Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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 Exclu-
sion 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, Den-
nis 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 des-
troyed 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 wa-
ter, 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, un-
planned experiment in conservation by way of pollution. For decades, wildness has been
