They shot but failed to hook the seventh seal. We chased the eighth—injured, but not dead—endlessly through a jigsaw patch of small ice floes. Part of the seal hunting strategy, they explained, was to tire out the seal through continuous shooting and chasing. After an hour-long pursuit we finally approached the seal, which was floundering in the water several feet from the boat. Jens grabbed the rifle, aimed it point blank at the seal’s head, and let loose one final pop! that spattered everything on the boat—even my camera lens—with seal blood. The final count? Eight killed, three hooked.
It was after midnight when we headed back, and the sun had sunk close to the horizon, assuming the position it would stay in through the morning. Summer nights in northern Greenland are an extended sunset, brilliant hues and streaks suspended in the sky for hours on end. But all I could think about was the cold. I stuck my fingers in my armpits. I wiggled my toes, then rubbed them through my sneakers, but nothing I did warmed them.
“Are you freezing?” Jens asked, in what I took to be the Greenlandic version of “are you cold?” He looked like he was out for a brisk evening stroll: no coat, no gloves, no hat, just a sweatshirt over his overalls. I took his suggestion to crouch on the boat’s floor, which provided a (slight) respite from the bitter wind.
As the colorful houses of Ilulissat came into view, Jens turned to me: “We’re going to cut the seal. Want to join?”
Even though I was freezing, starving, and pretty sure that I was losing a digit or two to frostbite, I couldn’t say no. We dropped off the Dane at the harbor and headed back out to sea, where Jens waved and shouted something to a man standing on the iceberg. He waved back to Jens—with a machete.
The berg was flat, low in the water, and mostly submerged, the underwater ice a fluorescent blue beneath the water’s surface. The man, a friend of theirs, stood in a puddle of blood at the center, and near his feet lay a dead seal. A single slit from head to flipper exposed its pinkish-red innards: fat, muscle, ribs, liver, and intestines. As we climbed onto the berg it felt like we were stepping onto an inflatable pool toy—it shifted noticeably with each footstep. Jens and Ule dragged the seals off the boat and anchored it to the most solid thing they could find: me.
Jens and Ule each got to work cutting the seals. After a few minutes, Jens placed a dark red organ off to one side: the liver. This, I had heard, was a delicacy here. “For good luck,” he said, as he handed me a bite-sized piece. “It will make you a better hunter next time.”
Even though I hate all kinds of liver—fried, grilled, chopped, or as pate—I accepted it. I braced myself to smile politely no matter how disgusting it would be. I took a bite, and my teeth sunk through the soft raw meat like it was a piece of sushi. Wait: it actually did taste like sushi.
“Wow,” I said, surprised. “It’s actually pretty good.”
“Want more?”
“No thanks,” I said. It was liver, after all.
Then, emboldened by the day’s events, or maybe it was the rush of eating seal, or maybe I was delusional from the cold, I carefully walked a few paces to the edge of what remained of this very shaky iceberg, pulled down my pants, squatted, and took one last piss: a future hunter marking her territory.
Anna Wexler is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and adventure traveler whose trip ideas are a continual source of concern for her friends and family. She has yet to top her solo bicycle ride across Mexico, but volcano boarding in Nicaragua, motorcycling northern Vietnam, and trekking the Himalayas all came pretty close. When Wexler isn’t on the road, she writes about science and travel from her sea view desk in Tel Aviv. Read more about her work at www.annawexler.com.
TOM MILLER
Precious Metal: Me and My Nobel
The author takes his rightful place among the immortals.
Every year the Swedish Academy awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize has been handed out annually, with the exception of the World War II years, since 1901. Winners have included George Bernard Shaw, Pablo Neruda, and Toni Morrison. It may surprise you, then, to know that I myself received a Nobel Prize in Literature. No one was more startled than me.
A good while back an online travel/adventure magazine called Mungo Park sent me to Cuba to prepare a series of reports under the general heading “Hemingway in Havana.” Now defunct, Mungo Park—named for a Scottish explorer from two centuries ago—was owned by Microsoft and operated from the corporate campus in Redmond, Washington. The series of dispatches I was to post daily would conclude with reports from Mariel Hemingway, the actress who was born some twenty weeks after her grandfather’s death. She was flown in for the occasion along with her husband, Stephen Crisman, who was shooting footage of her for a documentary film.
