Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
from the plaza's lower level, purple wildflowers and a few tree saplings poking out from
the cracks.
“Don't step on the moss,” Dennis ordered as we walked up the mossy stairs from the
mossy lower level to the mossy upper level.
“Why's that?” I asked, and hoped he hadn't seen the contorted tap dance of my reaction.
“The moss…concentrates the radiation,” he said, and tossed his cigarette butt on the
ground. The same could have been said for the mushrooms he had freely admitted to gath-
ering in the zone, but I didn't bother to point it out.
I stopped to take a picture. Dennis dangled another cigarette from his mouth and posed
on the concrete path, the pectopah in the distance. Behind his sunglasses, he could have
been the bassist for a Ukrainian rock band.
FOOTBALL,
said the writing on his sleeveless
black T-shirt.
SYNTHETIC NATURE.
He held up his detector for the camera to see. It read 120.
But what did 120 microroentgens mean on a sunny day? More than a little. Less than a lot.
Panic in Kiev.
Dennis wandered away along the side of the plaza, his detector in a lazy warble. I
lingered in front of the gutted pectopah. There was nothing left but a shell of cracked con-
crete and twisted metal. I tried to imagine the plaza before the accident, when it had been
the center of a living city. A place to meet a friend after work, maybe. Somewhere to have
a cup of bad coffee. What was it like to have your entire town evacuated in three hours? To
lose not only your house or apartment but also your workplace, your friends, your entire
environment? I tried to imagine the terror of that day.
But in the peace that reigned over present-day Pripyat, it was difficult. I closed my eyes
and felt the sun on my face. The trees and grass rustled in the wind. Insects buzzed past on
their way to somewhere else. I heard the easy cacophony of the birds. And as Dennis made
his way down the plaza, the chirping of his dosimeter dissolved into the birdsong, becom-
ing just another note in nature's symphony.
I caught up with him at the far corner of the shops, and we headed around back to visit
the amusement park. As we walked, I asked Dennis how he had gotten his job. Leading
guided tours through the world's most radioactive outdoor environment didn't seem like
a gig you would find on Craigslist. And Dennis had started early; at twenty-six, he had
already been working for the Chernobyl authority for three years, alternating every two
weeks between the zone and Kiev to keep his radioactive dose under the permitted limit.
He told me that originally he had worked only in the Kiev office, before getting transferred
to the zone. “I asked for it. I wanted to do it instead of sit in front of a computer,” he said,
and took a swig of water. “And most people don't work at all, if the computer has Internet.”
Here was someone who believed that boredom was worse for you than radiation.
