Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  Eternal, but it didn’t last. The time came when Krishna left the hills of his youth and went to fulfill his destiny as a warrior and lord. It is said that without Radha to animate his music, he laid down his legendary flute. Later, he married and had children with a princess in Dvaraka. I don’t know what happened to the milkmaid Radha.

  We walked. It was a good way to travel, watching the fields creep by, and smelling the air, and feeling the exhaust of passing trucks. There was still no Yamuna in sight—later today, Sunil told me—and we were hiking, as always, along the side of the highway. The trucks would blare their elaborate horns as they rushed past, sometimes melodious, sometimes earsplitting. It would be nice to think they were honking in solidarity with the yatra, but in India as in many countries, it is simply a part of driving to blast your horn when you are passing another vehicle, or being passed, or when you see something by the side of the road, or when you don’t.

  It was morning. I saw things. A dot of orange crossing an expanse of feathered grain. She turned, a woman, the tangerine cloth of her sari covering her head, just visible above the wheat. A sadhu with an ochre stripe painted across his forehead grabbed a handful of chickpeas from the edge of a field and handed me a sprig, and we ate the beans raw. The tall chimney of a brick factory, and another, and another. They drew dark plumes across the sky. We passed close to one. In a compound enclosed by walls of brick, men carted bricks to a kiln made of bricks under a tall chimney made of bricks. A peacock stood on a crumbling brick wall, iridescent in the dust. At the sound of our loudspeaker, the workers paused and watched us go, and we waved to each other.

  “All the farmers, come to Delhi!” the sadhus chanted. “All the people, come to Delhi!” There were thirty of us.

  A burst of parrots, and then a group of Sarus cranes coasted over our heads and landed in a field, each of them tall as a man, and more beautiful. Smooth, gray feathers lined their bodies, a flash of crimson around the head. In India, I hear, they are revered as symbols of marital happiness, of unconditional love and devotion. The species is classified as vulnerable, if not yet endangered.

  The Doctor and I had been e-mailing. From New York to Linfen, and Delhi, and here on the road, sympathetic words echoed over the space between two diverging lives, building our goodbye.

  “Please do not be sad,” she wrote. “My love goes with you everywhere.”

  We walked.

  I should be wrapping it up, I thought. The end of the story was somewhere nearby, just down the highway, where the road found the river. I should be ready for that moment. I should be thinking, reflecting on my journeys in polluted places, looking back across thousands of miles, distilling each location into its essence, saying what it all meant. Hadn’t I already said it? That to chase after the beautiful and the pristine was to abandon most of the world? That the unnatural, too, was natural? Or was it the reverse?

  It began on a train to Chernobyl. And I had tried to follow it, through oceans and mines and forests, past a chain of uncanny monuments to our kind. There was something I was trying to see. An asteroid was striking the planet. I just wanted to catch a glimpse. But it was impossible, because we were the asteroid. The world had already ended, with a whimper, and also it didn’t end. Now we inhabit the ended, unending world that came afterward. The world with us. The world transformed. A crater yawns open from its center and a new nature floods across it.

  It is the world as it is, not as we wish it would be.

  But mostly, we walked. And I waited for that feeling. It found me in the mornings. On the road before sunup, the sadhus falling into rank, Potbellied Baba narrowly avoiding being run down by an oncoming truck, and we would set out. Someone had garlanded the pickup truck with a white flag, bordered in green—the fluttering standard of the farmers’ union. I stayed in the back and watched us as we went, our tiny band of misfits, a ragged line of men, supposedly holy, straggling along the shoulder of the highway, down to Delhi, with the night’s mist settling on the fields, and the sun just short of the horizon behind us, and it would find me. Somehow, that feeling. It started in the bones of my legs, and into my spine, and up the back of my neck, washing over my ears and face and my eyes, coursing through my scalp, streaming into the air above my head, lit with the fresh sun and then it was day. This happened. Every morning, this attack of gratitude, swarming over me, as we walked and walked, puppets to an uncertain music.

  Only after we had been in camp for several minutes did I realize it. We hadn’t made the river. I was leaving for Delhi in the morning. My Yamuna yatra had been completely Yamuna-less.

