by Jason Wilson
During our last year, we went to Jerusalem, where we toured underground sections of the Western Wall. At the site of some ancient cisterns, the guide asked the girls, “Where does water come from?”
“The Nile,” Natasha said. The guide tried to nudge them toward the right answer, but they just stared blankly. According to Toby Wilkinson, in the entire corpus of ancient Egyptian literature the word “cloud” appears twice.
We left Cairo in the summer of 2016. We had lived there for half a decade, and now, in an election year, it seemed right to return to the US. After Morsi and Sisi, I looked forward to living in a country where the president behaved responsibly.
For the last month, the girls cried virtually every day. They cried about saying goodbye to Atiyat, to their school, to their bedroom. They worried about their cat staying behind. As far as they were concerned, leaving Egypt was the worst thing that Leslie and I had ever done to them.
Back in Ridgway, Colorado, we rented a double-wide trailer high in the mountains, surrounded by a forest of cedar. As the evenings grew cooler, field mice streamed into the double-wide. I started buying glue traps.
That fall, the second-grade class at Ridgway Elementary was given a writing assignment in which each student was asked to imagine a new name. Ariel wrote, “I wish my name was Ackananen because it is an old pharose name and it reminds me of Egypt.” At an event for parents, a father with a rural accent asked me where we had moved from. He laughed at my answer. “You know, my kid told me there are two Egyptian girls in his class,” he said. “I just figured he was lying.”
Morsi was extradited from the Republic of Egypt at 2:20 in the morning on November 13, 2016, aboard Lufthansa Flight 581. Prior to transport, he was injected with three milligrams of diazepam and placed in a cat carrier. The veterinarian estimated that he would be unconscious for 10 hours. The product description for the cat carrier included the words “sturdy construction.”
After we left Egypt as a family, our flight connected in the United Kingdom, which has strict rules about animals being transported through its airports. So Morsi boarded with a friend in Cairo until Leslie returned for research. Periodically, the friend sent updates. The first read, “I’ve also found he is a bit of an escape artist, and so I have been making modifications to my apartment.” Then: “He can open my windows and balcony doors even with the addition of screens with sliding locks.” Finally: “He’s had feline company from vaccinated adult cats on and off, but I should warn you that he doesn’t seem to like it. Morsi is quite aggressive toward other cats.”
After the sedative was administered, Leslie caught a cab. Morsi woke up before they reached the Cairo airport. There was no problem going through security, but now he was making noise.
The flight departed on time. Leslie placed the carrier beneath her seat and fell asleep. At approximately three o’clock in the morning, she was jolted awake by the sound of people yelling, “Get that cat! Somebody grab that cat!” It’s unclear how many other passengers were also awakened. But the ones who were conscious saw a small Chinese woman chasing a large Egyptian cat while shouting the name of a Muslim Brother who had been in prison for more than three years.
She caught him near the bathrooms. A German flight attendant was angry in the way that only German flight attendants can be angry. “What if somebody is allergic to cats?” she said repeatedly. But Leslie was more concerned about the carrier. Morsi had completely obliterated the thing.
She sat down with the squirming cat on her lap. After this flight, she was scheduled for a layover of 7 hours and 30 minutes, followed by a flight of 10 hours and 20 minutes, a layover of 6 hours and 30 minutes, a flight of an hour and 5 minutes, and a ride in a van.
The man in the next seat liked cats. He held Morsi for a while. Later he emailed to request Morsi photographs to show his kids.
In Frankfurt airport, Leslie walked around holding the cat until she found a shop that sold a hard-shell carrier. For the final flight, it was necessary to buy a soft container. All told, it took three cat carriers to get Morsi from Cairo to Ridgway.
On Morsi’s first day as a Colorado trailer cat, he curled up with the girls on the couch. Soon headless mice started to appear. The first time it snowed, I threw open the door and told Morsi to run as far as he wanted into the forest. He crept up to the powder, sniffed it, and went back to the couch.
