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When most people hear the phrase “travel writer,” they get a mental picture of someone lounging around on a beach or sitting in Paris cafe meeting with beautiful people and drinking Bordeaux for hours. Reality tends to be a little less glamorous. I am currently typing this from a Staybridge Suites hotel in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
You may not have heard of this city, but at least you can find it on a map now. In the early 1940s, you could not. The U.S. government moved about 1,000 families off their land in a sparsely populated valley without telling them why and proceeded to fill the fenced-off area with some 75,000 people who were secretly building the atom bombs that ended World War II. It’s a bizarre story that has not been told very often—or very well—in the popular press so I’m down here putting something together for Perceptive Travel. (It’s going to be an Atomic Tourism story tying in Albuquerque and Los Alamos as well.)
Tonight I had dinner with a lovely 84-year-old woman named Colleen who worked here at the time. “My job was to check pipes for leaks. I didn’t really know what was in the pipes or what they were for. We weren’t supposed to ask.”
I can’t imagine being able to pull off anything close to this “secret city” in the age of satellites, blogs, Twitter, and Google Earth, so it’s a strange quirk in time that is unlikely to ever occur again. We’ve had Charlie Wilson’s War, underground bunkers, and secret prisons, but could you still build a whole city that’s not on any map, even though it has become the fifth-largest one in the state and has one of the biggest bus terminals in the whole country? Could you procure the government money necessary to build an entire city from scratch and outfit it with—get this—a reactor facility that required 14,700 tons of silver?
Screw the beach. I think my brain is better off in Oak Ridge. Maybe some smarts from the scientists working at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences will wear off on me.
[This story is now up in Perceptive Travel: Secret Cities and Atomic Tourism]
[photos are from James E. Westcott, who shot almost all the Manhattan Project period photos in Oak Ridge. He was 19 when he started. See more at the American Museum of Science and Energy.]
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