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LIFE IN THE ZONE
What we’re still learning from Chernobyl
By Steve Featherstone
W
e stood inside a dilapidated
barn in the Ukrainian village of
Pisky, waiting for swallows to ly into
the nets we’d strung across the doors.
It was a sultry June day, and the stagnant air reeked of cow urine. The two
evolutionary biologists I was assisting
wondered aloud why there were so
few birds this year. Anders Møller, research director at the National Center for Scientiic Research, Paris–Sud
University, reasoned that a sudden
cold snap the previous fall had killed
many of the swallows. His colleague,
Steve Featherstone’s last article for Harper’s
Magazine, “Human Quicksand,” appeared
in the September 2008 issue.
Photographs of a barn swallow caught in a net, and a
pine tree near the Red Forest, by Steve Featherstone
Tim Mousseau, professor of biological
sciences at the University of South
Carolina, blamed Pisky itself, or what
remained of it. Barn swallows are the
avian equivalent of dogs. They have
adapted to living with humans since
the beginning of civilization, and
there weren’t many humans left in
Pisky. But neither scientist pointed to
the obvious culprit.
“What about radiation?” I asked.
“And then there’s radiation,” Tim
said with a wink. “But you have to
prove it.”
Pisky lies just outside the Zone of
Alienation, the oficial name given to
a vast region in northern Ukraine
contaminated by fallout in 1986 when
a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear
Power Plant exploded. Pisky’s residents
were never evacuated. Nonetheless, it
became a ghost town. Radiation levels
there are ive times above normal. Lowslung brick barns, the architectural
signature of the old Soviet collectivefarm system, sit empty and neglected in
weed-choked ields.
I went outside for some fresh air.
Gennadi Milinevsky, an owlish astrophysicist from Kiev who helped Tim
and Anders with their experiments,
was talking to a woman wearing a
purple tracksuit and rubber galoshes,
the apparent owner of this ramshackle
LETTER FROM UKRAINE
41
mud farm. Nyah nyah nyah, the woman
the questions raised by Chernobyl
muttered, tapping an iron mallet
were existential. The radioactive cloud
against her thigh. A wiry man stumthat was released transgressed physical
bled around the corner of the barn,
boundaries as easily as it undermined
smiling crazily. He had a deeply tanned
limsy political dichotomies: East verface and glassy, bloodshot blue eyes. He
sus West, good versus evil, commuraised two ingers to his puckered lips.
nism versus capitalism. A nightmare
“He wants cigarette,” Gennadi transfor an uncertain age, Chernobyl herlated. Sorry, I said. The man kept talkalded the end of the Cold War and
ing. “He was liquidator,” Gennadi said.
prefigured the diffuse terrors of the
“He drive tractor. You know liquidadawning millennium.
tor?” I nodded. It was the sort of bland
Lately, Chernobyl’s reputation has
locution favored by Soviet apparatundergone a peculiar transformation.
chiks. More than 700,000 miners, solIn many articles that appear on its
diers, and construction workers were
anniversary, the nightmare has
mobilized from every corner of the
changed to a comeback story. The
Soviet Union to clean up — or
Zone is no longer a wasteland, the
liquidate— Chernobyl’s aftermath, ofstory goes, but rather a lush wildlife
ten equipped with nothing more than
refuge renewed by the irrepressible
shovels. Anybody who lived this
close to the Zone was either a liquidator or related to one. They are like
UKUSHIMA RAISED PRACTICAL
ghosts drifting across the poisoned
QUESTIONS ABOUT NUCLEAR
landscape. The man put his ingers
POWER,
BUT THE QUESTIONS RAISED
to his mouth again.
“He wants money,” Gennadi
BY CHERNOBYL WERE EXISTENTIAL
said, “for bread.” I handed the man
a wrinkled ifty-hryvnia banknote
and went back into the barn. Tim
forces of nature. Eager to rebrand the
and Anders sat in Gennadi’s car, takZone as Europe’s largest nature preing blood samples from the swallows
serve, the Ukrainian government has
they’d netted. They caught thirty
introduced a small herd of endangered
swallows that day, less than half the
Przewalski’s horses to the Zone and
number they’d caught ive
has dabbled in niche tourism. Endyears earlier.
times enthusiasts can now take day
trips to the forbidden city of Pripyat, a
n April, Japan upgraded the severipostapocalyptic Disney World comty of the disaster at the Fukushima nuplete with a creepy amusement park
clear power plant from 5 to 7 on the
and authentic Soviet-themed sets.
international scale of nuclear catastroThe notion that an Arcadia has
phes, oficially making it equivalent to
risen from Chernobyl’s rubble isn’t
Chernobyl. The scale, which measures
entirely unfounded. Wolves, moose,
the total amount of radiation released
black storks, lynx, eagle owls, otters,
as well as health and environmental
and many other rare species have been
impacts, obscures fundamental differspotted there. Some scientists believe
ences between the two events. Cherthat the absence of human activity has
nobyl’s radioactive inventory was rebeneited the Zone’s plant and animal
leased in a cataclysmic explosion and
life, outweighing the negative effects
ire that burned out of control for ten
of radiation. But Tim and Anders
days, spreading signiicant radioactive
don’t buy it. Over the past decade,
fallout over half the globe. The radiothey’ve published more than twenty
active emissions at Fukushima, estiscientiic papers suggesting that the
mated at 10 percent of Chernobyl’s,
Zone’s ecosystem is little more than a
have leaked out slowly over the course
sickly clone of the natural world outof weeks, much of it ending up in the
side its borders.
sea. But the equivalence also obscures
“It’s not a lunar landscape,” Tim exa deeper shift in the way that we
plained to me. “It’s not a complete void
think about the unthinkable. Fukuof life. It’s much more insidious than
shima has raised practical questions
that. Because everything’s still there, it’s
about the future of nuclear power, but
just being modiied at some low level.”
