The Best American Travel Writing 2012

by Jason Wilson

  The marabout retrieved a palm-size book bound with intricately tooled leather. The withered pages had fallen out of the spine, and he gently turned the brittle leaves one by one until he found a chart filled with strange symbols. He explained that the book contained spells for everything from cures for blindness to charms guaranteed to spark romance. He looked up from the book. “Do you need a wife?” I said that I already had one. “Do you need another?”

  I asked if I could examine the book, but he refused to let me touch it. Over several years his uncle had tutored him in the book’s contents, gradually opening its secrets. It contained powers that, like forces of nature, had to be respected. He explained that his ancestors had brought the book with them when they fled Andalusia in the fifteenth century after the Spanish defeated the Moors. They had settled in Mauritania, and he had only recently moved from there with his family. “I heard the people of Timbuktu were not satisfied with the marabouts here,” he said. I asked who his best customers were. “Women,” he answered, grinning, “who want children.”

  He produced a small calculator, punched in some numbers, and quoted a price of more than a thousand dollars for the gris-gris. “With it you can walk across the entire desert and no one will harm you,” he promised.

  The Green Beret’s Girlfriend

  The young woman appeared among the jacaranda trees of the garden café wearing tight jeans and a pink T-shirt. She smiled nervously, and I understood how the Green Beret had fallen for her. Aisha (not her real name) was twenty-three years old, petite, with a slender figure. She worked as a waitress. Her jet-black skin was unblemished except for delicate ritual scars near her temples, which drew attention to her large, catlike eyes.

  We met across from the Flame of Peace, a monument built from some three thousand guns burned and encased in concrete. It commemorates the 1996 accord that ended the rebellion waged by Tuareg and Arabs against the government, the last time outright war visited Timbuktu.

  Aisha pulled five tightly folded pieces of paper from her purse and laid them on the table next to a photograph of a Caucasian man with a toothy smile. He appeared to be in his thirties and was wearing a royal-blue Arab-style robe and an indigo turban. “That is David,” she said, lightly brushing a bit of sand from the photo.

  They had met in December 2006, when the U.S. had sent a Special Forces team to train Malian soldiers to fight AQIM. David had seen her walking down the street and remarked to his local interpreter how beautiful she was. The interpreter arranged an introduction, and soon the rugged American soldier and the Malian beauty were meeting for picnics on the sand dunes ringing the city and driving to the Niger River to watch the hippos gather in the shallows. Tears welled in Aisha’s eyes as she recounted these dates. She paused to wipe her face. “He only spoke a little French,” she said, laughing at the memory of their awkward communication.

  Aisha’s parents also came from starkly different cultures. Her mother’s ancestors were Songhai, among the intellectuals who helped create Timbuktu’s scholarly tradition. Her father, a Fulani, descended from the fierce jihadis who seized power in the early 1800s and imposed Sharia in Timbuktu. In Aisha’s mind, her relationship with David continued a long tradition of mingling cultures. Many people pass through Timbuktu, she said. “Who is to say who Allah brings together?”

  Two weeks after the couple met, David asked her to come to the United States. He wanted her to bring her two-year-old son from a previous relationship and start a life together. When her family heard the news, her uncle told David that since Aisha was Muslim, he would have to convert if he wanted to marry her. To his surprise, David agreed.

  Three nights before Christmas, David left the Special Forces compound after curfew and met one of Aisha’s brothers, who drove him through the dark, twisting streets to the home of an imam. Through an interpreter the imam instructed the American to kneel facing Mecca and recite the shahadah three times: “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” He gave the soldier a Koran and instructed him to pray five times a day and to seek Allah’s path for his life.

  When David returned to the compound, his superiors were waiting for him. They confined him to quarters for violating security rules. Over the next week, he was not allowed to mix with the other Green Berets nor permitted to see Aisha, but he was able to smuggle out three letters. One begins: “My dearest [Aisha], Peace be upon you. I love you. I am a Muslim. I am very happy that I have been shown the road to Allah, and I wouldn’t have done it without meeting you. I think Allah brought me here to you . . .” He continues: “I am not to leave the American house. But this does not matter. The Americans cannot keep me from Allah, nor stop my love for you. Allahu Akbar. I will return to the States on Friday.”

