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

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 construction, 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.

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.