The Best American Travel Writing 2012

by Jason Wilson

  The most contaminated of the villages were bulldozed and buried soon after the explosion, with only a few mounds and ridges left to show they were ever there. The meadows are mostly gone, replaced by forest. Russia is a land of forests, but the true forest, the primeval untouched forest that human eyes may never even have seen, is called pushcha—which roughly translates as “dense forest.” This is what has been reestablishing itself at Chernobyl, regenerating at an unprecedented rate.

  At the edge of Chernobyl, we stop by the half-mile-wide Pripyat River. It’s unbelievably peaceful. A black dog, which knows Sergey, slumps down in the grass beside us. A handful of long, stoved-in rowboats moored at the shore take me back to the punts of my Oxford childhood. They’re stamped with the initials of the local KGB and must have been moldering here since Soviet times. Frogs plop into the water, boatmen skedaddle across the surface, dragonflies hover—it’s like a weight has been lifted from the world. A sparrowhawk turns in lazy circles; a pair of ducks race by, low down, necks stretched, and make it to a willow on the far bank with a clatter of relief.

  We pass two brick sheds with padlocks on their doors: the shrines of zaddiks, Jewish wise men.

  “Why locked?” I ask Sergey.

  Not missing a beat, he says, “Many people don’t like Jews.” (Something else that survived the apocalypse.)

  We meander along the sleepy brown river. The main sounds are the different shades of hissing of wind in the trees: high nearby, deeper and steadier farther away. Occasionally the wind picks up, flicks a ripple along the surface. This must be what life was like one thousand years ago, when the entire human population of the globe was roughly 250 million. There’s space for everyone, time for everything.

  On our way down off the bridge, we spot a slender roe deer 200 yards up the road. It stands still a moment, head cocked, then like a sylph it slips into the trees, so swiftly I don’t even see it go. A little farther on, we spot an elk between two bushes. He looks at us, head lifted, then strolls out of sight.

  The van drops us off at a dark footpath that winds up through the woods, past a chain of collapsed wooden houses. Inside, their floors are littered with clothes, bottles, stuffing from mattresses. Pieces of gutted insulation lie strewn like corpses under the trees. It’s not so much a town with trees in it as a forest with an old town falling to pieces within it.

  Sergey tells us about the herds of boar he has seen, fifty strong, rampaging through the forest. And about a starving wolf pack that surrounded a scientist friend of his in a wood one winter day. He had to shoot every last one to get away.

  It’s not just the forest that’s come back but all its creatures. It’s the land of Baba Yaga, the old witch of Russian folktales. Is this the world before humanity? Or after? Is there a difference?

  Traveling in Ukraine can be quite a party. The Ukrainians prefer not to engage in talk on its own. It’s better with a bucket of vodka and a carton of cigarettes.

  It’s three in the afternoon of our second day when seven of us settle at a makeshift table beneath a spreading mulberry tree in the luscious garden of Ivan Nikolayevich’s home. Officially, no one is supposed to live here, but within a few months of the disaster, several hundred farmers, families like this one, returned to their ancestral homes and have been quietly living here ever since, tolerated by the government and apparently free of any unusual health problems.

  We’re in the tiny village of Upachich, deep in the zone. There’s Ivan himself, dressed in a sleeveless shirt with only one button and a pair of trousers that have seen so much yard work he could be a man from any of the past few centuries. When we met him half an hour ago, he had just finished gathering up his small field of hay with a pitchfork, building the kind of hayrick Monet and Van Gogh loved to paint. There’s Ivan Ivanovich, his son, who was helping him, with designer stubble and a wristwatch that place him somewhere in the past few decades. The two of them are still dripping and red-faced from their labors. And there’s young Ivan’s mother, Dasha, wearing a timeless Russian babushka headscarf and a subtle, sublime smile.

  It feels like we haven’t walked into a home so much as a story by Gogol. Corncobs are drying on a line. Indoors, there’s a big stove with a built-in shelf on top for sleeping on in winter, buckets of potatoes standing on the floor, scraps for the hens, a basin with its own cistern you fill up from the well.