  Aisha never saw him again. He sent two e-mails from the United States. In the last message she received from him, he told her that the army was sending him to Iraq and that he was afraid of what might happen. She continued to e-mail him, but after a month or so her notes began bouncing back.

  As she spoke, Aisha noticed tears had fallen onto the letters. She smoothed them into the paper and then carefully folded up the documents. She said she would continue to wait for David to send for her. “He lives in North Carolina,” she said, and the way she pronounced North Carolina in French made me think she imagined it to be a distant and exotic land.

  I tried to lighten her mood, teasing that she had better be careful or Abdel Kader Haidara would hear of her letters. After all, they are Timbuktu manuscripts, and he will want them for his library. She wiped her eyes once more. “If I can have David, he can have the letters.”

  Uncertain Endings

  A month after I left Timbuktu, Mali officials, under pressure from the French government, freed four AQIM suspects in exchange for the Frenchman. The Italian couple was released, as were the Spanish aid workers after their government reportedly paid a large ransom. Since then AQIM has kidnapped six other French citizens. One was executed. At press time five remained in captivity somewhere in the desert. The marabout and his family disappeared from their home. Rumor spread that he had been recruited by the One-Eye to be his personal marabout.

  I e-mailed David, who was serving in Iraq and is no longer in the Special Forces. He wrote back a few days later. “That time was extremely difficult for me, and it still haunts me.” He added, “I haven’t forgotten the people I met there, quite the contrary, I think of them often.”

  I called Aisha and told her that he was still alive. That was months ago. I haven’t heard any more from David, but Aisha still calls, asking if there is any news. Sometimes her voice is drowned out by the rumble of the salt trucks; sometimes I hear children playing or the call to prayer. At times Aisha cries on the phone, but I have no answers for the girl from Timbuktu.

  HENRY SHUKMAN

  Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden

  FROM Outside

  THE WILD BOAR is standing 30 or 40 yards away, at the bottom of a grassy bank, staring right at me. Even from this distance I can see its outrageously long snout, its giant pointed ears, and the spiny bristles along its back. It looks part porcupine, a number of shades of ocher and gray. And it’s far bigger than I expected, maybe chest-high to a man. The boar is like some minor forest god straight from the wilderness, gazing wild-eyed at the strange spectacle of a human being. For a moment it seems to consider charging me, then thinks better of it. When it trots away, it moves powerfully, smoothly, on spindly, graceful legs twice as long as a pig’s, and vanishes into the trees.

  I climb back into our VW van, tingling all over. The sighting bodes well. I’ve come to what is being dubbed Europe’s largest wildlife refuge in early July, when I knew spotting animals wouldn’t be so easy. (Winter, with its scarcity of food and lack of foliage, makes them more visible.) And within a couple of hours I’ve ticked a wild boar off the list. Maybe luck is on our side.

  But luck isn’t our only obstacle to wildlife spotting here. This is northern Ukraine’s C
hernobyl Exclusion Zone, a huge area, some 60 miles across in places, that’s been off-limits to human habitation since 1986. Even now, nineteen years after the collapse of the USSR, nothing happens in this former Soviet republic without sheets of paper typed and stamped in quintuplicate. It took months of e-mails and phone calls to get permission to spend a few days here. Yes, we’re only a couple of foreign vagabonds—photographer Rory Carnegie is an old travel buddy of mine from England—but we have cameras and a telephoto lens, and my notepad has lines in it: obviously we’re spies. The Soviet Union may have died, but the Soviet mind-set has not.

  At the Chernobyl Center, a kind of makeshift reception building in the heart of the old town, I had to hand over a solid 9 inches of local bills—hryvnia, pronounced approximately like the sound of a cardsharp riffling a deck—sign a stack of agreements, compliances, and receipts, and then get checked on an Austin Powers–style Geiger counter made out of chrome. Finally, under the protection of a guide, a driver, and an interpreter, we were free to set off into the zone—as long as we did exactly what our guide said.

