Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [109]
After the fun of Seligman, I spent the night in possibly the weirdest hotel room in the world. At Peach Springs, Arizona, the room was in the centre of a dry cavern, 220 feet deep and 65 million years old. One of the few dry caverns in the world, there was not a drop of water in it, which made it uniquely suitable for use as the world’s deepest hotel room.
Until quite recently, the cavern was a tourist attraction. People would be winched down on ropes, through holes in the rock, holding a paraffin lamp. Promised the chance to explore what was billed as a ‘dinosaur cave’, those must have been the bravest tourists in the world, because I certainly wouldn’t have done it that way. I took the newly built lift, which was scary enough, especially when I realised it was my only lifeline back to the surface.
As soon as I stepped through the lift door, I felt a huge rush of air surging up through the shaft. That air, I was told, came from the Grand Canyon, more than sixty-five miles away. It makes its way through a series of tunnels all the way to that cavern at Peach Springs. Then, in a way that nobody really understands, it escapes from the cavern, meaning it sort of breathes. Weird … and a little bit scary.
Having walked down a short corridor, I entered the most unbelievable cave. It consists of two enormous rooms, with a wooden platform in the middle of one of them – my quarters for the night. With two double beds, some nice Route 66 furniture, a couch, a television and an assortment of National Geographic magazines to remind me what the world upstairs looked like, it was a pleasant enough place to stay. There was also a wee shower and a toilet. It was pretty much the same as any other motel room I’d stayed in on Route 66 … aside from the fact that the roof was about seventy-five feet above my head and made entirely of solid rock that had been hollowed out over millions of years by an ancient waterfall. I started to wonder exactly what I thought I was doing down there.
In 1962 President Kennedy decided that the cave would make a good bomb shelter. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, when Americans felt there was a very real possibility that Soviet missiles might be launched against them, JFK had the cavern filled with enough provisions to feed two thousand people for thirty days. I suppose it was a good idea in those very dark days, but the idea of two thousand people in that cave, fighting for the food – most of it sweeties and crackers – just boggles my mind. The smell, the dark and the crush of people would have been unbelievable. And how would they get two thousand people in and out of a cavern using a lift that could carry a maximum of a dozen people at a time? And what would they do if the food ran out? And would they really have wanted to return to the world up top, which presumably would have been full of people with two heads running about, eating anything that dared to show its face, human or otherwise?
Wandering through the cave, I struggled to come to terms with the sheer size of it, but then I always get freaked out by the size and age of things like that. Talking about squillions of years confuses me. I spotted some helictites – very rare crystals that baffle geologists, who still don’t understand how they are formed. Neither do I, so I moved on and found JFK’s store of food and other vital supplies. It didn’t look very big. Some big black plastic drums contained water that had been stagnant for