F
I
42
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2011
After rolling up our nets in Pisky,
we drove to Chernobyl, our base for
the next six days. On the way, I was
alert to any sign of afliction or blight
in the passing landscape, but the
blank verdure of the ields and the
forest beyond revealed nothing extraordinary. Hand-painted billboards
appeared occasionally, advertising the
Zone’s beauty with depictions of
pointy green pines and slender white
birches set on the banks of curving
blue ribbons of water. The scenes
would be charmingly naïve in the
manner of grade-school artwork but
for the Orwellian captions printed
beneath them. forests are the people’s wealth, one billboard proclaimed. protect the forests!
Chernobyl was an ancient town,
and had 10,000 residents at the
time of its evacuation. Today it
serves as an administrative outpost
and garrison for the police who
patrol the Zone’s 1,100 square
miles, mostly searching for looters
and poachers. Near the center of
town we passed under a mysterious
square arch made of pipe, wrapped in
frayed canvas and connected to a latticework of pipes that snaked above
the unruly grass. Stray cats and dogs
roamed the streets, as well as men in
woodland camoulage. We pulled into
the parking lot of a building that resembled a self-storage shed, with corrugated metal walls painted mustard
yellow. It is Chernobyl’s only hotel,
shipped here prefab from Finland
soon after the disaster. Eleven bare
lagpoles stood out front, a sullen reminder of the days when international delegations descended upon
Chernobyl to sort out what had happened and what to do. Anders stood
at the hotel’s entrance, ingering the
needles of a hemlock tree that he
gleefully pronounced a mutant.
“It is especially pleasing because it
is by the front door,” he said. Anders
has the ruddy complexion and misanthropic frame of mind of a man who
spends a lot of time outdoors, away
from people.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
While I hadn’t expected to see giant
spiders stalking Chernobyl’s derelict
neighborhoods, the mutant hemlock
looked just like the other trees, a little bushier maybe.
Anders gave me a thin smile. “Well,
I’ve only seen perhaps a few hundred
thousand of these trees in my life,” he
said, “but okay.” He plucked a spindly
blue wildlower from the ground and
twirled it between his ingers.
“Mutant?” I said.
“Myosotis stricta,” Anders said, “the
straight forget-me-not.” He mashed
the lower against a microscope slide,
scribbled some notes in his ield book,
and began walking down a side street,
his pale blue eyes scanning the dense
to a nuclear reactor. That’s technically true, but meltdowns aren’t all
created equal. In 1979, Three Mile
Island’s Unit 2 reactor experienced a
partial meltdown. Years later, when
technicians cracked open the reactor’s pressure vessel, the thick steel
capsule that contains the nuclearfuel rods, they were surprised to ind
that nearly half of the rods had melted. But the molten fuel hadn’t
burned through the vessel’s thick
steel liner. A full accounting of the
fuel assembly loaded in the core melted so completely and quickly that it
lowed like lava into the reactor building’s basement, burning through layers
of concrete and steel. The reactor contained 211 tons of nuclear fuel. Nobody knows exactly how much was
ejected in the explosion or vaporized
in the ire, but the lowest estimate is
around 8 tons. Chernobyl released 400
times as much radiation as the Hiroshima bomb, and it dispersed its inventory of radionuclides in a way that
undergrowth for additional specimens. There was a haunted stillness
to the air, which smelled sweetly of
chestnut and locust blossoms. Across
the street, clouds of gnats rose into
the slanting light as two stout women swung scythes into a wall of
weeds. The liquid notes of a nightingale’s song mingled with opera playing on some unseen radio. Overhead,
I glimpsed a swift’s black silhouette
splitting the sky. Two swifts, Anders
corrected me, lying in tandem. And
they were mating, he said. It occurred to me that despite their ignorance of the corruption of the earth
passing under their wings, the amorous swifts, like every other living
thing in the Zone, were
probably radioactive.
chaotic situation unfolding at the
Fukushima plant won’t be possible
for some time, but it’s clear from the
released radionuclides —iodine-131,
cesium-137—that some if not all of
the fuel rods in three reactors were
damaged when dropping water levels
allowed temperatures to soar, as were
the fuel rods in the spent-fuel storage
pools in four reactor buildings.
When the spent fuel rods heated up,
they began to crack, which released
huge amounts of hydrogen gas that
likely exploded and blew the thin
metal roofs off the reactor buildings.
Did the rods at Fukushima get hot
enough to melt? We won’t know for
certain until radiation levels drop
enough for technicians to inspect
the reactors.