  A handful of dilapidated roads cross the zone, half overgrown with weeds and grasses, and the whole area is littered with pockets of intense radiation, but nature doesn’t seem to mind. All nature seems to care about is that the people, along with their domestic animals, are for the most part gone. The zone is reverting to one big, untamed forest, and it all sounds like a fantastic success story for nature: remove the humans and the wilderness bounces right back. Lured by tales of mammals unknown in Europe since the Dark Ages, we’re setting out on an atomic safari.

  It was soon after 1 A.M. on the night of April 26, 1986, that one of the world’s nightmare scenarios unfolded. Reactor 4 in the huge Chernobyl power station blew up. The causes are still the subject of debate, but it was some combination of a design flaw involving the control rods that regulate reactor power levels, a poorly trained engineering crew, a test that required a power-down of the reactor, and a dogged old-style Soviet boss who refused to believe anything major could be wrong. At any rate, it was spectacular. Eight-hundred-pound cubes of lead were tossed around like popcorn. The 1,000-ton sealing cap was blown clear off the reactor. A stream of raspberry-colored light shone up into the night sky—ionized air, so beautiful that inhabitants of the nearby city of Pripyat came out to stare. When it was all over, estimates former deputy chief engineer Grigori Medvedev, the radioactive release was ten times that of Hiroshima.

  Chernobyl had been a mostly peaceful settlement for one thousand years and a predominantly Jewish town for the past three centuries, famous for its dynasty of Hasidic sages. Since the Russian Revolution, the Jews have thinned a lot, but even today there are two shrines to the Hasidim where once a year devotees come to light candles and pray. It’s incredible what survives a disaster. As Emily Dickinson said, “How much can come and much can go, and yet abide the world.”

  In 1970, 9 miles from the town, the Soviet Union started building what they hoped would become Europe’s largest nuclear power station. (Only four of the planned eight reactors had been completed when disaster struck.) To go with it, they erected a brand-new concrete city, Pripyat, whose 50,000 inhabitants greatly outnumbered the 12,000 living in Chernobyl. The nuclear industry fell under the military complex, and the traditional Soviet culture of secrecy was all over it. Radiation is bad enough, but compound it with Soviet pride and paranoia and you have a potent mix of Kafka and Ray Bradbury.

  The first the rest of the world knew of the Chernobyl disaster was when workers at a Swedish power station more than 1,000 miles away reported for work two days later, checked themselves with a Geiger counter, and found they were highly radioactive. By the following day, April 29, radioactive clouds had been carried by prevailing winds right across Western Europe and into Scandinavia, and the New York Times ran a front-page story about the catastrophe. The Soviet newspaper Pravda devoted a full eight lines to the “accident” that day—on its third page. It wasn’t till May 15, three weeks later, that General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev finally announced what had happened.

  Thirty people died on the night of the explosion or soon after. Two days later, a convoy of 1,100 buses shipped out all the inhabitants of Pripyat, turning it into a ghost city overnight. The vast might of the Soviet Union went into overdrive with a massive cleanup operation involving 600,000 workers. A layer of topsoil was removed for miles around the site. (The government has not said where it went, but many believe it was dumped in the nearby Dnieper River, where silt would have buried it.) Hundreds of thousands of trees were planted, to bind the ground and reduce the spread of radioactive dust.

  But the cleanup turned out to be even more lethal than the explosion itself. Soldiers were offered two years off their service in exchange for just two minutes shoveling nuclear waste. Thousands of people won medals for bravery and were declared Heroes of the Soviet Union but at the same time picked up cancer and thyroid problems that would dog them for the rest of their lives. Thousands of evacuated locals and cleanup workers are said to have died in the ensuing years from radiation doses, and it’s reckoned that some 2.7 million people alive today in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia have been directly affected by it.