CAMERON HEWITT
A Visit to Chernobyl: Travel in the Postapocalypse
from Rick Steves’ Europe
“And now we will stop at the abandoned Kapachi village school to experience some radiation hot spots.” This is something I’ve never heard a tour guide say before. And I don’t really welcome it now, truth be told. I’m on a rural road near the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl, a few short miles from the site of the worst accident in humankind’s brief history of splitting the atom. I came here willingly. I paid to come here. But at this moment, I’m questioning the wisdom of that decision.
The Tour
We hurtle toward Chernobyl on a tightly packed minibus, far faster than is comfortable on rutted country roads through the dewy postdawn hours—drawing nearer, ever nearer, to the ominously named “Exclusion Zone.” I think back on a lazy summer barbecue a few months before, when I casually mentioned to some friends that I was thinking of visiting Chernobyl. Mouths dropped open and faces turned white, as our lighthearted evening pivoted into a full-blown intervention. They pleaded and begged me, for the love of all that’s holy, not to go. Only Karl—who I suspect doesn’t like me very much—was supportive of the idea.
Undeterred, I stuck with the plan and booked a $100, all-day tour by minibus from Kiev to Chernobyl. This morning I had shown up promptly at 7:30 a.m. at Kiev’s gritty train station. In the KFC parking lot, I met my tour group: a twentysomething couple from Austria, a gregarious bald Dutchman, a well-to-do retired couple from Seattle’s Eastside, and a tattooed bloke from Manchester who inexplicably wore shorts in spite of the chilly temperatures.
Now, bouncing recklessly in my springy seat, I look out the minibus window over a flat landscape with little definition: fields of wilted, unharvested sunflowers; peekaboo views of the dammed Dnieper River, which fills its broad basin like a great lake; and the occasional forest of skinny pine trees that recede infinitely—a haunting house of mirrors. It feels like we’re driving to the very edge of the civilized world, toward the edge of the treasure map marked “Here There Be Monsters.” At one point, an hour and a half outside of Kiev, we pass a lonely rural bus stop—so remote it’s hard to imagine who might possibly catch a bus there.
Our guide is dressed in a faux-military uniform. With his fatigues, his furry neck beard, his strong features, and his flat-topped cap, he’s the spitting image of a young Fidel Castro. I assume his getup is intentional—designed to tinge the experience with even more Cold War nostalgia.
The Accident
Our guide—who has a generic Ukrainian name like Yuri or Volodymyr, but whom I’ve decided to call “Fidel”—is comfortingly knowledgeable. As we drive, he explains the history of the event: The V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station was built in the 1970s as a jewel in the crown of USSR technological achievement. A couple of miles away, they also built the planned workers’ town of Pripyat, where nearly 50,000 people lived in one of Ukraine’s most desirable communities.
In the middle of the night of April 25, 1986, a perfect storm of design flaws and human error brought about a catastrophic systems failure at the Chernobyl plant’s Reactor No. 4. A plume of radioactive matter was ejected high into the air and drifted north, across Belarus and the Baltics, before finally being detected at a power plant in Sweden. It was only then—a full two days after the accident, when the Swedes called Gorbachev and said, “Um, we think maybe you have a serious problem”—that the Soviet authorities publicly acknowledged the meltdown.
With the catastrophe out of the bag, the USSR scrambled to contain the damage. They sealed off an “exclusion zone” around the plant—a
t first 10 kilometers, later expanding to 30 kilometers—and evacuated tens of thousands of people from Pripyat and the surrounding villages. Firefighters, miners, and a half million Soviet soldiers were mobilized. It took them two weeks to extinguish the fire at the core of the reactor; within seven months, a containment “sarcophagus” had been installed over the meltdown site.
An untold number of responders (or, as they’re called, “liquidators”) spent the rest of their lives grappling with health problems. While the official number of deaths stemming directly from the meltdown is in the double digits, the radiation is thought to be ultimately responsible for deaths numbering in the thousands—or tens of thousands, or perhaps even hundreds of thousands—mostly from increased rates of thyroid cancer, leukemia, and other ailments. To this day, people living within the blast radius, who lack the resources to relocate, raise their children on food and milk contaminated with toxic levels of radiation. The legacy of Chernobyl is far from over.