A steam explosion literally blew the
2,200-ton lid off Chernobyl’s Unit 4
reactor, exposing its nuclear core. The
was inherently more polluting. It was
in essence a nuclear volcano. Within
a week of the bomb’s detonation, 90
percent of its radiation had dissipated.
But in many European countries the
consumption of berries, mushrooms,
and wild game is to this day restricted
because of contamination from Chernobyl’s fallout.
The area around the hotel in Chernobyl is considered “clean” by Zone
standards, with about three times the
background radiation found elsewhere
in Europe. Still, it was high enough to
sharpen one’s sense of mortality. On
our irst morning, as we gathered in
the parking lot before breakfast, a
cuckoo called from the trees. According to Ukrainian folklore, Gennadi
said, the number of calls corresponded
to how long you will live.
“I’d rather avoid counting them,”
I said.
A
meltdown is often thought to
be the worst thing that can happen
Photographs of a dead moose calf at an abandoned collective farm in Vesnyanoe, and a
collage of family photos in an abandoned cottage in Korogod, by Steve Featherstone
LETTER FROM UKRAINE
43
Anders frowned as if I’d disputed the
law of gravity. “It does not matter,” he
said. “That is how long you will live.”
Before entering the modest dining
room of the canteen across the street,
we were required to stand on a radiation detector. The machine looked
like a doctor’s scale made from the
back end of a ’59 Cadillac. I slid my
hands inside two chrome-plated brackets and stared at three lamps the size
of taillights. In a few seconds the machine rendered its judgment with a
green licker. I was clean.
As we ate, a French ilm crew shufled in, disheveled and bleary-eyed.
They were making a documentary
about wildlife in the Zone, and they’d
arranged a few days of shooting with
Tim and Anders. The director, Antoine, was a short, frenetic man wearing black Ray-Bans. He leaned over
Tim’s shoulder.
“Maybe we can talk about different sequences?” Antoine asked. He
suggested that they start by ilming
Tim and Anders leaving the hotel to
work in the Zone. Did Tim have a
Geiger counter with a big display on
it? Something that would look good
on camera?
“I think so,” Tim said.
“We can even turn on the beeper,”
Anders added drily.
“Perfect!” Antoine said.
After breakfast Tim and Anders
made a show of hauling their gear up
and down the hotel stairs for an hour.
With each take, Anders grew more
exasperated. TV was the stupidest
thing ever invented, he railed. It
turned people into fat zombies. We
were waiting by the car for Antoine’s
signal when two thrushes lew overhead. The sight of them seemed to
calm Anders, and he admitted that
the documentary might not be a bad
thing if it drew attention to what was
happening to the Zone’s wildlife.
Driving north out of town to the
reactor complex, we passed a road sign
announcing the village of Kopachi.
There was no village, just a cluster of
grassy mounds where houses once
stood. Hundreds of such mounds dotted the Zone, marking places where
liquidators had buried material too
radioactive to leave exposed—houses,
vehicles, even the topsoil itself—all
bulldozed into trenches and pincush-
44
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2011
ioned with triangular yellow radiationwarning signs.
The trees thinned out to make
room for columns of giant transmission towers strung together with miles
of dead wire. And then, looming
above the tree line, appeared the red
and white candy-striped ventilation
stack of Unit 4, now faded and dull.
Everybody turned to look. Through
breaks in the trees I caught glimpses
of the “sarcophagus,” a hulking gray
ediice that entombs the remnants of
Cher nobyl’s reactor. T he road
branched, and the sarcophagus fell
away behind us. Leonid, our driver,
turned onto an unpaved access road
and stopped next to a burial mound.
Nobody seemed alarmed by his choice
of parking space.
“What’s the radiation level here?” I
asked Tim. He shrugged.
“Two, maybe three microsieverts
per hour,” he said, as if he were guessing the temperature. He pulled out a
color-coded contour map of the Zone
and laid it on the hood of the car. He
traced our route from Chernobyl, his
inger coming to rest on an area called
the Red Forest, a blotch the shade of
rare sirloin indicating some of the
highest concentrations of radioactive
isotopes in the world.
“Don’t put anything on the ground,”
Anders said sharply. “Don’t touch the
vegetation. Don’t put your ingers in
your mouth while you’re here. Don’t!”
Antoine ilmed Anders doing a bird
census, a scientiically rigorous form of
bird watching. Following a course laid
out in his GPS, Anders walked across
a scrubby meadow, stopping every ifty
yards or so for ive minutes to count all
the birds he could see or hear. He
scribbled a dozen names in his black
ield book, but I could identify only
the hoopoe’s eerie low-pitched whoopwhoop. Radiation levels increased
steadily as we entered a forest of Scots
pine. It began to rain, and black lies
swarmed around our heads. The documentary’s producer, an urbane young
Parisian named Luc, showed me his
dosimeter. It was pinned at its maximum 9.99 microsieverts per hour
(μSv/hr). Anders’s dosimeter gave a
reading of 23 μSv/hr—more than a
hundred times the background radiation around the hotel in Chernobyl.
Deep in the forest, Luc said with ner-
vous excitement, radiation levels
reached as high as 300 μSv/hr.
“Silence!” Antoine shouted.
