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.
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 cliche 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
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?
But for the moment, the world was still half-spinning, and I couldn’t look. I rolled the window down and felt relief stream in with the wind. Nikolai hugged the edge of the road as we picked up speed, and I leaned my head against the frame of the car and listened to the rising drone of the engine, eyes closed, mouth hanging open, gulping in the sweet, sunny air of the Exclusion Zone.
Two
THE GREAT BLACK NORTH
On April 28, 2008, a group of some sixteen hundred ducks landed on a lake near Fort McMurray, Canada. It was a warm day for early spring in northern Alberta, the temperature reaching into the mid-sixties. The ice on the water was still melting after the long winter. The ducks were heading for nesting grounds in the green expanse of Canada’s boreal forest—a vast band of coniferous trees and wetlands that stretches clear across Canada and that provides a summer home for half the birds in all North America.
Around these parts, though, a duck can’t safely assume that a lake is in fact a lake. This lake, for instance, was actually a huge tailings pond owned by the Syncrude corporation—“tailings pond” being a term of art in the mining industry for “waste reservoir.” As the birds touched down, they became coated with oily bitumen residue. Most of them sank. Others languished on the surface, waiting to be saved by human beings or videotaped by journalists. Of the sixteen hundred birds, fewer than half a dozen survived. Ducks of the world, beware of Alberta.
Syncrude had presumably hoped to keep its little duck holocaust private, but an anonymous tipster reported the incident and, before the day was out, the company had a full-blown public relations disaster on its hands. “Hundreds of Ducks Dead or Dying after Landing on Syncrude Tailings Pond,” reported the
This, then, is Canada—perhaps the only country where ducks have national, even geopolitical, significance.
But this isn’t because the Canadian character is somehow uniquely sensitive to the welfare of its waterfowl. It’s because the sixteen hundred—long may their memory live—had, with their deaths, scratched a festering sore on the Canadian national psyche. They had landed—and died—in something larger than a lake. Larger than a tailings pond. They had hit a grim bull’s-eye in the world’s largest and most controversial energy project, in the Middle East of the Great White North, in the cauldron of our energy future. They had landed in oil sands country.
Canada lives in the imagination of the United States as a benign, continent-size footnote, the brunt of conservative jokes about invasion and annexation, and the object of liberal daydreams about socialized medicine