I had considerable experience on the island, and made the best preparations I could, given Cuba’s perennial suspicion of foreign electronic media. The country was just then emerging from its “special period in a time of peace,” a euphemism for the economic free fall following the Soviet Union’s implosion. Microsoft’s reputation helped enormously as I arranged logistics along Cuba’s informally dubbed “Hemingway Trail.”
“Will Bill Gates be coming?” officials in the tourism and communications fields asked. “You never know,” I replied with a wink.
My most daunting task was to convince Cuba’s Catholic Church to take Ernest Hemingway’s 1954 Nobel Medallion out of hiding so Mariel could see it. When Ernest won the 23-karat gold medal, he wanted to give it to the people of Cuba, off whose north coast his novel The Old Man and the Sea is set. Rather than turn the medallion over to the Batista government, he placed it in the custody of the Catholic Church for display at the sanctuary at El Cobre, a small town outside Santiago de Cuba on the island’s southeast coast.
The sanctuary has been called the Cuban Lourdes, and remains a repository for mementos and prayers from the hopeful and hopeless. The medallion remained there until the mid-1980s when thieves broke into the glass display case and stole it. Police recovered the medal within days, but the Catholic Church decided to keep it under wraps rather than chance another theft. It was with singular pleasure, then, that I held a private meeting with Padre Jorge Palma of the Diocese of Santiago de Cuba to persuade the church to bring the medallion out of hiding for the first time since the theft.
When it came time for our series to begin, Mungo Park flew in a producer to oversee the project and handle the technical details, and a photographer whose digital work was to be posted alongside my articles. The day we were to go online the tourism minder assigned to us had unfortunate news: We had not yet received official clearance to begin transmission back to Redmond. State Security—which we later learned had a hotel room on the floor below ours—tried to sabotage us.
Producer Christian Kallen took a deep breath and went to work. Instead of using our hotel’s monitored phone line to the States, he routed a line from his laptop to a Microsoft terminal in Canada, from which the stories and photos were dutifully forwarded to Microsoft’s campus for worldwide posting the next morning. Every day the tourism fellow forlornly told us we had not yet received clearance to transmit, and we’d nod our sad acquiescence. And every night we’d mojo the package to Canada.
Finally, Mariel arrived with her husband and two factotums who seemed to have no function other than to regale each other with tales of how to extract cash from errant ATMs. I was only too pleased to guide Hemingway and her entourage around Havana and introduce her to people and places of note, especially locations associated with her father’s father. Each time we came to such a site, I would recount the conventional wisdom about it, then explain that the popular story was at odds with the historical record.
A sign at a famous restaurant, for instance, had supposedly been autographed by Ernest Hemingway, but this was a complete invention, fabricated by tourism officials after his death. He was said to have written For Whom the Bell Tolls at one hotel, when in fact he wrote most of the book at another hotel where he maintained a room to escape
his growing popularity. When Hemingway’s old sea captain, then 100 years old at the time of our visit, was trotted out as the model for The Old Man and the Sea, I noted that, as a letter from Hemingway to his editor Maxwell Perkins reveals, the real fisherman was someone else who had died early on, leaving the way open for this new public face. Mariel’s husband grew increasingly annoyed as I punctured holes in the grand myth he had come to film. At one point, he leaned over from the back seat of our rented SUV. “Miller,” he said with irritation, “shut up.”
We chartered a plane to fly to Santiago de Cuba, and when we arrived at the sanctuary at nearby El Cobre, Padre Jorge came to the chapel to greet us. I’d like to say he slowly opened a creaking mahogany box and carefully unwrapped a fringed silk tallit to produce the medallion. But no, Hemingway’s celebrated Nobel Prize, which weighed almost half a pound, was stored in a large manila envelope.
Mariel knelt briefly and crossed herself, then received the medallion as the rest of the party watched from a distance. As interpreter, I discreetly stood a few feet back and to her side. Mariel held the precious medal, absorbing its essence. Then, as if a quarterback unexpectedly handing off to her halfback, she turned to her left and placed her grandfather’s medallion in my hands.
After many books, through decades of writing, I had received the most hallowed honor in my profession, the Nobel Prize.