  Ivan the son is busy wiping down the table, spreading out sheets of newspaper for all the foodstuffs: eggs from chickens pecking under our feet, tomatoes from the garden, bread, a bowl of tiny forest raspberries, a whole dried river fish, crystallized and orange from its time smoking in a homemade stove. It’s all local and it all looks great, but most tempting of all are the mulberries hanging above my head. They resemble elongated blackberries, and there’s something about the way they’re growing among the elegant oval leaves of the tree that makes them irresistible. I’m dying to reach up and grab one, but they frighten me. We’re only 10 miles from the power station.

  Whatever you do, friends advised before we came, don’t eat anything that grows there.

  The older Ivan comes out of the house carrying a glass jar full of clear fluid in his trembling hand.

  “Vodka,” someone declares appreciatively.

  That’ll be safe, I think to myself: shop-bought.

  “No, no. Samogon,” Sergey explains, eyeing the jar with a gleeful twinkle. “Better than vodka.”

  Samogon?

  “Homemade.”

  My heart sinks. The local moonshine. But before I can ask if it’s really safe to drink, we’re clinking glasses, wetting our fingers, and I cautiously take a sip.

  “You’re not exactly drinking as you should,” Sergey notes, suggesting that I chug.

  “Clean—it must be clean!” declares one of the Ivans.

  Sergey is already slamming down his empty glass. What can I do but oblige?

  Conversation begins to flow. Sergey starts expatiating on the advantages of village life. “When you want make business, make networking, you live in the city. But here, there is natural food, for example this samogon, it is so good for you.”

  I’m far from sure, but the dad gets up and shows me round the garden. He wants me to see where the tomatoes grow, and the grapes and vegetables, and where he finds the root he uses in his special medicinal vodka. Swaying, puffing, he pulls up a little plant, then lumbers off to the pond to rinse it: a lump of ginseng.

  A couple of samogon shots later, my fears have abated and I’m tucking in like the rest. The fish is so smoky my eyes water, and soon my hands are stained blood-red from all the mulberries I’ve eaten. A bird starts singing. Flakes of sunshine shift over us. The hay is in, there’s a pig fattening for Easter, and the oats are almost ready for the scythe. If this isn’t rustic life at its timeless, bibulous best, what is?

  Most everyone in Chernobyl displays a predictable bravado about living with radiation. In the relative cool of the evening, the workers on their two-week shifts gather outside the guesthouse to sit on tree stumps and chew the fat, drink beer, smoke cigarettes. With a line of dark chestnut trees nearby and the pale night sky overhead, amid the silence and stillness of the deep forest, it’s a lovely scene, even with the insistent black mosquitoes that bob around our faces.

  “Radiation is good for you,” one of them tells me. “Every year I get younger,” says another. And another: “I work here so when I come home glowing my wife will think I’m a god.”

  A particularly hearty-looking man who works as a janitor asks me, “How old do you think I am?”

  “Sixty,” he answers himself. A preposterous answer: he looks not a day past thirty.

  The best decontamination? “A bottle of vodka.”

  But radiation is scary. It’s particularly scary because it’s mostly undetectable to the senses. If you feel sleepy and have a chemical taste in your mouth, it might be because of radiation. If you’re able to see it, in the form of purple ionized air—as they did that night in April—o
r, worse, feel it in the form of instant-tanning heat, it’s probably too late for you.

  Still, it’s a fact of life. We all live under constant radioactive bombardment: there’s solar radiation, terrestrial radiation, there’s even radiation in our food, since all living things contain radioactive potassium-40 and our food consists mostly of once-living things. There are different units of measurement—like dps, or disintegration per second, and curies, grays, sieverts, rads, rems, roentgens, and so on. The average terrestrial dose is 3 microrems per hour—but in some parts of the world this goes as high as 100 microrems, with no perceptible ill effects. (In fact, there’s some evidence that cancer rates are lower in these areas; perhaps mild stress to the immune system makes it work better.)

