Turning back to the map, he continued. “From here we will go to Pripyat. This is deserted city. Then we can approach reactor to one hundred and fifty meters.”
It was the standard itinerary, allowing visitors to inhabit their preconceptions of Chernobyl as a scene of disaster and fear—but without actually straying off the beaten path or risking contamination. This was, after all, what most people wanted. But I hadn’t come all this way only to wallow in post-nuclear paranoia. I was here to enjoy the place, and this was the moment to make it happen.
“Is there any way…” How to put it? “Is there any way we could go canoeing?”
Dennis regarded me blankly from behind his shades. In their silvery lenses, I could see the reflection of someone who looked like me, with an expression on his face that said, Yes. I am an idiot.
“This is not possible,” said Dennis.
“Well, if there’s any way to get on the water, or maybe visit the local fishing hole, I’m happy to sacrifice part of our planned itinerary.”
The conference room was quiet. The shadow of a grimace passed across Dennis’s face. “This is. Not possible,” he said, without emotion. He was proving witheringly immune to what I had hoped would be my contagious enthusiasm. But it’s at moments like this, when you’re trying to take your vacation in a militarily controlled nuclear disaster zone—for which, I might add, there is no proper guidebook—that you must be more than normally willing to expose yourself as a fool in the service of your goals. I laid my cards on the table.
“Look. Let’s say I wanted to go for a boat ride with some friends somewhere in the zone,” I said. “Just theoretically speaking, where would we go? I mean, where are the really nice spots?”
A faint crease had developed in the dome of Dennis’s head.
I pressed on, telling him that I was trying to approach this not so much as a journalist or a researcher, but as a tourist. As a visitor. Where, for instance, could I find a good picnic spot in the Exclusion Zone? Where did he himself go on a slow day? And if it wasn’t possible in the zone, what would be the next best thing? I pointed to Strakholissya, just outside the zone, a town that I had identified while poring over a map the night before. What about that?
“Yes, this is nice place,” said Dennis. “You can go fishing here.”
I was making progress. Fishing?
“Yes,” said Dennis, gaining speed, “but this place is better.” He pointed to Teremtsi, a tiny spot nestled among a bunch of river islands deep inside the zone. “This is a good place for fishing,” he said. “I went once. Mostly I go there to collect mushrooms.”
I stared. Mushrooms, because they collect and concentrate the radionuclides in the soil, are supposed to be the last thing you should eat in the affected area. And Dennis gathered them in the heart of the Exclusion Zone.
“You collect mushrooms? And you eat them?” There was awe in my voice.
“Yes, this is clean area, I know. This is no problem.”
I couldn’t believe my luck. A total newbie, I was already teamed up with a guy who used the zone as his own mushroom patch and trout stream. I wanted to abandon our itinerary. Who needs to see a destroyed nuclear reactor when you can go fishing just downriver?
Don’t think I didn’t beg. But Dennis was far too professional to chuck the official program—with all its approved paperwork, stamped and signed in duplicate for each checkpoint—just because some half-witted foreigner said pretty please. But this time, there was a moment’s hesitation. “This is, um. Not possible,” he said, getting back on script. But I saw the hint of a smile on his face as he turned away from the map.
The briefing continued down the side wall of the room, from one diagram to the next. There were a pair of maps showing the distribution of contamination by radioactive isotopes of cesium and strontium in the zone. The contamination is wildly uneven, depending on where the radioactive debris fell immediately after the explosion, and on the wind and rain in the days and weeks that followed, when the open reactor core was spewing a steady stream of radioactive smoke and particles into the air. The weather of those following weeks is inscribed on the ground, in contamination. The maps showed the distribution, color-coded in shades of red and brown, a misshapen starfish with its heart anchored over the reactor.
The radiation level at any given spot also varies over time, although based on what, I’m not quite sure. So there are limits set for what is considered normal, just as there are in any city. Dennis told me that the standard in the town of Chernobyl was 80 microroentgens per hour. In Kiev, it was 50. (It’s about the same in New York, where background radiation alone gets you about 40 micros per hour.)