“That means in three hours you get
your maximum,” Luc whispered, referring to the annual limit of 1,000 μSv.1
Anders and the ilm crew pressed
farther into the forest, but I hung back
to take photos. The forest loor was
strewn with slabs of broken concrete,
rolls of rusted chain-link fencing, ceramic pipes, rotten wooden crates, and
old vodka bottles. A park bench rested
atop a pile of debris as if inviting us to
sit and admire the view. For a time I
could hear Antoine shouting “Action!”
and “Arrêt!” Then it was dead quiet
apart from the click of my camera’s
shutter and the lonely echo of a cuckoo calling for a mate.
Without a dosimeter I felt as
though I were walking through a
mineield. I had no idea what lurked
beneath the carpet of pine needles
and moss, so I decided to retrace my
steps back to the car. I stumbled into
a copse of pines that formed a rough
circle. The trees all had aluminum
identiication tags wired around their
trunks, and a rusted sign was stuck in
the ground at the edge of the circle.
The sign was illegible, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t an invitation to hang
around. I threw my tripod over my
shoulder and ran. Once I hit the
meadow, breathing hard, I slowed to a
walk and promptly swallowed a black
ly. Raising my hand relexively to my
mouth, I remembered Anders’s warning: Don’t! I hacked the black fly’s
sodden little corpse to
my lips and spat it out.
M
ost of what we know about
the effects of radiation on human
beings comes from the Life Span
Study (LSS), a body of medical data
collected over decades by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation
(RERF) from Japanese atomic-bomb
survivors. Thanks to the LSS, we
know the amount of radiation it
takes to cause your large intestine
1
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the average U.S. resident receives a radiation dose of 3,600 μSv annually from all sources, natural and manmade.
The International Council on Radiological
Protection recommends that people not exceed 1,000 μSv annually.
to slough its lining, and how much
it takes to raise your risk of getting
leukemia after age fifty. While it
provides the basis for virtually every
international health standard regarding acute radiation exposure,
the LSS is a poor tool for predicting
what might happen to people
chronically exposed to low doses of
radiation. To wit, no advisory body
in the world has identiied a “safe”
dose of radiation. Standards designed to protect nuclear workers
and cancer patients are based on
the principle that any exposure to
radiation can harm you. Over a bottle of Ukrainian cognac one night
at the hotel, I asked Tim whether
he worried about getting cancer
from working in the Zone.
“Relative to cognac and smoking,
you mean?” He winked. For argument’s sake, he continued, let’s say
that you had a one in a thousand
chance of dying from the radiation
here. That risk wasn’t equivalent to
smoking; it wasn’t cumulative; the
probability remained one in a thousand no matter how many times you
visited. Tim tapped cigarette ash
into an empty water glass. But maybe
the health risk was cumulative, he
mused. Maybe in each of the twelve
years he’d been coming to the Zone
he’d ingested a certain amount of radiation that incrementally upped his
odds of getting cancer. He took a
drag on his cigarette, exhaled out
the open window, and said, “But I
would argue that everything we eat,
everything we drink, all this processed food, all the pesticides that
contaminate everything in our highly technological, artiicial life—it all
adds up.”
In other words, modern society
has invented so many ways to poison us that a few extra gamma rays
get lost in the noise of our dying.
Background radiation is ever ywhere, always has been. Cosmic rays
from above. Radon gas from below.
Uranium pulsing in the polished
granite vaults of New York City’s
Grand Central Terminal. Fly in an
airplane, get a CAT scan, and you
receive an extra dose. And then
there’s the radiation we carry in our
lesh and bones, souvenirs from decades of nuclear-weapons testing. If
you live in the Northern Hemisphere there’s probably a little bit of
Chernobyl in you right now. Is all
this radiation making us sick? Maybe. Maybe not. There’s no analogue
to the LSS for Chernobyl, no organization like RERF compiling medical data on the millions of people
directly affected by the fallout, and
thus no reliable statistics for diseases associated with low-level radiation exposure. As far as we know,
potato chips will kill us
long before plutonium.
O
n our third day in the Zone it
was raining, and a gray mist hung
over the green ields. According to
Tim’s radiation maps, we were following a lobe of heavy fallout that
pointed west from the reactor like a
pink finger. Far on the horizon I
could see the giant mesh radar array
belonging to Chernobyl-2, a former
Soviet military station. Beyond the
ten-kilometer checkpoint the road
turned into an obstacle course of
potholes and fallen tree branches.
Leonid sawed the steering wheel
back and forth, muttering to himself
with every jolt. Trees and bushes encroached on the road, at times scraping the doors.
“I like this forest, almost jungle,”
said Igor Chizevsky, a technician at
the Chernobyl EcoCenter and our
oficial guide. His job was to make sure
we didn’t stray into sensitive areas like
Chernobyl-2, even though it had been
decommissioned long ago and pictures
of it were easy to ind on the Internet.
Soviet-era paranoia has a long halflife. On my irst day in Chernobyl, an
irate military oficer interrogated me
in the street for taking pictures of a
Lenin statue. Igor bailed me out, but
not before the oficer berated him for
not keeping a closer eye on me. I
bought him a bottle of brandy for the
trouble I’d caused.
