bridge that spanned the river. This was the Pripyat River, which runs right past Pripyat and the Chernobyl reactor, and into which the cooling channel from the nuclear reactor drains. The Pripyat also empties into the Dnieper River, which runs through Kiev and is the backbone of Ukraine’s most important watershed. You might call it the Ukrainian Mississippi, except there hasn’t been a meltdown in Minneapolis yet.
Dennis had made this stop, I think, as a concession to my pleas for a tour of the zone’s “nice spots.” Nikolai killed the engine and we got out of the car and walked across the deserted road to the north side of the bridge. The river stretched away toward the power plant, a miniature in the distance. Dennis and Nikolai lit cigarettes and we leaned on the guardrail, staring out at the view. The wide, coffee-colored water of the river, gently iridescent with shafts of warm sunlight, rippled against a border of marshy grass and tall reeds. Beyond the tiny shapes of the cooling tower and reactor buildings, a forest of grumbling thunderheads retreated over the horizon. Peace descended again on the zone. The official part of the tour was over.
At headquarters, Dennis and I ate quickly and in good style. The dining room was air-conditioned (the remote control for the AC looked a lot like my radiation detector), the table was covered with an embroidered tablecloth, and the meal was multicourse, with plates of meats and cheese and vegetables (not local). For the first time, Dennis took off his sunglasses. He seemed uneasy with his eyes exposed to the light, and we sat stiffly at the table, trading snippets of conversation. Maybe he was worried about missing the start of the soccer game. As soon as I told him he didn’t have to wait, he excused himself and headed upstairs.
The game had started by the time I joined him. What I had hoped would be a raucous gathering of soccer- crazed zone workers was actually a small, somber party of five people: only Dennis, Nikolai, a pair of tired, middle- aged secretaries from the Chernobyl authority office, and me. We were well provisioned, at least, with a generous spread of vodka, cognac, cola, and some kind of pickled fish. The game was scoreless into the second half, but we found moments to toast: a good save here, a near miss there. We would hold our glasses up, wait for a few words in Ukrainian from Dennis or Nikolai, and then drink. The secretaries glared at me meaningfully before each slug of vodka: the spirit of inclusion, I chose to think.
Finally Ukraine scored on a dubious penalty kick. The remaining minutes ticked away, and the game ended 1 -0. Ukraine would be advancing to the next round. Nikolai pounded on the table in celebration while Dennis poured out another round. He looked me in the eye, our glasses raised.
“To victory,” he said.
Afterward, Dennis and I went for a walk, clutching liters of beer we had bought at the corner store. It was a beautiful Friday evening, still warm with lingering sunlight, and the town was quiet. I suppose the place is always quiet. The only other person in sight was Lenin, standing alone on a low concrete platform, his hand in his pocket, looking like he was waiting for the bus.
A car passed in the distance, and we hid our beer bottles inside our coats. “We are not supposed to have beer outdoors in the town,” Dennis said. “If it is police, they can get angry.” For a moment, I felt like a bored teenager in a too-small town, with nothing to do on a Friday night but wander the streets and get drunk. Maybe there’s a reason the Exclusion Zone is also called the Zone of Alienation.
Across the street from Lenin, next to the church, was the recreation center. Dennis told me there was a Ping-Pong table inside, but that the place was closed for the weekend. First no canoeing or mushroom gathering, and now no Ping-Pong? These people had a thing or two to learn about hospitality.
“Come, I can show you the nice spots in town,” Dennis said. We strolled to the edge of town and then down an overgrown dirt road toward the water. Now off the clock, Dennis had dropped the forced, semi-military formality of his guide persona and was enjoying himself. He pointed at the thick overgrowth spilling into the road. “There could be wild boar here,” he said. “They like to hide in bushes like these. Sometimes the mother boars leap out of the bushes and charge. If this happens, you must climb something very tall, like this—“ He pointed at one of the tall, concrete utility poles that lined the road.
I looked at it doubtfully. “I don’t think I could climb that.”
Dennis took a swig of his beer and smiled. “If the wild boar is charging, you learn fast.”
At the riverbank, we stopped and stared out at the sunset, the surface of the water glassy and still. I wondered idly if the giant mosquitoes swirling around us were mutants, or if we might see a three-eyed fish. A few mutants would add such panache to the zone. But the closest you’ll come are the deformed, runty trees of the Red Forest and some unspectacular abnormalities in bird coloring, in the litter size of the wild boar, in who knows what else. The point is there are no two-headed dogs.
The world thinks of Chernobyl as a place where humankind had overwhelmed and destroyed nature. The phrase “dead zone” still gets tossed around. But this was nowhere more obviously untrue than here, watching the sunset, my entire horizon a quiet rhapsody of water, sun, and trees. Paradoxically, perversely, the accident may actually have been good for this environment. The radiation—while not exactly healthy for any organism—has been so effective at keeping humans away that Chernobyl has gone back to nature, a great, unplanned experiment in conservation by way of pollution. For decades, wildness has been reclaiming the place, growing in where civilization would have pushed it back, reoccupying the space once reserved for people.
If the zone had become a giant, radioactive national park, then Dennis was the Boy Scout in love with it. As we walked back to town, birdsong filling the air, he told me about the scientists and researchers who came to the zone to study the wildlife. His pride was obvious. Species of birds not seen in the region for decades had been popping up there, he said. Ecologists had even chosen it as a place to reintroduce an endangered species of wild horse. And everywhere I had gone, except for the reactor complex itself, I had seen nature running riot. Despite the radiation—indeed because of it—Chernobyl had effectively become the largest wildlife preserve in Ukraine, perhaps in all of Europe.
It is a turn of events that highlights a certain human arrogance about our destructive powers. It is only hubris to imagine that we can destroy nature, or the world. It is the mirror image of the industrialist’s egotistical desire to exploit and control it. And it is true that we can kill off continents of forest and destroy species by the thousands, and even wreak climate change. But once we’re gone, the rest of nature will rush on, as it has after so many other cataclysms, growing over and through and out of us. The apocalypse we can create is for ourselves and for our cousins, but not for life on Earth.
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.
