against Tunisia. Fanciful images of a raucous Chernobyl sports bar danced through my mind. I told Dennis it sounded like a great plan.
He rode shotgun, while I sat in back. A few hundred yards beyond the firemen’s memorial, Nikolai pulled into a small gravel parking lot and jumped out of the car to buy a bottle of beer and an ice cream bar. There was a convenience store in the zone.
Within a few minutes we reached the checkpoint for the ten-kilometer limit, which encompasses the most- contaminated areas. The car barely stopped as Dennis handed a sheet of paperwork through the window to the waiting guard. He folded the rest of our permission slips and tucked them into the car’s sun visor for later.
The air that streamed through the car’s open windows was warm and sweet, a valentine from the verdant countryside that surrounded us. It felt as though we were just three guys out for a pleasant drive in the country— which was more or less the truth. Dennis and Nikolai traded jokes and gossip in Russkrainian. “We’re talking about the other guide,” said Dennis. “He’s on vacation.” It seemed there were no more than a handful of Chernobylinterinform guides. It only added to the sense that I had found a traveler’s dream: an entire region that— although badly contaminated—was beautiful, interesting, and as yet unmolested by hordes of other visitors.
My thoughts were interrupted by a loud electronic beep. My radiation detector had turned itself on—funny, that—and now that there was actually some radiation to detect (a still-modest 30 micros), it had begun to speak out with an annoying, electric bleat that in no way matched the PADEKC’s smooth iPod-from-Moscow look. There was a reason, I now realized, that this detector looked like something you might take to the gym instead of to a nuclear accident site: It was designed for the anxious pockets of people who thought 30 micros were worth worrying about.
In the front seat, Dennis had produced his own detector, a brick-size box of tan plastic fronted by a metal faceplate. Little black switches and cryptic symbols in Cyrillic and Greek adorned its surface. I was jealous. It seemed there was no kind of radiation it couldn’t detect, and it probably got shortwave radio, too. Its design was the height of gamma chic: slightly clunky, industrially built, understatedly cryptic, and pleasingly retro. What really sold me was its beep. Unlike the fretful blurts of the PADEKC, the beeps of this pro model were restrained, almost musical. It sounded like a cricket, vigilantly noting for the record that you were currently under the bombardment of this many beta particles, or that many gamma rays. It was a detector made for someone who accepts some radiation as a fact of daily life, and who doesn’t want to lose focus by being reminded of it too loudly. Someone who is perhaps even something of a connoisseur of radiation levels. Someone like Dennis.
The car stopped. Dennis pointed out the window to a large mound among the trees. “This is Kolachi,” he said. A pair of metal warning signs stood crookedly in the tall grass. That was all that remained. The village had been so contaminated by the accident that it was not only evacuated but also leveled and buried. There were many such villages. Dennis held his meter out the window: 56 micros. It was my first time above Kiev-panic levels.
Leaving Kolachi behind us, we passed by some old high-tension electrical wires—presumably part of the system that had, until recently, carried electricity from the undamaged reactors of the Chernobyl complex, which had continued to function even after the accident. The Soviet and then Ukrainian governments kept the other three reactors running into the 1990s, and only shut the last one down in 2000. Of the thousands of people still reporting to work in the Exclusion Zone, the great majority are employed in the decommissioning of those reactors.
On the seat beside me, the PADEKC was getting insistent. I apologized for the racket, feeling the same embarrassment as when your cellphone rings in a quiet theater. I tried to put the damn thing on vibrate, but all I could manage was to get lost in its impenetrable Russian menus. When we took the turnoff for Pripyat, it began to freak out in earnest. The reading ascended quickly from 50 micros through the 60s and the 80s, and into the low 100s. The beeping increased in pace, in a way I could only find vaguely alarming. Nikolai glanced back at me, unconcerned, but wondering what my little meter was making such a fuss about.
We were crossing through the Red Forest. Named for the color its trees had turned when they were killed off by a particularly bad dose of contamination, the Red Forest was cut down and buried in place, becoming what must be the world’s largest radioactive compost heap. Back in the briefing room, Dennis had warned me that we would experience our highest exposure while passing through this area, which had since been replanted with a grove of pine trees, themselves stunted by the radiation.