  What the hell, Sunil?

  “Gore Krishna!” he cried, and told me not to worry. We would see the river that afternoon. He had planned a field trip. I crammed into the jeep with half a dozen other people, and Sunil hit the gas.

  As we headed west, the air became hotter, the earth tougher, the fields of wheat taller and blonder. Forty minutes and half a dozen quick stops for directions, and Sunil turned left down a small, barren gully. There were rowboats tied up in the dust. It was the edge of the floodplain.

  We came out the bottom of the ravine and saw a stripe of water in the distance, beyond a wide sweep of sandy scrubland. The Yamuna at last.

  But if I thought the sight of the river would be greeted with any reverence by the sadhus of the Yamuna yatra, I was mistaken. They seemed not to notice. Sunil was in the middle of a long set of stories that had reduced the car to uproarious laughter.

  “What is he saying?” I asked Mahesh.

  “He is telling a joke,” he said, between gasps.

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “What’s the joke about?”

  “Yes!” he said, still laughing.

  “No, Mahesh. What was the joke?”

  “It is a…very different, something kind of joke.”

  Our destination was a temple overlook on the bluff opposite. We crossed a temporary bridge constructed of large steel pontoons and cracked timbers, and manned by a quintet of men sitting by a shack. The Yamuna glimmered in the late-afternoon light. On the other side, Sunil sent us shooting up the dirt road that climbed the hill, past low adobe houses, past a huge banyan tree, and finally parked by the temple. We spilled out of the jeep and walked by a pair of ruined towers to find the overlook. From the promontory, we could see green fields descending to the riverbank. A pair of fishermen plied the water in small boats.

  This was Panchnada, the confluence that R. C. Trivedi had told me about. Nearly three hundred miles downstream from Delhi, four tributaries joined to feed the Yamuna a massive dose of new water, finally diluting the river’s oxygen-starved flow. We could see the confluence in the distance—the confluences. From a confusing tangle of sinuous bends and meandering inflows, the Yamuna emerged clean at last—or cleanish—despite everything that had been done to it. It had been made to flow into the ground, to slosh along canals and up against barrages, to wind through the intestines of sixteen million people, to suffer any number of other transformations, and still it flowed. It may have to wait out humankind to find a less tortured course.

  On the way back, about a hundred yards past the bridge, the deep, dry sand of the floodplain swallowed the wheels up to their axles. We got out and started pushing the jeep in different, uncoordinated directions. In the distance, we saw a truck having the same problem, and another jeep. The place was a car trap.

  “Gore Krishna has caused us complications!” shouted Sunil, gunning the engine and spinning the wheels. (Don’t look at me, Sunil—I wanted to walk.) Mahesh crouched by the tire, shoveling sand out with his hands. “With Krishna all things are possible!” he said. Behind every handful he scooped away, more sand ran in.

  I wandered back to the pontoon bridge. The men sitting by the bridge-keeper’s hut let me climb the ramp and stand on the steel plates of the roadway. I watched the river flow gently against the bridge, steel cables creaking with the strain. A fresh, sweet air came off the water. Downstream, a new bridge was under constructio
n, a proper highway bridge, built on tall concrete pylons.

  The men climbed the ramp to see what I was doing. Their English was almost as bad as my Hindi, but somehow we started a conversation. The bridgekeeper said his name was Tiwari, and he introduced me to everyone else. I took their picture and showed it to them.

  Tiwari got it across that the bridge was seasonal. It was installed only for the dry months, from November to the middle of June. During the monsoonal flood, he became a boatman, ferrying people across on a square, flat-bottomed boat that he kept tied up next to the bridge. I didn’t know how to ask him if he would still have a job when the new bridge opened.

  They asked my name. Andrew, I said. Andru, they said. They didn’t ask me why I was here, or who I was, or where I was going. They asked me if I had been on the river.

  Not here, I said. I had been on the river in Delhi. I held my nose. They shook their heads and clucked their tongues in disapproval. But they were smiling. I shook Gorokhpur’s hand—I think it was Gorokhpur—and his wizened face creased with laughter, and I laughed, too.

  I realized that, among my five or six words of Hindi, I had several that might apply.

