Read Online The Best American Travel Writing 2012 by Jason Wilson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jason Wilson
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consistently or evenly. If radioactive dust is picked up by a cloud, it will fall where the rain falls. There are still parts of Wales where the sheep farmers canât sell their meat, and last summer thousands of wild boars hunted in Germany were declared dangerously radioactive.
Today, around five thousand people work in the Exclusion Zone, which over the years has grown to an area of 1,660 square miles. For one thing, you canât just switch off a nuclear power plant. Even decommissioned, it requires maintenance, as does the new nuclear-waste storage facility on-site. The workers come in for two-week shifts and receive three times normal pay. Any sign of disease at the annual medical, however, and they lose their jobs.
There are also some three hundred people living in the zone: villagers whoâve been coming home to their old farming lands since not long after the disaster and teams of radioecologists from around the world whoâve come to study the effects of radioactive fallout on plants and animals. Theyâve effectively turned the zone into a giant radiation lab, a place where the animals are mostly undisturbed, living amid a preindustrial number of humans and a post-apocalyptic amount of radioactive strontium and cesium. On the outside the fauna seems to be thriving: there have been huge resurgences in the numbers of large mammals, including gray wolves, brown bears, elk, roe deer, and wild boar present in quantities not recorded for more than a century. The question scientists are trying to answer is whatâs happening on the inside: in their bones, and in their very DNA.
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Once you enter the zone, the quiet is a shock. It would be eerie were it not so lovely. The abandoned backstreets of Chernobyl are so overgrown, you can hardly see itâs a town. Theyâve turned into dark-green tunnels buzzing with bees, filled with an orchestral score of birdsong, the lanes so narrow that the van pushes aside weeds on both sides as it creeps down them, passing house after house enshrined in forest. Red admirals, peacock butterflies, and some velvety brown lepidoptera are fluttering all over the vegetation. It looks like something out of an old Russian fairy tale.
Ukraine officially opened Chernobyl up to tourism in January 2011, but small groups have been able to visit the zone for the past few years. There are small tour operators based in Kiev that take visitors on day trips. You donât need Geiger counters or special suits; you just have to stay with the tour, pass through several checkpoints, and get tested for radiation on your way out. The tours will shuttle you around some of the main sitesâthe deserted city of Pripyat, a small park filled with old Soviet army vehicles used in the cleanup, various concrete memorials to the fire crews who lost their lives after the blast. Visitors are strictly confined to areas the authorities have scanned and declared safe.
Staying longer than a day is more complicated. The Chernobyl Center has a guesthouse where nonofficial visitors like us can stay and be fed delicious if overpriced Ukrainian stews and escalopes. At sundown each evening thereâs a curfew. Walk to the nearby shop where the local workers buy their beer and bread and you could get yourself arrested.
Chaperoning Rory and me at the center and on our daily excursions is our guide, Sergey. He lives in a town near Kiev, but for the past ten years heâs been spending two weeks out of every four in the zone, showing visiting scientists and the odd tourist around. Sergey is a tough, taciturn guy who looks like an old sergeant major, with a silver mustache and a head of cropped white hair. Our plan is to explore the forest, the old town of Chernobyl, the nearby rivers, the empty city of Pripyat, and some villages where a few peasants are still living. One of the papers we had to sign when we entered was an agreement that if we stepped anywhere Sergey hadnât told us to, we
Today, around five thousand people work in the Exclusion Zone, which over the years has grown to an area of 1,660 square miles. For one thing, you canât just switch off a nuclear power plant. Even decommissioned, it requires maintenance, as does the new nuclear-waste storage facility on-site. The workers come in for two-week shifts and receive three times normal pay. Any sign of disease at the annual medical, however, and they lose their jobs.
There are also some three hundred people living in the zone: villagers whoâve been coming home to their old farming lands since not long after the disaster and teams of radioecologists from around the world whoâve come to study the effects of radioactive fallout on plants and animals. Theyâve effectively turned the zone into a giant radiation lab, a place where the animals are mostly undisturbed, living amid a preindustrial number of humans and a post-apocalyptic amount of radioactive strontium and cesium. On the outside the fauna seems to be thriving: there have been huge resurgences in the numbers of large mammals, including gray wolves, brown bears, elk, roe deer, and wild boar present in quantities not recorded for more than a century. The question scientists are trying to answer is whatâs happening on the inside: in their bones, and in their very DNA.
Â
Once you enter the zone, the quiet is a shock. It would be eerie were it not so lovely. The abandoned backstreets of Chernobyl are so overgrown, you can hardly see itâs a town. Theyâve turned into dark-green tunnels buzzing with bees, filled with an orchestral score of birdsong, the lanes so narrow that the van pushes aside weeds on both sides as it creeps down them, passing house after house enshrined in forest. Red admirals, peacock butterflies, and some velvety brown lepidoptera are fluttering all over the vegetation. It looks like something out of an old Russian fairy tale.
Ukraine officially opened Chernobyl up to tourism in January 2011, but small groups have been able to visit the zone for the past few years. There are small tour operators based in Kiev that take visitors on day trips. You donât need Geiger counters or special suits; you just have to stay with the tour, pass through several checkpoints, and get tested for radiation on your way out. The tours will shuttle you around some of the main sitesâthe deserted city of Pripyat, a small park filled with old Soviet army vehicles used in the cleanup, various concrete memorials to the fire crews who lost their lives after the blast. Visitors are strictly confined to areas the authorities have scanned and declared safe.
Staying longer than a day is more complicated. The Chernobyl Center has a guesthouse where nonofficial visitors like us can stay and be fed delicious if overpriced Ukrainian stews and escalopes. At sundown each evening thereâs a curfew. Walk to the nearby shop where the local workers buy their beer and bread and you could get yourself arrested.
Chaperoning Rory and me at the center and on our daily excursions is our guide, Sergey. He lives in a town near Kiev, but for the past ten years heâs been spending two weeks out of every four in the zone, showing visiting scientists and the odd tourist around. Sergey is a tough, taciturn guy who looks like an old sergeant major, with a silver mustache and a head of cropped white hair. Our plan is to explore the forest, the old town of Chernobyl, the nearby rivers, the empty city of Pripyat, and some villages where a few peasants are still living. One of the papers we had to sign when we entered was an agreement that if we stepped anywhere Sergey hadnât told us to, we
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