But the legacy of the liquidators is that today, many parts of the Chernobyl area are safe to visit—provided you’re accompanied by a guide who knows which hot spots are best avoided. Fidel outlines the ground rules: avoid touching or setting personal effects down on any surface within the Exclusion Zone; don’t take anything home with you; and wear long pants and long sleeves at all times. (Hearing this, the shorts-wearing Mancunian sheepishly reaches into his backpack and pulls on a pair of sweatpants.)
Oh, and if you encounter any cute, curious foxes sniffing around in the woods, keep well clear. Some of them are rabid. There have been some . . . incidents. And, you must understand, it would be best not to repeat these.
The Exclusion Zone
We approach the first checkpoint, at the boundary of the 30-Kilometer Exclusion Zone, and have our passports checked—a mercifully brief exercise in bureaucratic posturing with machine guns. Soon after, we pull over on a gravel shoulder in the middle of nowhere.
Stepping out of the minibus, we’re greeted by three gregarious stray dogs. Having been warned about those rabid foxes, I recoil. But Fidel points out that these dogs are healthy: well fed, vaccinated, and with tags in their ears. “You can even pet them,” he says. “But, uh, wash your hands after. Their fur may be contaminated.”
He means radioactive. Their fur may be radioactive. Hands in pockets, hands in pockets.
With our trio of mascots in tow, Fidel walks us through a dense forest. Soon, ruined houses begin to emerge from between the trees. “This was the village of Zalyssa,” he tells us. “It was evacuated after the accident, and never repopulated. The three thousand or so inhabitants were resettled to a new village in a different part of Ukraine.”
First, radiation overtook Zalyssa. Then came the slow onslaught of nature. It’s astonishing to see how quickly a tidy community of businesses and homes, once deserted, is enveloped by brush and trees. If I didn’t know better, I’d say this place was abandoned a century ago—and certainly not within my lifetime.
We head up an overgrown path, once a paved street, past rusted cars and ramshackle cabins. The community hall still echoes with an endearing village pride. Stucco garlands ring the ceiling, directing the eye to a little stage at one end of the room. It’s easy to imagine this hall, 40 years ago, filled with revelers at a wedding reception, or with concerned farmers at a meeting of the collective. But today, the windows are mostly broken, the decor is weathered, and in a darkened corner of the stage, sinister black mold spreads unchecked. A cheery red banner preaches a sickeningly ironic message: “All hail communism—the bright future of all humankind!”
In the next room, the floorboards have been pried up, revealing a subfloor of chimney-like brick stacks and a few lonely joists. “Looting is a big issue here,” Fidel says. “People harvest wood and scrap metal from these buildings to sell on the black market. If you buy certain things at a flea market in Kiev, you have to wonder if it’s radioactive.” I imagine some poor, unfortunate Ukrainian hipster renovating a stylish urban flat with reclaimed wood floors and vintage fixtures.
As we hop on the bus and wave goodbye to our canine friends, Fidel explains, “The dogs are very nice, as you can see, and local people take care of them as well as they can. In fact, there’s a charity for getting Chernobyl’s stray dogs adopted in the United States. But . . .” He shrugs, matter-of-factly. “These dogs will probably be eaten by the packs of wolves who roam here in the winter.” Driving onward, all I can think is: wild carnivorous radioactive wolves.
Just beyond Zalyssa, as we drive past the jaunty WELCOME TO CHERNOBYL sign—topped with the local symbol, a friendly atom—I reflexively check my dosimeter. But the radiation levels here are about the same as in Kiev.
The Radiation
Walking around with a radiation dosimeter clipped to your belt is fascinating. Having spent a day doing it here, I’m inclined to try it at home.
Like most Americans (at least, those barbecue interventionists), I think of radiation in black-and-white terms: It’s bad, full stop. But visiting Chernobyl cultivates a more pragmatic way of thinking about radiation: Too much is bad, but a little is okay. And as long as you’re keeping track, you’ll be fine . . . probably. It’s not that different from deciding how many cigarettes or hamburgers you can safely consume. You could swear off smoking or go vegan, but most people don’t. They take a calculated risk in order to do something enjoyable . . . like visiting Chernobyl on vacation.