“In the last month, I measured 75 micros at different places in the town,” he said. Chernobyl was pushing the limit. But I was unclear what the standards for radiation levels really meant. In Kiev, for example, what difference did it make that the standard was 50 micros instead of 80, or 100?
“It means,” said Dennis, “there would be panic in Kiev if the reading was 51.” He thought people in Kiev were a little paranoid about contamination. “Just yesterday, some journalists called, saying they had heard there was a release of radioactive dust at the reactor,” he said. “I told them I had just been down to the reactor, and there was no problem.”
We had come to the end of the briefing. Dennis paused in front of the last photograph, which showed a large outdoor sculpture. Two angular gray columns held a slender crucifix aloft, like a pair of gigantic tweezers holding a diamond up for inspection. Below them, half a dozen life-size figures lugged fire hoses and Geiger counters toward a replica of the reactor’s cooling tower.
It was the firemen’s memorial. In the hours immediately following the explosion, the firemen of Pripyat had responded to the fire that still burned in the reactor building, and had kept it from spreading to the adjacent reactor. Unaware at first that the core had even been breached, they received appalling doses of radiation and began dying within days.
Dennis turned to me, expressionless behind his shades. The giant pointer tapped gently on the photo of the memorial. “If not for those firemen,” he said, “we would have an eight-hundred-kilometer zone, instead of thirty.”
Nikolai was waiting in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette. “We work until five o’clock,” Dennis said. “So we’ll have lunch at half past four. Then at ten to five is football. It is the most important game.” He was talking about the World Cup. Ukraine’s soccer team had qualified for the first time, and tonight was the critical elimination match against Tunisia. Fanciful images of a raucous Chernobyl sports bar danced through my mind. I told Dennis it sounded like a great plan.
He rode shotgun, while I sat in back. A few hundred yards beyond the firemen’s memorial, Nikolai pulled into a small gravel parking lot and jumped out of the car to buy a bottle of beer and an ice cream bar. There was a convenience store in the zone.
Within a few minutes we reached the checkpoint for the ten-kilometer limit, which encompasses the most-contaminated areas. The car barely stopped as Dennis handed a sheet of paperwork through the window to the waiting guard. He folded the rest of our permission slips and tucked them into the car’s sun visor for later.
The air that streamed through the car’s open windows was warm and sweet, a valentine from the verdant countryside that surrounded us. It felt as though we were just three guys out for a pleasant drive in the country—which was more or less the truth. Dennis and Nikolai traded jokes and gossip in Russkrainian. “We’re talking about the other guide,” said Dennis. “He’s on vacation.” It seemed there were no more than a handful of Chernobylinterinform guides. It only added to the sense that I had found a traveler’s dream: an entire region that—although badly contaminated—was beautiful, interesting, and as yet unmolested by hordes of other visitors.
My thoughts were interrupted by a loud electronic beep. My radiation detector had turned itself on—funny, that—and now that there was actually some radiation to detect (a s
till-modest 30 micros), it had begun to speak out with an annoying, electric bleat that in no way matched the PADEKC’s smooth iPod-from-Moscow look. There was a reason, I now realized, that this detector looked like something you might take to the gym instead of to a nuclear accident site: It was designed for the anxious pockets of people who thought 30 micros were worth worrying about.
In the front seat, Dennis had produced his own detector, a brick-size box of tan plastic fronted by a metal faceplate. Little black switches and cryptic symbols in Cyrillic and Greek adorned its surface. I was jealous. It seemed there was no kind of radiation it couldn’t detect, and it probably got shortwave radio, too. Its design was the height of gamma chic: slightly clunky, industrially built, understatedly cryptic, and pleasingly retro. What really sold me was its beep. Unlike the fretful blurts of the PADEKC, the beeps of this pro model were restrained, almost musical. It sounded like a cricket, vigilantly noting for the record that you were currently under the bombardment of this many beta particles, or that many gamma rays. It was a detector made for someone who accepts some radiation as a fact of daily life, and who doesn’t want to lose focus by being reminded of it too loudly. Someone who is perhaps even something of a connoisseur of radiation levels. Someone like Dennis.
