We had to book the trip to Chernobyl a few weeks in advance, and I was in charge of that, so on a lunch break at work I researched our options. The tours have every search keyword covered, so if you enter "Is Chernobyl safe," for example, you get a page saying, like, "Hell, yes. Safe as houses. Safe as milk. And I can take you there for a very safe price."
Every one of them, every last page, had some variation of this phrase: "You get more radiation on a transatlantic flight than you do in an afternoon at Chernobyl Town."
A month ago, when my mother was visiting, and I told her where we were going, she was like, "Why would you do that? The radiation!" and like a good parrot, I was like, "Yeah, but you get more radiation on a transatlantic flight!" and she was like, "You are ALSO taking a transatlantic flight to get there!" I think she won that point.
I wanted to see it. I remember the news and how strange and scary it was back in the '80s, and I've read since that nature has reclaimed the place, and I'm into ghost towns. I'd also read that very sad book and wanted to sort of pay homage to the brave souls described within, and it seemed like an opportunity to have some context when or if there's a conversation about the trade-offs of living in a nuclear-powered world.
It would also be a kind of sick thrill, which I mustn't deny. That element is in there.
We got up super-early, grabbed some coffee at a colorful 24-hour place, and made our way to the pickup point. It was next to a McDonald's, so we got some breakfast. I figured the patriotic preservatives would keep us safe. We found our mini van and joined the dozen or so other folks who had the same curiosity we did.
The logo for the tour company showed a winding road leading to the symbol for "radiation."
The guide was a Ukrainian Barbie we called Cher (for Cher Nobyl) and she made bad jokes about how we shouldn't expect to get superpowers from the radiation and shouldn't expect to grow an extra hand. "I go into the Exclusion Zone every day, and I still don't have a third eye."
The van took off, and we were outside of Kyiv very quickly. Cher apologized in advance for "Ukrainian roads." There were some potholes caused by snowmelt. My practiced eye scanned the roadside for weird old Soviet bus stops, and I was rewarded. Angular, colorful, and strange.
Cher went through the rules. Don't go into any buildings. Don't touch anything. Don't sit on the ground. "If you sit down," she said, "you will contaminate your pants." She held up her dosimeter and showed us what a "normal" radiation level was. She was giving us a baseline.
Through the countryside we tore, the driver taking us ever northward. Cher started a video. It concerned the efforts to cover the exploded nuclear reactor with something called a "Mega Tomb."
While the video played, Cher softly read to the driver. We found this remarkably endearing.
The video gave a quick history but focused mostly on the international team of engineers tasked with covering up the rad-spewing hole in the ground. When the reactor first blew, it took them a few days to just pour concrete over the thing, a big old Soviet block they called The Sarcophagus. But it started sucking after a few decades, so they built this big old airplane-hanger-lookin' thing on top.
What will they put on top of this one in twenty years, one wonders.
The logistics behind both endeavors were sad and fascinating. Sometimes, the workers could only be on site for a few minutes at a time. You run up, fill a bucket with sand, and then you run back because your Roentgen ray count is too high. Call it a day! Hit the showers.
Cesium is a hell of a drug.
For a while, they tried to use robots to get things done, but the radiation was too much and even the robots got scrambled, their circuits couldn't take it. So... back to people; they bused in thousands of miners from remote parts of the Soviet Union.
These people were referred to at the time as "Bio-Robots." Most of the bio-robots are dead now. Deactivated.
At some point, the tv switched from color to black and white. One of the guys in the back started hollering about it and Cher told him there was nothing she could do about it and to try not to contaminate his pants every time something went wrong.
We got to the Thirty-Kilometer Exclusion Zone and had to exit the van. Our passports were checked by a stern dude with a Kalashnikov strapped to his back. It's not all theater. There's still a ton of plutonium under the reactors, and some bad-actors may try to steal it one day. Would be a hell of a heist film.
A souvenir truck sold patches with the radiation symbol and "I survived Chernobyl" t-shirts. A grey kitty came slinking out of the guard tower and curled around our legs while we waited. Little Chernobyl kitty.
Another tour group showed up and got in line in front of us. Once our passports were checked, we had to duck around them to get to the turnstile leading back to the van. The new line of people blocked the view of one of the guards, and Sara got yelled at as she crossed over. He couldn't tell if she was cutting the line or not.
We were off and rolling again, but now we were on the other side. In The Exclusion Zone. I scanned again for Soviet bus stops and found one... with a tree growing inside it. Shudder. Long, gray stretch of road until we pulled over to visit an Abandoned Kindergarten. We were allowed inside, and like proper ghouls we all took pictures of the storybooks on the floor and the stripped dolls on the wire nap-beds.
It's been over thirty years and some of the shelves have collapsed, the roof leaks, dust is everywhere, a sad place. I was particularly affected by a row of cubby holes with animal faces above each individual cubby. Like, at some point a little girl had the hedgehog designated to her, a little boy the goose.
It was sort of set up like a haunted house tour but the ghost was Radiation. Cher whipped out her dosimeter to show a "hot spot" in the soil near the entrance. People gathered round to see, but we went back to the van.
We drove through Chernobyl Town, up and down abandoned streets. It could have been any '80s suburb, but the brick and wood homes were all sagging and fallen. This is what happens when you don't weatherproof the deck every few years.
In the distance, down a road we were forbidden to travel on, rusted ships listed and sank. I dearly wanted a photo of them. A river full of abandoned boats returning to the deep.
