the government and everyone who helped build the bunker to keep it all on the DL. No one liked asking questions in 1962. “It was the Cold War era,” he explains. “People were used to secrecy back then.”
In the Greenbrier bunker, members of Congress were. expected to bunk as if at a summer camp.
COURTESY OF THE GREENBRIER
That, of course, is no longer true. There are very few secret places anymore—very few places for anyone, even the elite of the elite, to escape to. It’s hard to even escape from yourself. I know this firsthand because mine is a restless mind, forever tempted to empty its contents out onto the internet on a whim. My physical deafness can stop me from hearing others but not from hearing this cursed brain of mine.
As for the bunker itself, it’s still built, maintained, and stocked to withstand, then survive, a nuclear blast more than 15 miles away. But in the event Putin’s trigger finger gets even itchier, the bunker won’t be sheltering Nancy Pelosi and her ilk this time. Congress has a new secret bunker that you and I don’t know about yet. The one at the Greenbrier is now a server farm, used by former owner CSX for its offshoot cloud-storage business. You are worth sacrificing in the fire, but we gotta keep your digital organs around so that, even in death, you’ll have nowhere to hide.
At the end of the tour, we get a novelty envelope that says “declassified” and also “top secret,” two disclaimers that are not terribly in harmony. Inside are some of the photos that lined the bunker during our tour. They are now my data to shelter, and they’re safe in my hands. I’m not too far off from the age of the people who built this bunker when they built it, and I’m about the same age as the government officials the bunker was designed to protect. If I am not one of “them” yet, I will be soon. I will be one of the bad guys.
Nothing pleasant was ever going to happen in this room.
Photography COURTESY OF THE GREENBRIER
I’m driving home now, and everything that irritated me about the e-tron no longer does. I am no longer in a hurry. I know the drill with charging. I’m used to the cup holder giving my forearms a workout. The suede steering wheel feels buttery. I don’t ruminate over the bucket seat angering my lumbar region. Suddenly I’m just driving. Fast. Oh my God, this thing goes so fucking fast. Faster than Death can catch you. I look at the head-up display and see that I’m approaching 100 without a second thought. I bet I scared the shit out of the other cars on the road. Good.
I shoot for 100 again. I barely have to press the throttle. Going 100 in this car feels like doing 35 in my Hyundai. I am understanding the e-tron now. It’s becoming my hideaway. I wanna go faster. I wanna see where it tops out. I wanna accelerate until I levitate. I am a hog of the road, eating all the speed and food and electricity, without guilt or fear or empathy. And I’m loving it.
I feel old in this car, and I don’t mind. One day I’ll turn 50, and you know what? I can’t wait. Fifty is like 40, only without the remorse. You won’t be able to touch me, and no one else will either. I’ll be safe in my little fallout shelter of an existence, and the rest of the world will be everyone else’s problem but mine. I’m ready to stop sweating old age and exploit it to the hilt. I’m ready to suck some young blood. Now I am become boomer, the destroyer of worlds. Maybe I’ll treat myself to some Botox to celebrate the occasion and then buy the wheels to match.
Keyword: Audi E-Tron, Take Me to My Nuclear Bunker