I do not know what followed. It seemed as if a ray of light had come through stained glass and struck me dumb. There was something heavy in my hands that reflected the sun, I know, but I’m not sure if I held it for five seconds or five minutes. I recall sweating profusely and wearing a goofy grin. Mariel’s voice brought me out of the fog: “O.K., Tom, that’s enough.” I handed the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature back to her.
On our last day in Cuba, the tourism flack, utterly clueless about the previous week’s daily postings, excitedly told us we would be allowed to transmit to Redmond that evening. To make him happy, we reprogrammed the laptop and did it his way.
Tom Miller’s many books include Trading With the Enemy, The Panama Hat Trail, Jack Ruby’s Kitchen Sink, and Revenge of the Saguaro. His prizes include two Solas Awards and a Lowell Thomas Award for Best Travel Book of 2000. He was editor of Travelers’ Tales Cuba, and wrote the introduction for The Best Travel Writing 2005. Miller is a member of the Thornton Wilder Society and the Cervantes Society of America, and lives in Tucson, where he serves as Adjunct Research Associate at the University of Arizona’s Center for Latin American Studies.
HOLLY MORRIS
The Babushkas of Chernobyl
“As long as the sun shines, one does not ask for the moon.”
—Russian proverb
Outside Hanna Zavorotnya’s cottage in Chernobyl’s dead zone, the hulking, severed sow’s head bleeds into the snow, its gargantuan snout pointing to the sky in strange defeat. The frigid December air tingles with excitement as Hanna, seventy-seven, zips between the outlying sheds wielding the seven-inch silver blade used to bring the pig to its end. “Today I command the parade,” she says, grinning as she hands a vat of steaming entrails to her sister-in-law at the smokehouse, then moves off again. In one hand she holds a fresh, fist-size hunk of raw pig fat—there is no greater delicacy in Ukraine—and she pauses now and then to dole out thin slices to her neighbors. “I fly like a falcon!” says Hanna, shuttling at high speed back towards the carcass. Indeed, falcons, as well as wolves, wild boar, moose and lynx, all species not seen in these environs for decades, have returned to the forests around Chernobyl. One particular falcon, however, has not fared so well. A large gray and white specimen, it is strung up, dead, chest puffed and wings outspread against the slate sky, above Hanna’s chicken coop as a warning to its brethren. “He came and ate my chicken so I beat him with a stick,” she says. But if this falcon has not survived, Hanna has—against all odds and any reasonable medical prediction.
Twenty-five years ago, on April 26, 1986, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s Reactor Number 4 blew up after a botched test, and the ensuing fire lasted for ten days, spewing 400 times more radiation than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The government (then Soviet) declared that the surrounding thirty square kilometers were uninhabitable, and immediately resettled 116,000 residents with a pension, an apartment, some pots and pans and sketchy information about the health risks that lay ahead. In the months and years that followed, these first resettlers were followed by a few hundred thousand more, all displaced from the land where they’d grown up. But Hanna, who’d been forced out in the first group, did not accept that fate. Three months after being relocated, she returned to her ancestral home with her husband, her mother-in-law and a handful of other members of their collective farm, the main building of which now lies like a carcass, silent and overgrown, its sunken roof collapsing, a half-mile down the road from Hanna’s house. When government officials objected, she responded, “Shoot us and dig the grave; otherwise we’re staying.”
In the years following the accident, Hanna was among 1,200 returnees, called self-settlers, most over the age of forty-eight, who made their way back in defiance of the authorities’ legitimate concerns. For despite the self-settlers’ deep love of their ancestral homes, it’s a fact that the soil, air, and water here in what is now called the Exclusion Zone, or Zone of Alienation, are among the most heavily contaminated on Earth. Today, about 200 or so self-settlers remain, scattered about in eerily silent villages that are ghostly but also strangely charming.
About 80 percent of the surviving resettlers are women in their seventies and eighties, creating a unique world of babushkas, a Russian word that means “grandmother” but also refers to “old country women.” Why women? Radiation may know no gender preference, but alcohol and cigarettes do. The average life span of the Ukranian man is fifty-nine, and dropping. The consequences of vice—perhaps worsened by immune-damaging radiation—have contributed to creating this unlikely world of women.