The people here had left in a hurry all right. The whole population went out for cigarettes and never came back.
There was a second checkpoint at the Ten Mile Exclusion Zone, but it went quickly. I reckon they figured any plutonium thieves would have figured out a way around them by now and only law-abiding suckers would stop here to show off their papers.
We saw the Mega Tomb, star of the video. There it was covering up Naughty Reactor No. 4. It was news to us that the other reactors had still been in use up to around 2000. Folks in Kyiv want their power. It took an international team of persuaders to be like, "how about everyone chips in to help you find a solution here."
It's "safe-ish" again now, and when we pulled up to the damn thing we saw dozens of workers swinging their lunchpails and working on... something without wearing any masks or gear. In appearance, it could have been any Seattle construction site.
There was a monument to the first responders. A giant stone fist holding a tiny stone factory.
We rolled on to Pripyat, stopping to take selfies in front of the awesome "Welcome to Pripyat" sign. This was the factory town set up to keep the whole thing running back in the '70s. It was once like any other factory town, but the factory made nuclear power. Soccer stadium, hotels, restaurants, swimming pools, movie stars. A city of the future.
The sign was very cool on its own merits. A Latvian dude started hitting on Cher at this point, and it became a theme of the trip. He helped her take a selfie, something she said she'd never done.
It was a brisk, clear day. I kept my eyes on the roadside hoping to see a wolfpack or fox or moose.
Down a dirt path surrounded by trees and brush. It used to be clear. It used to be the main road into town. Thirty years of untended nature is a hell of a drug. We entered the main square. A stark and quiet place.
It was slightly familiar to me from a video game set here. Call of Duty. I had killed and been killed here. I had been sniped from the top of that hotel, I has shot someone through the window of that restaurant. I was too shy to tell Sara this.
It was sad and strange and still and beautiful. Rusted Cyrillic letters falling off of buildings, crumbling staircases, cracked plazas, words like silent raindrops fell and echoed in the wells of silence.
Our group scattered and poked around reverently in an abandoned supermarket and down the halls of a ruined office building. It was the promised experience, and we were given a lot more freedom than I had expected.
We moved on to the Unopened Amusement Park. It had been scheduled to open two days after the accident. But nothing opened after the accident. The big rusty Ferris wheel was never ridden in. The bumper cars never bumped no one. It was very cool to see and probably the most famous symbol of the abandoned town.
Through the woods where "crazy ants" scrambled in the dirt and strange red beetles surfed on the leaves. We saw the stadium with its splintered bleachers. Sara told me a funny story about being a little girl and her class being bused in to clean the university stadium after Lady Razorback games.
After that, we both thought of the miners who had been bused in to sop up the cesium.
Around then to the back of town and back to the van. Slow, sober ramble out of town and toward an enormous radar called The Russian Woodpecker. It's one of the biggest in the world, you know, and back in the Cold War it's "tak tak tak tak tak" interfered with radio all over the globe.
It was supposed to spy on US missiles, but its signal couldn't "see" through the Aurora Borealis. Take that, Commies! Uncle Sam has weaponized the rainbow! Green clovers and blue diamonds in your fa ace, Ivan!
It started to rain. The Latvian dude clowned around in his poncho and wondered aloud if the driver was Cher's boyfriend. She said he was not. Clumsy as hell, but Latvia got the info he was looking for.
There was a mosquito in the van, and I became suddenly irrational about its desire to put its plutonium proboscis in me. I killed it with my hand, and it must have just fed, because blood went everywhere. It was like a scene from a Dario Argento movie. Napkined it up but still saw blood flecks in creases in my finger skin.
We both got kind of paranoid and weird about it. We'd been reverent and calm throughout the visit, but I think the sustained exposure to this sad region was beginning to get to us. We felt itches in places no mosquito could have penetrated. So, the stop for lunch came just in time.
Soup and pork chops. Sweet rolls and dry bread. One of the other tourists requested a gluten-free meal, so they gave her an apple.
The driver, who had heretofore, been silent made sure we knew the food had all come from outside the Exclusion zone, because "In Chernobyl, you have to shoot the mushrooms."
We stopped at a statue of a trumpeting angel. There's a bit in Revelations about "the star Wormwood falling to Earth and making the water bitter" and Chernobyl means "wormwood" (if you translate it a certain way). I vividly remember people talking about this in the '80s, that the Chernobyl disaster was a precursor of Revelations!
But it was the same people who said Reagan was the Devil, because the names Ronald Wilson Reagan each had six letters in them.
One last stop at the "Welcome to Chernobyl!" sign, which had a concrete atom on it. Another very cool design. And that was it.
They played another video, this one with a pop song with chorus that went "Radioactive! Radioactive!" played over footage of Pripyat in its prime
We went through some sort of "clean machine" to see if any particles had fallen on us and to see if we had somehow absorbed too much radiation. If those machines were real, then so is the trumpeting angel.
I fell asleep pretty much right after that, which I later called "Firing up the dozeimeter." At some point, I woke up with a gasp and imagined I had sucked in a particle of radiation, like Peter Pan swallowing Tinker Bell.
Heavy traffic, but we got back to Kyiv in one piece. We bid farewell to Cher and wonder even now if she had a drink with the Latvian.
We walked the long way home and passed through an Easter celebration at St. Michael's cathedral. The streets were full of children. The trees strewn with painted eggs. Thousands of people cheering and happy. Smiling and kissing. The sun bursting through the windows of the church towers.
The contrast could have been more pronounced.
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