Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

We headed back by a different route, cutting through the town’s World War II memorial, an arcade of pillars tucked into the woods. The centerpiece of the memorial was a white column, perhaps thirty feet tall, with a large bronze star perched on top. Fresh flowers had been placed at its base.

Layers of catastrophe had been overlaid on this landscape. During World War II—long before any nuclear reactors came along—the area around Chernobyl had been the scene of brutal fighting. As local partisans resisted the German occupation, the people suffered murderous Nazi reprisals, only to endure a horrific famine once the war was over.

In that context, it’s hard to say that the accident in 1986 was even the worst thing offered up to Chernobyl by the twentieth century. Indeed, although the human dislocation caused by the accident was immense, its legacy in terms of illness and death is deeply ambiguous.

In the public consciousness, Chernobyl stands for cancer, deformity, and death. Even now, a quarter century later, there is no shortage of charities dedicated to the care of “Chernobyl children”—recently born kids suffering from cancer or birth defects attributed to the accident’s aftereffects. But the Chernobyl Forum (a consortium including several branches of the UN and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia) has argued that, after an epidemic of thyroid cancer among children living in the area during the accident, no measurable increase has yet been demonstrated in the region’s cancer rates. The Forum’s projection of excess cancer deaths in the future is surprisingly low, at about five thousand. Meanwhile, its estimate of the number of people killed by the accident’s immediate effects stands at fewer than a hundred. Such estimates drive organizations like Greenpeace crazy, and they have produced their own numbers—of nearly a hundred thousand projected cancer fatalities, and sixty thousand already dead. Who knows, maybe the UN is the nuclear power industry’s stooge.

More fundamentally, it’s just hard to accept how little is known with any confidence about the disaster’s effects, whether on people or animals. And it’s hard to accept that the Chernobyl children may be the children of regular misfortune, not of nuclear fallout. That the accident’s most traumatic effects may have been social and psychiatric, rather than radiological. That Chernobyl—and humankind’s wretchedness—may not quite have lived up to our expectations.

Early the next morning, in the zone’s only hotel, I awoke to the symptoms of acute radiation poisoning.

Inflammation and tenderness of exposed skin. Nausea and dehydration. Exhaustion and disorientation. Headache. Did I mention the nausea? I was still in my clothes, sprawled on top of a ruffled pink bedspread. The ceiling listed sideways in a sickening spiral.

I lay motionless, hoping for death, and stared upside down through the window above my head. Beyond the gauzy curtains, a massive Ukrainian dawn burst downward into the sky. It made me want to burst, too.

It wasn’t radiation sickness. What I had was a bad hangover and a bit of sunburn. But I didn’t see much difference.

I had found the nightlife in Chernobyl. Coming back from the war memorial, we had visited the outdoor “vehicle museum,” a tidy grass parking lot with a fleet of military trucks and personnel carriers left over from the cleanup. Already slightly tipsy, we amused ourselves for a moment by dipping our radiation meters into the wheel well of an armored personnel carrier and listening to them scream, and then headed back to find the party.

The party was across the road from headquarters, in front of the hotel, and consisted of Dennis, Nikolai, and me, sitting on a bench in the parking lot. The hotel—it was more like a nice dormitory, really—was otherwise deserted. I’m sure you can still get good rates. I went up to my room and brought down some gifts: a Mets cap for Dennis, a pair of New York shot glasses for Nikolai, and a bottle of vodka for everybody.

We followed the strict custom that a bottle opened is a bottle that must be emptied—even though Nikolai wasn’t drinking tonight and Dennis was too polite to outpace me. Toast upon toast seemed to improve my Ukrainian, and Nikolai’s English, and the fluidity of Dennis’s translation, and soon it was unclear to me which of us was speaking what. By this time it was completely dark, and my elbows had what I was certain were beta-radiation burns from leaning on the hood of the car, and we had somehow ended up in a bar.

There is a bar in Chernobyl, I thought. There is a bar in Chernobyl.

How we got there, or exactly where it is, was quickly lost in the fumes of my mind. I was deeply drunk. A lifetime lived in moderation had left me unprepared for this work. But if this was the price, I would pay it. I had found Chernobyl’s only nightclub—even if it was little more than a bare, cinder block room with half a dozen people quietly slugging vodka and cognac out of tiny plastic cups.

“So, Dennis!” I shouted. “Is the zone a good place to meet girls?”

He nodded sagely. “There are many girls here,” he said. “And they are all over fifty.”

It’s beyond cliché to suggest that drinking is the way to befriend Slavs, but it’s also true. We left the bar at full stumble, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, only partly because I couldn’t walk. Nikolai, still sober, was proclaiming his enthusiasm for the project of pollution tourism. Most people came to Chernobyl just to get their two photographs, he said. They treat the staff like servants and leave. They never bother to find out what a nice place the zone can be.

I raised a nonexistent glass, and we came weaving into the parking lot, singing in Ukrainian at the top of our voices, exchanging a series of cavorting high-fives. I said goodnight to my brothers, and then somehow, in a single, fluid motion, fell up the stairs, down the corridor, through a locked door, and into bed. Which is where I found myself the next morning, feeling like a fishbowl brimming with bile.

At headquarters, breakfast was a reprise of the previous night’s antipasto. I introduced a piece of cheese to my mouth, wet it with a teaspoon of water, and left it at that. Outside, I found Dennis and Nikolai. One look at my expression, and they both burst out laughing. Dennis shook my hand and smiled. “Next time, give me some more notice that you’re coming,” he said. “I’ll show you the really good stuff. Maybe we can go in a helicopter.”

The jerk. Surely I could stay on? Wasn’t there still time for helicopters and canoes? But it was not possible. These things needed to be booked in advance. The permissions. An escort. And Dennis already had a group of Ukrainian journalists out in the parking lot waiting to begin their visit. The nascent business of zone tourism carried on.

So learn from my mistakes. Plan on two nights.

In the car, I leaned gingerly against the seat, trying to disappear. Nikolai laughed again. There was still entertainment value in my hangover. He stamped on the gas, and we started for Kiev. It was another beautiful day for a drive. More glorious countryside, more checkpoints. Guards waving their excellently bulky Geiger counters over the car to test it for contamination. And detectors like phone booths, for us to hug, to test ourselves. And the road back to Kiev, through roadside villages, past pairs of men swinging scythes in the fields, and onto the highway, already swelling with the first weekend traffic streaming out of the city.

I wasn’t done with the Exclusion Zone. In the back of my mind, a scheme was beginning to form. A scheme for a picnic near Strakholissya, the town I’d seen on the map. A scheme that would require Olena to help me borrow a rowboat. Maybe on Sunday?