  A dangerous dose is hard to pin down. Worldwide, for most people, those daily microrems add up to about 360 millirems per year. Scientists agree that humans can safely handle 1,000 a year. Astronauts on the International Space Station receive 18,000 millirems of cosmic radiation over six months—but it’s once in a lifetime, so it’s seen as an acceptable, voluntary risk. But edge that up to 30,000 millirems and you’re looking at what caused increased cancer rates among the blast survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet animals can handle even more than this: large mammals and birds are generally safe with 36,000 per year, small ones with even higher doses, and reptiles with higher still. The more complex the animal, the more sensitive it is.

  Nuclear power involves various radioactive substances that differ from the hydrogen isotopes in a modern thermonuclear weapon. There are the fissile materials (which make the reaction happen) like plutonium and uranium, and the fission products (which result from it) like radioactive iodine, cesium-137, and strontium-90. It’s these last two, along with some plutonium, that mostly contaminate Chernobyl today. Some emit alpha or beta particles, some gamma rays. Alpha particles have a short range: in air, 1 to 2 inches; in skin, one to two thousandths of an inch. So if they’re coming from outside you, they can’t penetrate your skin. But if inside—if you’ve eaten something contaminated, for example—they’re nasty. Their short range means they’re more likely to deposit their energy within a small area—small enough to attack both strands of a DNA molecule, possibly causing cancer. Beta particles, meanwhile, can travel about 20 feet through air and a quarter of an inch through skin; they can’t reach internal organs from outside the body. Gamma rays are essentially X-rays. They can be more or less penetrating, depending on strength.

  The half-lives of radioactive materials vary too. Cesium’s and strontium’s are around thirty years, plutonium’s is eighty-eight years, but with uranium-238—the base product used to create plutonium—it’s more than 4 billion years. A long half-life means the substance remains radioactive much longer but gives off its radiation more slowly. The half-life of radioactive iodine is only one week, which means it gives off a lot of radiation quickly—another reason the Soviet authorities were so irresponsible in not announcing the Chernobyl disaster sooner: a lot of lethal, iodine-contaminated food got eaten those first few days after the explosion.

  All through our trip, Sergey has been telling us how healthy he is, in spite of ten years in the zone. Only at the end will he reveal that he can’t run anymore because of pains in his legs. Too much “strontsy,” he says. But he’s fine, he adds, because the strontsy is only in his muscles, not the bones. Not yet, anyway.

  One of the workers tells me he doesn’t drink, not even beer. “I do sports, so I cannot drink,” he says, lighting up another cigarette.

  “But what about the radiation?” I ask him.

  He shrugs. “Life itself is dangerous, my friend.”

  The world beyond the apocalypse may not be so great for humans, but for the other denizens of the planet it looks like a bonanza. Today there are around 5,000 adult wild boars in the Chernobyl Zone. In 1995 there were many more, but they suffered an epidemic and have now stabilized. There are 25 to 30 wolf packs, a total of maybe 180 adults. Many more lynx live here than before, along with foxes, barsuks (a Ukrainian badger), hundreds of red deer, and thousands of roe deer and elk. Out of the disaster comes a paradise of wildlife. The Garden of Eden is regenerating.

  But it’s not so straightforward.

  For seventeen years, biologist Igor Chizhevsky has been studying how animals metabolize cesium and strontium. He works with the Chernobyl Radio-Ecological Center and is a friendly, serious, broad-faced man. He has made Chernobyl his career. When he comes to talk with us in the guesthouse, he sits stolidly in an armchair, barely moving at all for an hour, while telling us in a doleful Slavic voice about how things are really going down here for the animals.

  When humans abandoned the zone, he says, it wasn’t just them and their domestic animals—including 135,000 cattle—that left. The “synanthropic” species that live around humans—pigeons, swallows, rats, and the like—also left the territory in large numbers, leaving it free for a wild ecosystem to reestablish itself.

  “Structure of entire fauna system change,” Igor says.

  House mice, which thrived on grains no longer grown here, have been replaced by forest and field mice. Likewise with the bird species. But it’s the larger mammals we’re interested in.