  In the following weeks, bureaucrats in Moscow designated an 1,100-square-mile Exclusion Zone—roughly the size of Yosemite—reasoning that the farther from Chernobyl people were, the better. This is mostly true: almost all of the crew working at the reactor when it blew died within a few weeks, as did several of the firemen who arrived on the scene minutes later, but the backup laborers who got there later mostly survived, albeit with dire health problems.

  In all, two towns and an estimated ninety-one villages were emptied. But radiation doesn’t travel consistently or evenly. If radioactive dust is picked up by a cloud, it will fall where the rain falls. There are still parts of Wales where the sheep farmers can’t sell their meat, and last summer thousands of wild boars hunted in Germany were declared dangerously radioactive.

  Today, around five thousand people work in the Exclusion Zone, which over the years has grown to an area of 1,660 square miles. For one thing, you can’t just switch off a nuclear power plant. Even decommissioned, it requires maintenance, as does the new nuclear-waste storage facility on-site. The workers come in for two-week shifts and receive three times normal pay. Any sign of disease at the annual medical, however, and they lose their jobs.

  There are also some three hundred people living in the zone: villagers who’ve been coming home to their old farming lands since not long after the disaster and teams of radioecologists from around the world who’ve come to study the effects of radioactive fallout on plants and animals. They’ve effectively turned the zone into a giant radiation lab, a place where the animals are mostly undisturbed, living amid a preindustrial number of humans and a post-apocalyptic amount of radioactive strontium and cesium. On the outside the fauna seems to be thriving: there have been huge resurgences in the numbers of large mammals, including gray wolves, brown bears, elk, roe deer, and wild boar present in quantities not recorded for more than a century. The question scientists are trying to answer is what’s happening on the inside: in their bones, and in their very DNA.

  Once you enter the zone, the quiet is a shock. It would be eerie were it not so lovely. The abandoned backstreets of Chernobyl are so overgrown, you can hardly see it’s a town. They’ve turned into dark-green tunnels buzzing with bees, filled with an orchestral score of birdsong, the lanes so narrow that the van pushes aside weeds on both sides as it creeps down them, passing house after house enshrined in forest. Red admirals, peacock butterflies, and some velvety brown lepidoptera are fluttering all over the vegetation. It looks like something out of an old Russian fairy tale.

  Ukraine officially opened Chernobyl up to tourism in January 2011, but small groups have been able to visit the zone for the past few years. There are small tour operators based in Kiev that take visitors on day trips. You don’t need Geiger counters or special
suits; you just have to stay with the tour, pass through several checkpoints, and get tested for radiation on your way out. The tours will shuttle you around some of the main sites—the deserted city of Pripyat, a small park filled with old Soviet army vehicles used in the cleanup, various concrete memorials to the fire crews who lost their lives after the blast. Visitors are strictly confined to areas the authorities have scanned and declared safe.

  Staying longer than a day is more complicated. The Chernobyl Center has a guesthouse where nonofficial visitors like us can stay and be fed delicious if overpriced Ukrainian stews and escalopes. At sundown each evening there’s a curfew. Walk to the nearby shop where the local workers buy their beer and bread and you could get yourself arrested.

  Chaperoning Rory and me at the center and on our daily excursions is our guide, Sergey. He lives in a town near Kiev, but for the past ten years he’s been spending two weeks out of every four in the zone, showing visiting scientists and the odd tourist around. Sergey is a tough, taciturn guy who looks like an old sergeant major, with a silver mustache and a head of cropped white hair. Our plan is to explore the forest, the old town of Chernobyl, the nearby rivers, the empty city of Pripyat, and some villages where a few peasants are still living. One of the papers we had to sign when we entered was an agreement that if we stepped anywhere Sergey hadn’t told us to, we wouldn’t hold the authorities responsible for any health issues.

  So far, the only visible sign of radiation has been a digital readout on the mostly deserted post office building in Chernobyl. Instead of telling the time and temperature, it shows the micro-roentgen levels in different sectors of the zone, which fluctuate according to changes in background radiation and the weather.