Why, I wondered, would the babushkas choose to live on this deadly land? Are they unaware of the risks, or crazy enough to ignore them, or both? (These are reasonable questions from a Westerner who struggles in the aisles of a grocery-store over whether paying the extra $3 for organic almond butter is “worth it.”) But babushkas see their lives, and the risks they run, decidedly differently.
When Reactor Number 4 blew up, roughly 30 percent of the initial fallout hit Ukraine and parts of Western Russia and 70 percent landed downwind in Belarus. The gamma radiation was death-dealing: some forty first responders were incapacitated immediately and died within weeks. But the explosion’s long-term effect on the surrounding area was harder to quantify. Unlike the fallout from a nuclear bomb, which can be measured out circularly, and somewhat predictably, the radiation from Chernobyl’s nuclear fire laid waste in a spotty, inconsistent manner. And that inconsistency was exploited by petty local officials. Which villages got doused? Which did not? Dosimeter readings (which indicate accumulated radiation exposure) varied wildly and sometimes the authorities accepted bribes to alter them. Confusion, bravery and corruption marked the post-explosion weeks and months, and hardly anyone on the ground fully understood the dangers they were facing. A nuclear fire of this sort was unprecedented and a secretive Soviet bureaucracy added to the cloud of misinformation.
Chernobyl ushered in a new chapter on the toxic vagaries of radiation. What is clear about the effects of nuclear contaminants (cesium, strontium and plutonium, and others) is that they enter the food chain through the soil, they spread via wind and fire, and their effects are cumulative and linked to, among other things, increases in fetal mortality and cancer. In some cases the contaminants stick around for thousands of years. Immediately after the accident, cows ingested grass contaminated with the short-lived isotope radioiodine 131 (contaminated milk largely accounts for today’s sky-high thyroid cancer rates in the area). At the time of the accident, the babushkas may or may not have noticed that the birds fell silent and the honey bees ceased flying as the “
invisible enemy” enveloped the spring countryside, but they were definitely alarmed when emergency workers made them dump out their cows’ milk.
Maria Urupa was thinking about her cow when the soldiers arrived to evacuate her village of Paryshev on May 3, 1986. “I planned to take my cow and hide in the basement,” she says. Instead, she and her neighbors were relocated to a hurriedly constructed housing project about two hours’ drive away. Their new homes were outside Kiev (changed to Kyiv in 1991 after Ukraine became independent), on land where many people had died in the 1930s during the Holdomor (literally “death by hunger”), the massive genocide-by-famine that Soviet leader Josef Stalin instigated in order to subjugate Ukraine and move peasant farmers onto state farming collectives or into factories. Conservative estimates say between 3.5 million and 5 million Ukrainians died during this period, and many of the babushkas lost their fathers. Some almost died themselves, since during the Holmodor, starving villagers sometimes resorted to cannibalism, slaughtering one child to save the rest. Half a century later, the site where Maria and her family were relocated still held grim reminders of the Holodmor. “People’s legs were sticking out of the ground, and that’s where they built the village,” she remembers. Three months after moving there, Maria and her family returned to their home in the Exclusion Zone.
When I meet the seventy-seven-year-old on a still December afternoon she’s standing on her porch in twenty-eight degree weather, wearing only a cotton print housedress and a sweater so threadbare that a few of the buttons have been replaced by safety pins. With a small sled in tow, she’s on her way to gather wood for her cook stove. “Would you like some soup with mushrooms?” she asks, diligently hospitable. I demure, knowing mushrooms, a regional favorite second only to pig fat, are infamous absorbers of radiation. She doesn’t mind stopping to talk. She looks healthy and stout, if a bit stern due to the upside-down smile lines that crease her cheeks. Straining to be heard over the gobbles of a hefty reddish-brown turkey whose ruckus is meant to keep her chickens safe from the abundant wild animals, Maria tells me about the day Soviet troops under orders from Stalin marched onto the Urupa family farm. “They took away two bulls, two pigs and all the potatoes,” Maria says. “They did it because my father was working for the church and that was not allowed then.” When her father asked if he could keep a few potatoes, the soldiers threatened to kill him if he tried, saying, “Your soul will fly away and we’ll wrap your guts around the telephone wire.”
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