By the time we reached the village
of Vesnyanoe, the greenery had swallowed the road altogether. Leonid
turned down a grassy lane that ended
at an abandoned collective farm.
There were about a dozen outbuildings made of red brick rising from a
sea of meadow grass. Leonid parked
on an asphalt pad that used to be the
floor of a large tractor shed. The
shed’s metal walls had been carted off
by looters long ago.2
I helped carry the bird nets and poles
into a cow barn identical to the one in
Pisky. Swallows darted in and out of
broken windows, chattering in alarm.
In 2001 Tim and Anders published
their irst paper together on barn swallows, linking the partial albinism they
discovered in some birds to elevated
radiation levels. The paper made news
outside academic circles because everybody likes a good mutant story, and
Tim had photos to go with it. In Pisky,
he’d shown me a barn swallow with
partial albinism. White flecks were
sprinkled in among the rust-colored
feathers of the bird’s throat. It didn’t
look like much, but genetic mutations
that ind expression in an organism’s
physical appearance are often subtle.
The film crew didn’t want me in
their footage, so I grabbed a dosimeter
and went exploring in the abandoned
village. The irst building I came to was
an old brick schoolhouse. Rain
drummed on the metal roof as I stood
in the vestibule, adjusting to the darkness. A doll’s head lay on a shelf next
to some dusty canning jars, and the
warped plank loor was littered with
children’s shoes and faded rubber
toys—a pink whale, a blue cat. There
was an organic quality to the ribbons
of wallpaper heaped along the baseboards, as if the walls were shedding
their skin. Outside, trees and bushes
had grown right up to the brick. I
walked to a ruined store in the center
of town. A fallen tree had staved in the
roof, and rain streamed down the splintered rafters. There was nothing inside.
The store had probably been cleaned
out in the irst few weeks after the meltdown. Turning to go, I caught sight of
a wooden abacus lying on the floor
amid piles of rotting leaves. When I was
growing up in the anticommunist fervor of the Eighties, it would have been
a comfort to know that citizens of the
Evil Empire tallied their grocery bills
with an abacus.
2
Illegal salvage is a cottage industry in the
Zone. In 2008, Ukraine’s state security
service arrested several men at a checkpoint
for attempting to steal a helicopter used in
the Chernobyl cleanup. The men planned
to convert the chopper, whose contamination level was thirty times the legal limit,
into a theme café.
LETTER FROM UKRAINE
45
I canvassed the rest of the village,
wading through stinging nettles and
pushing aside coils of bramble, mindful of falling into hidden wells. I felt
my way through darkened rooms,
treading warily on loorboards spongy
with rot. I heard nothing but the
scrape of my boots and the steady patter of rain on the leaves outside. During the Zone’s evacuation, people were
told to leave everything behind, that
they’d be coming back in a few days.
They never did, of course, but few clues
to their existence remained. Looters
had stripped the Zone bare, right down
to the lightbulbs. In Vesnyanoe and
other villages I visited, I found only a
few sticks of broken furniture, a keyless
accordion, and a hand-carved curry
brush that would make a quaint decoration in some oligarch’s summer dacha. Once, in the drawer of an overturned dresser, I discovered a framed
collage of black-and-white family portraits. Many of the photos showed a
grim man with blunt features and
thick hair swept back off his square
forehead in the style of Stalin. In one
blurry picture the man was in a cofin
adorned with lowers, dressed in a suit,
his limp hands propped on his chest in
a gesture of supplication.
When I returned to the collective
farm the others were standing around
waiting for Antoine to inish interviewing Tim and Anders. Gennadi opened
his trunk and came at me with a snow
brush. “Your trousers,” he said, and
vigorously brushed the backs of my legs.
I hadn’t noticed that I was streaked
with a chalky white dust from rubbing
against plaster walls.
“Radiation-remove device,” Igor
joked.
Gennadi dropped the snow brush in
a garbage bag to keep it from contaminating the stuff in his trunk. Sasha, the
French crew’s guide, leaned against his
van, smoking a cigarette. His strong
cheekbones and deep-set green eyes
seemed oddly familiar.
“I think I’ve seen that guy on the
Internet,” I whispered to Igor, “eating
an apple in the Zone. He’s crazy.”
Igor pointed to his chest. “I took
picture,” he said proudly. He translated
what I’d said to Sasha, who grinned and
told Igor that he wasn’t afraid to eat the
apple, that he was still alive, wasn’t he?
And now look—the picture of him
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HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2011
eating the apple had made him famous
in New York! “I remember some anecdote,” Igor said, turning serious for a
moment. “One question: You can eat
apple from Chernobyl?”
“You can?” I said.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “Eat, you
can. But your shit, need bury in ground
three meter.”
Igor suggested we check out a big
pond behind the barn. He pried open
a gap in a barbed-wire fence, and we
slipped through it and crossed a ield of
coarse grass. The sun came out, and a
soft breeze silvered the birch and willow
trees shading the shoreline. The bulrushes clattered. Fish nipped at insects,
sending ripples over the pond’s lilycovered surface.
“Steve, you come here,” Igor shouted.
“Very beautiful picture.”
I circled the edge of the pond.