The car stopped. Dennis pointed out the window to a large mound among the trees. “This is Kolachi,” he said. A pair of metal warning signs stood crookedly in the tall grass. That was all that remained. The village had been so contaminated by the accident that it was not only evacuated but also leveled and buried. There were many such villages. Dennis held his meter out the window: 56 micros. It was my first time above Kiev-panic levels.
Leaving Kolachi behind us, we passed by some old high-tension electrical wires—presumably part of the system that had, until recently, carried electricity from the undamaged reactors of the Chernobyl complex, which had continued to function even after the accident. The Soviet and then Ukrainian governments kept the other three reactors running into the 1990s, and only shut the last one down in 2000. Of the thousands of people still reporting to work in the Exclusion Zone, the great majority are employed in the decommissioning of those reactors.
On the seat beside me, the PADEKC was getting insistent. I apologized for the racket, feeling the same embarrassment as when your cellphone rings in a quiet theater. I tried to put the damn thing on vibrate, but all I could manage was to get lost in its impenetrable Russian menus. When we took the turnoff for Pripyat, it began to freak out in earnest. The reading ascended quickly from 50 micros through the 60s and the 80s, and into the low 100s. The beeping increased in pace, in a way I could only find vaguely alarming. Nikolai glanced back at me, unconcerned, but wondering what my little meter was making such a fuss about.
We were crossing through the Red Forest. Named for the color its trees had turned when they were killed off by a particularly bad dose of contamination, the Red Forest was cut down and buried in place, becoming what must be the world’s largest radioactive compost heap. Back in the briefing room, Dennis had warned me that we would experience our highest exposure while passing through this area, which had since been replanted with a grove of pine trees, themselves stunted by the radiation.
As we rounded a bend, Dennis again held his meter aloft outside the passenger window. It began chirping merrily. Meanwhile the PADEKC was going nuts. In Kiev, Leonid had told me the upper limit on the unit was 300 microroentgens, but it now spiked from the mid-100s directly to 361. The car filled with our detectors’ escalating beeps, which quickly coalesced into a single shrill tone that was painfully reminiscent of the flatlining heart monitor you hear on hospital TV shows.
Dennis’s meter topped out at 1,300 micros, about thirty times the background radiation in New York City. He twisted around in his seat to face me. “Yesterday it was up to 2,000,” he said. There was a hint of apology in his voice. Perhaps he was worried I might feel shortchanged for having received less than the maximum possible exposure from a Red Forest drive-by, as if I had come to Nepal to see Mount Everest, only to find it obscured by clouds.
Over a bridge lined with rusted street lamps and ruined guardrails, Nikolai slowed the car to weave between the potholes dotting the roadway. At the bottom of the bridge’s far slope, we reached another checkpoint. Dennis adroitly snatched the next leaf of paperwork out of the stack and tucked it into the waiting hand of the guard. The sign at the checkpoint read PRIPYAT.
Even more than the reactor itself, Pripyat is the centerpiece of any day trip to the Exclusion Zone. Before 1986, it was a city of nearly fifty thousand people, devoted almost entirely to running the four nuclear reactors that sat just down the road and to building the additional reactors that were to be added to the complex. At the time of the meltdown, Reactors Nos. 5 and 6 were nearing completion, and a further six reactors were planned, making the neighborhood a one-stop shop for the area’s nuclear energy needs.
It didn’t take long for the residents of Pripyat to realize there had been an accident. Anyone looking south from the upper stories of Pripyat’s tall apartment buildings could have seen smoke belching from the maw of the destroyed reactor building some two kilometers distant. What they didn’t know was that it was no ordinary fire.