  On the surface, Igor says, the wildlife seems to be thriving, but under the fur and hide, the DNA of most species has become unstable. They’ve eaten a lot of food contaminated with cesium and strontium. Even though the animals look fine, there are differences at the chromosomal level in every generation, as yet mostly invisible. But some have started to show: there are bird populations with freakishly high levels of albinism, with 20 percent higher levels of asymmetry in their feathers, and higher cancer rates. There are strains of mice with resistance to radioactivity—meaning they’ve developed heritable systems to repair damaged cells. Covered in radioactive particles after the disaster, one large pine forest turned from green to red: seedlings from this Red Forest placed in their own plantation have grown up with various genetic abnormalities. They have unusually long needles, and some grow not as trees but as bushes. The same has happened with some birch trees, which have grown in the shape of large, bushy feathers, without a recognizable trunk at all.

  “Genomes, er, unpredictable,” says Igor. “Genome not exactly same from generation to generation. They change.”

  This is not good for a species. Genomes are supposed to stay the same. That’s what holds a species together. No one knows what these changes could result in.

  “Soon or late,” Igor says, “new species will evolve.”

  In other words, new animals could actually be in the making here. The area has become a laboratory of microevolution—“very rapid evolution,” says Igor—but no one knows what will emerge or when.

  One Stanford scientist I spoke to later had a terse summary: if there are genetic changes, and if these pass down to the next generation, and if they survive natural selection, then it’s reasonable to talk of evolution. There are two theories about why this may happen. In classic Darwinism, random genetic changes that help an organism survive in its environment are naturally selected through generations, because the individuals with those characteristics do better. But “mutagenesis,” an alternate theory, posits that organisms deliberately adapt to their surroundings. The process is not accidental. For example, in Chernobyl, if mice are developing radiation resistance by passing down cell-repair systems, is that because some individuals just happened to develop this attribute and to fare better, or is it because the species deliberately developed this capacity in response to the environment?

  Sergey takes us to a real-life laboratory nearby: just an old house, but inside it’s been gutted, and the walls are lined with shelves of cages, each one full of scurrying white mice. A rank stench hits us as soon as we walk in.

  The white-coated lab technician—yet another Ivan—notices my grimace and smiles. “Yes,” he says. “And we just cleaned the place this morning.”

  He explains that they’re studyin
g the effect on the mice of the radioactive spectrum here in the Chernobyl Zone. They took probes from the Red Forest and recreated the conditions here at the lab, then started giving the mice food laced with cesium and strontium.

  Why here? I ask.

  “This is already a contaminated area. So we don’t risk spreading radiation elsewhere.” In other words, the zone has become a kind of refuge for radiation research.

  He and his team are studying the mice to understand their resistance to radioactivity. They’ve found sensitivity to ionization, which results in certain tumors, and some of this passes down through the genes. But they’re also finding heritable radiation resistance—which could perhaps be beneficial to humans someday.

  In spite of being a clearheaded scientist, Ivan gives us a surprise when asked if he’s okay being photographed. He starts laughing nervously. “I’m afraid of American shamans and what they may do to me,” he confesses. Apparently some old-time beliefs are still being inherited around here too, even in a science lab. The Ukrainians are complex people: part Soviet, part soulful Slav, part subsistence farmer. Even this lab has its own vegetable patch out front.

  On our last morning I wake up early, and as I lie in my bed at the dorm I hear, quite distinctly, a wolf howling. It holds its note a long time before reaching for a higher one, then a still higher one. It sounds like a healthy howl. But no biologist has yet been able to study these wolves in sufficient numbers to have a clear idea of their genetic health. They know what their bellies are full of, but the meat has its own genetic instability. These wolves may have a vast untracked forest to roam, but what is happening deep in their DNA no one knows. Will there be new species in a few generations? There may already be, out in the forest, and we wouldn’t even know.

  Later that morning, on our way to the ghost city of Pripyat, we see a fox darting across the road—nothing more than a black silhouette, curiously low to the ground. Or perhaps it was a small wolf, says Sergey. Then a big bird, which turns out to be an eagle, is suddenly ahead of us, grappling with a sapling it has attempted to land on, bending it down low, then letting the young tree spring back up again as it rides away on giant brown wings.