There was Igor, standing next to the
carcass of a moose calf. The calf lay on
its side, half submerged. A black water
beetle the size of a tea saucer clawed
at its nose, and frogs squatted on its
bloated rib cage, snapping at lies. The
breeze shifted, illing our nostrils with
the stench of rotting meat. As we
backpedaled toward the barn, Igor
asked me not to tell our “French
friends” about the dead moose. I suspected that he didn’t want Antoine to
exploit it for propaganda. The existence of moose, even a dead one, was
more anecdotal proof that the Zone
was a teeming wildlife preserve.
But Antoine didn’t need a moose
to prove his point. He just would
have to expand his scope to include
some of the Zone’s less photogenic
wildlife, like ticks. Later that night, I
killed two that I found in my underwear. And at dinner I brushed a tick
off Igor’s shoulder, crushing it beneath a drinking glass. Then Anders
reached over and pinched one off my
shirt. Instead of killing the tick, he
dropped it on his plate, folded his
arms, and watched it crawl away.
“ S o m e joy s mu s t b e
shared,” he said.
O
ne cloudy afternoon, we went
to Pripyat to scout for barn-swallow
nesting sites. The city was once a
workers’ paradise, purpose-built in
1970 for Chernobyl plant staff and
their families. At the time of the ac-
cident, 45,000 people were living
there and enjoying all the modern
conveniences the Soviet Union had
to offer. Now it’s become the Zone’s
public face, a monument to life at
the zenith of Soviet power. Its buildings and streets have been well documented in photographs and films,
and even digitized in loving detail as
a setting for violent video games
such as Call of Duty 4.
Just beyond the checkpoint into
the city we drove past a four-foot-tall
Jesus hanging from a varnished cruciix, and cruised slowly down a wide
boulevard littered with poplar branches. Ten-story apartment towers rose
amid plazas and parks that had reverted to meadow and forestland. We
stopped at a former heavy-equipment
repair facility that Tim suspected of
harboring a barn-swallow colony. A
few birds lew in and out of the open
mechanic’s bays, but from the ground
we couldn’t see any roosts. We
climbed a light of rickety metal stairs
and entered a warren of ofices and
locker rooms on the second loor. The
detritus of looters cluttered the narrow hallways: overalls, rubber boots,
gas masks with the ilters pried out.
Employment records with black-andwhite ID photos glued to them were
spilled across the loor of a washroom.
We found the skeleton of one swallow
trapped inside a double windowpane,
but no evidence of a colony.
On the way back to the hotel, Tim
asked Gennadi to swing by the Chernobyl plant. It was close by, and he
wanted me to see it. We pulled up next
to a monument to Chernobyl victims
in the middle of an empty parking lot
and got out to gaze at the sarcophagus.
It was bigger and more decrepit than
I’d expected, like a battle-worn concrete aircraft carrier run aground.
Somewhere in its dark, dripping chambers was a species of mutant black
fungus that, according to some scientists, possessed the unique ability to
feed on radiation. Remote-controlled
robots piloted into the heart of the
sarcophagus have sent back pictures of
bizarre heaps of corium. A by-product
of the meltdown, corium is a highly
radioactive slag of liqueied concrete,
steel, sand, chunks of the reactor’s
graphite moderator, nuclear-fuel rods,
and God knows what else. Nobody can
get near the stuff to remove it. I asked
what the radiation levels were this
close to the reactor. Tim took a drag
on his cigarette and licked the butt
into the parking lot.
“Oh, it’s an X-ray kind of day,” he said.
“You like go see big ish?” Gennadi
inquired.
“Sure,” I said, and went to grab my
camera gear. Gennadi stopped me.
“You cannot take picture,” he said. “Is
forbidden.”
The parking lot was adjacent to the
reactor’s cooling pond. I’d read something about giant catish living in it,
some as big as torpedoes. We stood on
a rail trestle over the pond, tearing
apart bread slices left over from lunch.
The bread bobbed around for a while,
white blobs dissolving into the black
water. Nothing happened.
“Now is cold weather, and wind,”
Gennadi said. “When is very calm, big
ish coming.”
Then, in a series of lazy splashes,
the bread chunks began to disappear,
one by one. It was too overcast to see
the catish, but I could imagine their
sluggish bodies sliding down to the
murky bottom of the cooling pond and
settling there in a puff of
radioactive sediment.
T
here are three basic types of
ionizing radiation: alpha, beta, and
gamma. Like X-rays, gamma rays are
very high-frequency photons. They
pass easily through most materials,
including flesh. Gamma rays strip
away electrons from atoms, disrupting cellular chemistry. In high doses,
they can destroy tissue, which is the
principle behind cancer radiotherapy. Unlike gamma rays, the other
two types of radiation, alpha and
beta, are composed of subatomic particles with mass. They don’t travel
nearly as far as gamma rays, and they
can’t penetrate anything much
thicker than a sheet of paper. But if
you inhale a mote of radioactive
dust, eat contaminated food, or absorb radionuclides through an open
wound, alpha or beta radiation can
do a lot of damage. Lodged in your
lung, a molecule of plutonium, which
is a powerful beta emitter, will ravage
nearby cells until it’s flushed out
weeks or years later (if at all) through
natural biochemical processes.