As we rounded a bend, Dennis again held his meter aloft outside the passenger window. It began chirping merrily. Meanwhile the PADEKC was going nuts. In Kiev, Leonid had told me the upper limit on the unit was 300 microroentgens, but it now spiked from the mid-100s directly to 361. The car filled with our detectors’ escalating beeps, which quickly coalesced into a single shrill tone that was painfully reminiscent of the flatlining heart monitor you hear on hospital TV shows.
Dennis’s meter topped out at 1,300 micros, about thirty times the background radiation in New York City. He twisted around in his seat to face me. “Yesterday it was up to 2,000,” he said. There was a hint of apology in his voice. Perhaps he was worried I might feel shortchanged for having received less than the maximum possible exposure from a Red Forest drive-by, as if I had come to Nepal to see Mount Everest, only to find it obscured by clouds.
Over a bridge lined with rusted street lamps and ruined guardrails, Nikolai slowed the car to weave between the potholes dotting the roadway. At the bottom of the bridge’s far slope, we reached another checkpoint. Dennis adroitly snatched the next leaf of paperwork out of the stack and tucked it into the waiting hand of the guard. The sign at the checkpoint read PRIPYAT.
Even more than the reactor itself, Pripyat is the centerpiece of any day trip to the Exclusion Zone. Before 1986, it was a city of nearly fifty thousand people, devoted almost entirely to running the four nuclear reactors that sat just down the road and to building the additional reactors that were to be added to the complex. At the time of the meltdown, Reactors Nos. 5 and 6 were nearing completion, and a further six reactors were planned, making the neighborhood a one-stop shop for the area’s nuclear energy needs.
It didn’t take long for the residents of Pripyat to realize there had been an accident. Anyone looking south from the upper stories of Pripyat’s tall apartment buildings could have seen smoke belching from the maw of the destroyed reactor building some two kilometers distant. What they didn’t know was that it was no ordinary fire.
The city was bathed in radiation, but the residents remained uninformed. They continued about their business for more than a day, while the government scrambled to contain the accident. Finally, at noon on April 27, nearly a day and a half after the explosion, the authorities announced their decision to evacuate the city.
You can say what you like about the Soviet government, which killed and exiled millions of its own people and repressed most of the rest. But you have to concede that when they put their minds to it, they really knew how to get a place evacuated. When at last the order was given, it took only hours for this city of fifty thousand people to become a ghost town. The evacuation was broadened over the following days to include more than a hundred thousand people. Ultimately, more than three hundred thousand were displaced.
Pripyat sat empty. In the months and years following the evacuation, it was looted and vandalized by people who were obviously unconcerned by the radioactive nature of their spoils, whether televisions for their own use or metal items to be sold as scrap. The evacuation and the looting turned Pripyat into what it is today: the world’s most genuinely post-apocalyptic city.
In spite of what you might have seen in the movies, though, things can actually be pretty nice after an apocalypse—if a bit scarce in terms of human beings. The road that led us into Pripyat from the south was lined with bushes speckled with small white blossoms, the air thick with the smell of flowers. The vista opened up as we reached the center of town, allowing a view of the buildings around us. Dennis and I clambered out in the middle of an intersection, and Nikolai motored off down a side road to find a nice spot to sit and drink the beer he’d bought earlier.
The day was hot and sunny. The ghostly city surrounded us, the buildings of downtown looming up from behind scattered poplar trees. Behind us rose a ten-story apartment block. Its pink and white plaster facade was falling off in patches, revealing the rough brickwork of the walls underneath. More apartment blocks stood along the road to the left, some of them crowned with large, Soviet hammer-and-sickle insignia that must once have lit up at night.
We walked toward the town plaza, following a path that had once been a sidewalk but was now a buckling concrete track invaded by weeds and grass. Dennis lit a cigarette and looked up as he took a long drag. A gentle breeze pushed a herd of little clouds across the sky. Birds flitted by.