  “Ye pani acha hai?” I offered. This water is good?

  They nearly broke into applause. Yes! they said. This water is good.

  “Delhi pani bahot acha nehi hai,” I said, getting ambitious. Delhi water is not very good.

  No, they said. It’s not. One of them pointed upstream. Panchnada, he said, and his sentence dissolved in a filigree of Hindi. I pulled out my notebook and we started drawing. We drew the Yamuna, and the four rivers feeding it, the fingers of a watery hand, with the bracelet of a pontoon bridge riding up against its palm.

  Once the five rivers come together, the water is good, they said. Tiwari gestured up and down the river, his arm outstretched. He had the English word.

  “Purify,” he said. “Purify Yamuna.”

  Upstream, the sun was setting. A temple on the rise of the opposite bank had descended into silhouette. The breeze off the water had cooled. I took a last look at the Yamuna. At the place where it became a river again.

  Then I said goodbye to the bridgekeepers and started back across the floodplain, to where the jeep was still trapped in the sand.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The people who appear in this book were incredibly generous with their time, their thoughts, and often their homes. I’m truly grateful to them, and to many others who remained behind the scenes.

  For help navigating Kiev and Chernobyl, I must thank Olena Martynyuk, Damian Kolodiy, Dmytro Kolchynsky, and of course Nikolai and Dennis.

  In Fort McMurray, in addition to Don and Amy, I was welcomed by Matty Flores and Corey Graham.

  Port Arthur is a better town than it gets credit for, and I am especially grateful to Hilton Kelley, Steven Radley, Laura Childress, Peggy Simon, Charlie Tweedel, Duane Bennett, Rhonda Murgatroyd, Jeremy Hansen, Bryan Markland, and everyone at the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown museum. For background on the Gulf Coast and its refineries, I depended on conversations with Ilan Levin, Jim Blackburn, and Kristen Peek, among others. I especially want to thank Jane Dalton, Scott Dalton, Don Harlan, Kirk Boomer, and Walter Mattox for opening doors in the Southeast Texas oil industry. Adam Ellick of the New York Times not only nominated Port Arthur as a notable polluted place but also was generous and exacting with his reporting advice.

  My visit to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was only possible thanks to Project Kaisei’s inclusive spirit, and I wish to thank Mary Crowley, Lenora Carey, and the entire Ocean Voyages Institute. I may have questioned their approach, but I don’t doubt their passion and commitment, and I am deeply grateful for my experiences as a deckhand on the Kaisei. It also seems important to thank any group of people whose company you still enjoy after three weeks at sea, which was true of the Kaisei’s crew. Special thanks to Stephen Mann, who was largely responsible for our survival. I am also grateful to Nikolai Maximenko, of the University of Hawaii, and Bill Francis and Marieta Francis of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. Gabriel Goldthwaite, Henry Whittaker, and Tim Jones very kindly reviewed the chapter, and Tim provided coordinates for the Kaisei’s route.

  In Brazil, I depended utterly on Gil Serique’s limitless store of energy, enthusiasm, and knowledge. Anyone seeking a guide, translator, or drinking buddy in the Amazon should seek him out immediately. I am also indebted to Rick Paid, who was immensely generous with his time, as were Josenilson de Souza Guimaraes (aka Tang), Eric Einstein, Eric Jennings, Steven Alexander, Joe Jackson, Luiz Machado, Antonio Carneiro, Raimundo Carneiro, and everyone at the Ambé Project. Carolina Klauck Moraes provided invaluable logistical support from afar, as well as after-the-fact translation.

  I’m very thankful to Cecily Huang for her research, translation, and logistics work in China. My deep appreciation also goes to the Han family, to Liu, and to the coal workers of a particular mine near Linfen. Thank you as well to Jonathan Watts, Andrew Jacobs, David Yang, Helen Couchman, Ami Li, Evan Osnos, and Ruth Morris.

  Of the many people who helped me in India, I would especially like to thank Mansi Midha. For the warm welcome at Man Mandir and on the Yamuna yatra, I thank Shri Ramesh Baba Ji Maharaj and his followers, including Brahmini, Sunil, Jai, and Mahesh. Thanks also to Jason Burke, Kakoli Bhattacharya, Vimlendu Jha, Anand Bhaskar Rao, and Shruti Narayan.