In the Zone we were defenseless
against gamma radiation. We could
only heed our dosimeters and try to
minimize exposure. To prevent contamination from alpha and beta particles, we wore rubber boots in the
worst areas. At the end of the day, we
scuffed them in the “clean” grass
along the roadside and wrapped them
in garbage bags before getting into
our vehicles. In the ield, we ate food
that Gennadi had bought in Kiev off
a bath towel that he spread across the
trunk of his old Ford sedan. We
washed our hands constantly, and we
never touched our faces while outside,
at least not consciously.
On our last day in the Zone, we returned to the Red Forest to gather oak
leaves for an experiment. It was cold
and drizzling. Tim opened a box of
disposable Tyvek suits, the kind worn
by hazmat workers. This time we were
going into the “real” Red Forest, he
explained. We set off across a meadow,
skirting burial mounds, our legs swishing in unison. In the forest I recognized
piles of debris from the last time I was
there, but I soon lost track of where I
was. The pine trees grew closer, dimming the watery gray light filtering
down from the needled canopy. The
inert silence of the forest was occasionally broken by a crow’s raspy croak or
the shrill whistle of a lycatcher. An
hour passed before we found what could
only generously be deined as an oak
tree. Three feet tall and lacking a central trunk, it resembled a bush. We
stripped off the few yellowish leaves
clinging to its spindly branches, stuffed
them in a Ziploc bag, and moved on.
The pine forest yielded to open
meadow. A crosshatch pattern of
scorched trees lay in the rough grass,
and more blackened trunks stood out
like rotten teeth amid stands of white
birch saplings. These were remnants of
the “real” Red Forest, a large tract of
evergreens adjacent to the Chernobyl
reactor that got hit by the worst of the
fallout. (Almost overnight, the evergreens died and their needles turned
orange, hence the name.) Soviet liquidators razed the forest, sprayed the area
with a polymer to keep radioactive dust
from blowing around, and replanted it.
The natural forces of decay and regeneration had been subverted. I stopped
next to a thirty-foot Scots pine resting
on the ground. After twenty-ive years,
its black branches were still perfectly
intact, as if it had been dipped in pitch
and laid out to dry. In a healthy forest,
the tree would’ve been a heap of mulch.
Radiation, Tim and Anders hypothesized, had effectively mummiied it by
inhibiting microbial decomposition.
The dosimeter I’d borrowed was reading
116 μSv/hr, an order of magnitude
higher than anything we’d yet recorded. I slid the device back into my pocket and jogged to catch up with Tim.
In our white Tyvek suits, we trekked
across clearings where nothing grew
except rubbery patches of lichen the
color of overcooked peas. The conifers
began to take on shapes like poorly
cultivated bonsai shrubs. Stunted by
radiation, they lacked symmetry, and
their gnarled branches twisted in all
directions except up. Consulting his
GPS, Tim pushed through a dense willow thicket and halted at the edge of a
swamp. To reach the woods on the
other side we’d have to bushwhack
around it. We zigzagged over the knobby terrain, hopping from one tussock of
sedge to another. Just as we gained the
other side of the swamp, the Tyvek
bootie covering my right foot snagged
on a willow branch and tore completely away. My foot plunged past the ankle
into the cold brown water.
“Fuck!” I shouted.
“You’re wearing boots, right?” Tim
said, looking over his shoulder. I lifted my
foot to show him my dripping running
shoe. His eyes widened. “Oh,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sneakers.” But that
was only half the story. The previous day
I’d stepped on a large-bore trocar at an
abandoned veterinary clinic. It punched
through the sole of my rubber boot and
sank deep into the ball of my right foot,
which had throbbed painfully ever
since. That was my excuse for slogging
through a radioactive swamp in a pair of
running shoes—comfort. I mentioned
none of this to Tim. I lurched behind
him through the woods like a zombie,
trying not to put too much weight on my
injured foot, the ripped Tyvek pant leg
lapping behind me. We found another
oak tree on a greasy patch of dirt and
leaves that had been torn up by wild
boar. Kneeling on a blue tarp, Tim
scraped fungus from the oak’s branches
with a trowel. My dosimeter gave a reading of 90 μSv/hr. I squatted down and
LETTER FROM UKRAINE
47
switched the selector to read alpha and
beta radiation, in addition to gamma.
The reading shot above three digits.
“113 and counting,” I said.
“Looks like you found yourself a hot
particle,” Tim said.
“125, 126 . . . ” As the number ticked
upward, I did the math in my head: 600
times the radiation level at the hotel in
Chernobyl; 1,400 times the background
level of my home in upstate New York.
Sitting here for forty-ive minutes was
equal to getting a chest X-ray.
“Probably a few molecules of plutonium,” Tim said. I imagined comic-book
rays of green light shooting through me
and felt a vertiginous tingle in my legs.
Given the radioactive baptism I received
back at the swamp, it was probably a
good idea to avoid any unnecessary exposure. I leapt to my feet. Tim laughed
and flapped his arms like a chicken.
“Bawk-bawk-bawk!” he cackled.