Is Chernobyl safe? Wild carnivorous radioactive wolves aside, the answer seems to be yes. The most hazardous forms of radiation released in the accident also had the shortest half-lives and have already stopped being dangerous. A patina of longer-lasting radioactive particles settled over the entire region, but these sink deeper and deeper into the soil with each passing year. Because of these factors, a daylong visit to Chernobyl will expose me to 10 times less gamma radiation than my flight home to Seattle.
Until planning a visit here, I never knew that long-haul, high-cruising-altitude flights expose their passengers to significant loads of cosmic radiation. And that’s to say nothing of dental X-rays, CAT scans, mammograms, and other medical testing. If you’re truly “worried about radiation” . . . you’ll never get on an airplane or go to the dentist again.
Dosimeters track the amount of gamma radiation you are exposed to, in real time. The “safe” level—meaning sustainable indefinitely—is anything under 0.3 microsieverts per hour (μSv/h). That’s the reading, more or less, when I get on the bus in Kiev, and it’s probably the reading in your hometown. And for most of the day, the dosimeter stays comfortingly below that number, with a few brief spikes to 1 or 2 μSv/h. That seems scary, but a commercial airliner at 35,000 feet would make your dosimeter ping at a rate of 2 or 3 μSv/h.
One thing you learn from the Chernobyl experience is just how localized radiation is. It tends to be low inside buildings and higher in overgrown areas. The classic Chernobyl tour-guide gimmick is demonstrating radiation hot spots: The group is walking on concrete sidewalks through a forest, where radiation levels are normal. But then the guide pauses and holds out a dosimeter near the roots of a tree or a suspicious-looking pothole, and the numbers shoot up.
The most striking example of this will come later in the day, when we drive across the path of that initial cloud of atomic ejecta that sowed radiation across a swath of Ukrainian and Belarussian countryside. Fidel suggests that we hold our dosimeters up to the bus window. They’re reading normal. But then, as we cross that invisible line, they skyrocket at a terrifying pace—up to 38 μSv/h. The bus driver, helpfully extending our adrenaline rush, slows down. While half of the passengers giggle with nervous delight, the rest of us shout, “Okay, we get it—keep going!”
All of this is specific to gamma radiation. The Chernobyl site also has alpha and beta radiation, which can be carried by dust and other particles. Your clothes protect you from these, for the most part; that’s why visitors to the Exclusion Zone must wear long pants and long sleeves. (Full disclos
ure: I made a point to shower and wash my clothes when I got back to Kiev that night . . . just in case.)
Because careless visitors may pick up alpha- and beta-radioactive material on their shoes and clothing, everyone is required to pass through three special screening checkpoints: you step awkwardly into a giant contraption that feels like standing sideways in a metal detector, place your hands and feet on special pads, then wait for the green light. The technology seems comically antiquated, and we’re told that visitors are almost never flagged. If your shoes did set off the alarm, near as I could tell, they would simply have you wade through a rusty pan of dirty water and try again.
Before my trip, I was nervous about the danger involved in visiting Chernobyl. But ultimately, the most toxic thing we’re exposed to all day is the silent, devastating, eye-watering flatulence of the Mancunian, who eventually reveals that drinking the Kiev tap water has been wreaking havoc on his insides.
The Russian Woodpecker
Soon after passing through the second checkpoint—at the 10-Kilometer Exclusion Zone—we turn off the main road at a bus stop colorfully painted with a Ukrainian knockoff of Yogi Bear, collecting mushrooms in the forest. This ostensibly marks the location of a children’s camp. But that’s just a ruse to throw Cold War–era spies off the scent: A few miles down this road, through a rusted gate adorned with silver, five-pointed stars, stands an impossibly gigantic Soviet-era radar antenna array. Clearly not familiar with the adage about eggs and baskets, the USSR located this top secret surveillance facility next to their top secret nuclear power plant.