  In both the Pacific and Amazon chapters, I combined my research for this book with the production of television segments for the weekly newsmagazine Dan Rather Reports. I am most grateful to Mr. Rather for that opportunity, and for his words of encouragement; also to the management and staff at DRR, among them Wayne Nelson, Elliot Kirschner, Steve Tyler, and Andrew Glazer, who provided me with work, contacts, and advice.

  As my agent, Michelle Tessler has been an ideal advocate for this project, and without her guidance and enthusiasm it would not exist. Colin Dickerman also believed in the book from a very early stage and made a home for it at Rodale. As for everyone else at Rodale, I can’t thank them enough for their hard work and collegiality: Mike Zimmerman, Marie Crousillat, Brent Gallenberger, Aly Mostel, Maureen Klier, Amy King, and especially Gena Smith, without whose intelligence and judgment this book would be a confused mess.

  It is impossible for me not to thank the New York Public Library and Wesleyan University for providing me with good places to write; as well as Keith Blount, who created Scrivener, the software in which this book was written. Professor Lesley Sharpe of the University of Exeter provided a clarified version of the epigraph. (The original version can be found in the subway station underneath Bryant Park, in New York City, which means I should thank the MTA as well.)

  Many thanks to Paul Wapner for an engaging discussion of his work studying environmental politics, and to Jamie Tanner for drawing the beautiful maps that adorn the beginning of each chapter.

  I’m truly humbled by the support I received from my family, especially Jane and Michael Blackwell, and from a deep roster of friends. They supported the dream of this book, indulged my stretches of writer’s despair, and provided invaluable feedback on the manuscript. They include James Taft, Laura Driscoll, Matthew Blackwell, Alice Towey, Katie Ender, Scott Dalton, Lorena Sanches Agredo, Victoria Schlesinger, Sally Kim, Anamaria Aristizabal (who took me to Kanpur in the first place), James Higdon (who named the book), Naomi Goodman, Nick Bussey, Bryan Reichhardt, Anna and Ben Low, Brigid Rowan, Eric Laplante, Fleur Knowsley, Kate Pound, Alisa Roth, Hugh Eakin, Chad Poist, Jeff Cohen, Andrew Goldman, Kristen Cesiro, and the ever-vigilant Erin Lee Mock. As for Adam Bolt, I don’t see how I could have managed without his help. I can’t thank him enough for his collaboration and friendship.

  Above all, I will never be able to repay James, Laura, Erin Lee, and Adam. Time and again, these four put a roof over my head, gave me a place at their tables, and showed me what friendship looks like.

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  INDEX

  Amazon rainforest

  carbon bomb potential in, 158

  cattle ranching and, 159

  feedback loops from cutting down, 158

  future of, 195, 198

  hydroelectric projects in, 179

  record low deforestation in, 160

  regulations on clearing, 183–84

  secondary forest, 194

  selective logging in, 176

  size of, 158

  soy moratorium, 190–91, 198–201

  strangeness of owning, 202–3

  Tapajos National Forest, 169–175

  waste from logging, 176–77

  waves of exploitation in, 164

  Archeology sites on Spindletop, 109–10

  Beijing, China, pollution in, 219–220

  Carbon dioxide (CO2)

  China as biggest emitter of, 221

  forests absorbing, 158

  Fort McMurray’s emissions, 60–61

  oil’s part in emissions, 77

  small farmers’ footprint, 183

  Cargill Incorporated

  deforestation prompted by, 183, 186

  forest “preserve” on land of, 193

  Greenpeace and, 190–91, 199–200

  Santarem terminal of, 159, 167–68

  Chernobyl area

  briefing for trip to, 15–18

  cancer in, 36

  firemen’s memorial, 18

  Garbage Patch compared to, 127

  liquidators in, 10

  nature in, 23, 24, 25, 34–36

  sanctioning of tourism to, 13

  Chernobyl Museum, Kiev, 3–4

  Chernobyl reactor

  destruction caused by accident, 30

  firemen at, 3, 18, 29