The city was bathed in radiation, but the residents remained uninformed. They continued about their business for more than a day, while the government scrambled to contain the accident. Finally, at noon on April 27, nearly a day and a half after the explosion, the authorities announced their decision to evacuate the city.
You can say what you like about the Soviet government, which killed and exiled millions of its own people and repressed most of the rest. But you have to concede that when they put their minds to it, they really knew how to get a place evacuated. When at last the order was given, it took only hours for this city of fifty thousand people to become a ghost town. The evacuation was broadened over the following days to include more than a hundred thousand people. Ultimately, more than three hundred thousand were displaced.
Pripyat sat empty. In the months and years following the evacuation, it was looted and vandalized by people who were obviously unconcerned by the radioactive nature of their spoils, whether televisions for their own use or metal items to be sold as scrap. The evacuation and the looting turned Pripyat into what it is today: the world’s most genuinely post-apocalyptic city.
In spite of what you might have seen in the movies, though, things can actually be pretty nice after an apocalypse—if a bit scarce in terms of human beings. The road that led us into Pripyat from the south was lined with bushes speckled with small white blossoms, the air thick with the smell of flowers. The vista opened up as we reached the center of town, allowing a view of the buildings around us. Dennis and I clambered out in the middle of an intersection, and Nikolai motored off down a side road to find a nice spot to sit and drink the beer he’d bought earlier.
The day was hot and sunny. The ghostly city surrounded us, the buildings of downtown looming up from behind scattered poplar trees. Behind us rose a ten-story apartment block. Its pink and white plaster facade was falling off in patches, revealing the rough brickwork of the walls underneath. More apartment blocks stood along the road to the left, some of them crowned with large, Soviet hammer-and-sickle insignia that must once have lit up at night.
We walked toward the town plaza, following a path that had once been a sidewalk but was now a buckling concrete track invaded by weeds and grass. Dennis lit a cigarette and looked up as he took a long drag. A gentle breeze pushed a herd of little clouds across the sky. Birds flitted by.
The plaza was bordered on three sides by large buildings. To the right, a defunct neon sign announced the Hotel Polissia, seven stories of square, gaping windows. From where we stood, more than twenty years of looting and abandonment had not significantly worsened the stark, unforgiving aspect of the hotel’s architecture. A few hardy shrubs even peeked from among the freestanding letters of the roof sign. It’s amazing where things
will grow when people stop all their weeding.
Between drags on his cigarette, Dennis answered my questions with the jaded economy of someone who had been to this spot a thousand times. “What’s that?” I said, pointing at the building to the left of the hotel.
“Culture palace,” he said.
“What’s a culture palace?”
“Discos.” Another drag. “Movies.”
To our left was a blocky building with a sign reading PECTOPAH. Using my nascent Cyrillic, I decoded this as RESTAURANT. I pointed to a low-slung gallery that jutted from its side.
“What was there?”
Dennis looked up and removed the cigarette from his mouth.
“Shops.”
The plaza where we stood was gradually surrendering itself to shrubs and moss. Vegetation spilled over its borders and crept along its seams. A set of low, crumbling stairs led up from the plaza’s lower level, purple wildflowers and a few tree saplings poking out from the cracks.
“Don’t step on the moss,” Dennis ordered as we walked up the mossy stairs from the mossy lower level to the mossy upper level.
“Why’s that?” I asked, and hoped he hadn’t seen the contorted tap dance of my reaction.
“The moss…concentrates the radiation,” he said, and tossed his cigarette butt on the ground. The same could have been said for the mushrooms he had freely admitted to gathering in the zone, but I didn’t bother to point it out.
I stopped to take a picture. Dennis dangled another cigarette from his mouth and posed on the concrete path, the pectopah in the distance. Behind his sunglasses, he could have been the bassist for a Ukrainian rock band. FOOTBALL, said the writing on his sleeveless black T-shirt. SYNTHETIC NATURE. He held up his detector for the camera to see. It read 120. But what did 120 microroentgens mean on a sunny day? More than a little. Less than a lot. Panic in Kiev.
Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places Page 3