Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
would wake up from a nap, my topic sliding onto the floor, and look out the window to see
that we had stopped in a station.
“We have stopped,” Max would say.
We spent the first night crossing the length of Slovakia. A beautiful dusk settled over
the cracked smokestacks of deserted factories.
In the morning, we reached the Ukrainian border and rolled into a cluttered rail yard,
coming to rest between a set of oversize jacks, taller than the train car itself. A team of
crusty rail workers set themselves wrenching and hammering at the wheels of the train, and
soon the jacks were raising the entire car into the air, leaving the wheel trucks beneath us
on the rails.
The train tracks in the former Soviet Union don't match those in Europe, you see. So
they were changing the wheels on the train.
“They are changing the wheels on the train,” Max said.
By afternoon we had entered the flowered alpine landscape of the Carpathian Moun-
tains, and Max had become curious about my plans. I chose not to tell him that I was em-
barking on an epic, years-long quest to visit the world's most polluted places. I just said I
was headed for Chernobyl.
His face lit up. He had stories to tell. In the spring of 1986, when word of the disaster
got out, he was eleven years old, living in Kiev. Soon, people were trying to get their chil-
dren out of the city. It was nearly impossible to get train tickets, Max said, but somehow
his family got him onto a train bound southeast for the Crimea. Even though tickets were
so hard to come by, the train was nearly empty, and Max implied that the government had
manufactured the ticket shortage to keep people from leaving the city.
“When we arrived,” he said, “the train was surrounded by soldiers. They tested everyone
and their things for radiation before allowing them to move on. They were trying to keep
people from spreading contamination.”
He stayed away from Kiev that entire summer. From his parents, he heard stories about
life in the city during those months. The streets were washed down every day. Bakeries that
had once left their wares out in the open on shelves now wrapped them in plastic.
Max talked about the possibility that cancer rates in the area had increased because of
Chernobyl, and he told me that his wife, also from Kiev, had abnormalities in her thyroid,
which he attributed to radioactive exposure.
“It's very lucky Kiev didn't get more radiation, thanks to the winds,” he said. Then, in
his very polite, clipped voice, he asked, “And what do you think about nuclear energy?”