We left the Zone for good later that
afternoon. The sun broke out from behind the clouds as we approached the
last checkpoint at Dytyatky. The checkpoint guard walked around Gennadi’s
car, holding a wand attached to a large
metal box. For a moment I thought he
might detect my wet sneakers and pants,
which were balled up inside a garbage
bag in the trunk. But the gate opened,
and we drove the two-lane road toward
Kiev. Babushkas sat in the shade, selling
strawberries and spiky bunches of the
herb sweet lag in preparation for Holy
Trinity Day, when Ukrainians remember their dead. Gennadi stopped the car
in Mikhilivschyna, a large tract of forest
thirty miles from Chernobyl that Tim
and Anders used as a control area (background radiation there is only .03 μSv/
hr). Tim always packed extra shoes, and
he lent me a worn pair of black Reeboks.
I bent down to tie them and noticed a
bunch of red ants tugging at a molted
cicada shell. I couldn’t recall ever seeing
a single ant or hearing a cicada’s buzz
when I was in the Zone. Then a grasshopper ricocheted off my shin.
“Is it me, or are there more bugs
around here?” I asked Tim.
“You noticed?” he said. “It’s pretty
striking.”
Two months earlier he and Anders
had published the irst extensive study
of insects in the Zone, and their indings
mirrored their work on bird populations.
Basically, as radiation levels increased,
48
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2011
the numbers of critters decreased. Mikhilivschyna, by contrast, hummed with
everyday life. Dragonlies, robber lies,
and iridescent blue butterlies illed the
air. Fat honeybees droned among clusters of purple and pink wildlowers. In
the forest, dozens of bird species hidden
in the dark understory contributed
chirps and warbles. Hunting for oak
leaves, we came to a clearing that had
been trampled by wild boar. Tim
scooped up a handful of crumbly black
soil. Lots of turnover here, he said, referring to the high rate of decomposition.
Towering over us was a giant oak whose
branches started fifty feet above the
ground. We’d need a cherry picker to
collect any leaves. Tim slapped the oak’s
massive trunk. “It’s the same basic composition,” he said. “The Chernobyl area
is just a much simpler version.”
The environmental impact of fallout from the damaged reactors at Fukushima will take a long time to assess,
but it’s safe to say that it won’t begin to
approach the level of damage wrought
by Chernobyl. Towns may have to be
abandoned for years while Japanese authorities igure out how best to decontaminate them, but there will be no
Japanese version of the Red Forest, no
partial-albino barn swallows. The pine
trees will grow straight and true. The
birds will sing from their branches.
And fallow spinach fields dusted by
cesium-137 and strontium-90 will buzz
with the rough music of cicadas, even
if there are no people
around to hear it.
I
accompanied Tim and Anders on
our last day together to a dairy farm
in Voronkov. The swallow colony
there serves as a control group. They
sat at a battered table inside a barn,
surrounded by Ziploc bags stuffed
with glass vials, boxes of microscope
slides, and a plastic cup of Nemiroff
vodka that they used to sterilize the
thermometer. Tim filled out worksheets and labeled vials filled with
blood and sperm. Anders handled the
birds, playing them like a concert pianist. Every movement of his ingers—
tapping beaks, spreading wings, jabbing lancets—was calibrated to cause
the minimum amount of discomfort.
By the time he reached the inal procedure, to gauge a bird’s stress reaction, he seemed relieved. He stood by
the open door, cradling a swallow in
his palm. The bird rested on its back
for a few seconds, getting its bearings,
and then disappeared in a metallic
blue lash. Smiling crookedly, Anders
glanced at his wristwatch and called
out the time to Tim.
Along with Gennadi and two other
Ukrainian volunteers, I was entrusted
with the delicate tasks of counting eggs
and disentangling the birds from the
nets. I was pretty good at it by then.
Once, three swallows lew into the net
at the same time. I slid two of them
into a linen sack and hung it on a nail.
The third swallow had black Sharpie
smudges on its white underbelly, marking it as a returnee. I ducked under the
net and stepped into the courtyard.
The bird felt weightless in my hand,
like a sachet of dry twigs wrapped in
tissue paper. It cocked its head as if to
ask whether I was going to let it live. I
tossed it into the air. The swallow
dipped toward the ground, righted itself, then hurtled into the sky to join
the others wheeling and chattering
above the courtyard.
As they processed the last few birds,
Tim and Anders were in a buoyant
mood. They debated where we should
celebrate that night, their banter oscillating between Anders’s droll misanthropy and Tim’s chummy good humor.
Anders reached into a linen sack,
pulled out a swallow, and laid it on the
table. Its tiny black feet were curled
against its downy belly. “Dead?” Tim
asked. Anders nodded. Too many birds
in one bag, he mumbled. The blame fell
on me, but there was no way to tell
whether it was my bird or one of the
volunteers’. I began to explain how
there weren’t enough sacks for all the
birds, but the contempt on Anders’s
face stopped me cold.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Well,” Anders said, and cleared his
throat. He didn’t inish his sentence. But
I knew what he was thinking. We owed
the bird more than the casual cruelty of
our ignorance. Anders scooped up the
dead swallow and pinched its wing tips
together. He fastened them with a metal clip attached to a digital scale by a
metal rod, just as he had done with all
the other birds. Then he held up the
scale and called out the swallow’s
weight, as the swallow dangled from the
rod in perverse imitation of light.
■