As I close my eyes and lean back against my towel-covered lounge chair, my toes digging into soft, white sand and my senses calmed by the sound of the waterfall splashing into the lagoon next to me, I have to work hard to convince myself that I am not, in fact, somewhere in Hawaii or Bora Bora. It helps if I open my eyes, of course, because then I can see, through the green fronds of the palm, banana and papaya trees surrounding me, the arching rooftop and grand, segmented doors of what is, inarguably, an aircraft hangar. An airship hangar, to be exact … and, to be even more precise, reportedly the largest clear-span hangar in the world, stretching more than 1,000 feet long, 320 feet high, and encompassing 5.2 million cubic meters of space.
If I actually make the effort to sit up and look out the windows in the lower portion of the hangar walls, I can also see that it is far from tropical on the outside of this mini-ecosystem. Snow is blowing past the windows in horizontal, billowing clouds, and the parking lot is covered in ice. If I really want to test my bizarro-meter, I can peer even more closely out those windows and make out, across the airfield, empty MiG bunkers covered in turf and snow.
