LETTER FROM UKRAINE

LIFE IN THE ZONE What we’re still learning from Chernobyl By Steve Featherstone

We stood inside a dilapidated Tim Mousseau, professor of biological contaminated by fallout in 1986 when barn in the Ukrainian village of sciences at the University of South a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Pisky, waiting for swallows to fl y into Carolina, blamed Pisky itself, or what Power Plant exploded. Pisky’s residents the nets we’d strung across the doors. remained of it. Barn swallows are the were never evacuated. Nonetheless, it It was a sultry June day, and the stag- avian equivalent of dogs. They have became a ghost town. Radiation levels nant air reeked of cow urine. The two adapted to living with humans since there are fi ve times above normal. Low- evolutionary biologists I was assisting the beginning of civilization, and slung brick barns, the architectural wondered aloud why there were so there weren’t many humans left in signature of the old Soviet collective- few birds this year. Anders Møller, re- Pisky. But neither scientist pointed to farm system, sit empty and neglected in search director at the National Cen- the obvious culprit. weed-choked fi elds. ter for Scientifi c Research, Paris–Sud “What about radiation?” I asked. I went outside for some fresh air. University, reasoned that a sudden “And then there’s radiation,” Tim Gennadi Milinevsky, an owlish astro- cold snap the previous fall had killed said with a wink. “But you have to physicist from Kiev who helped Tim many of the swallows. His colleague, prove it.” and Anders with their experiments, Steve Featherstone’s last article for Harper’s Pisky lies just outside the Zone of was talking to a woman wearing a Magazine, “Human Quicksand,” appeared Alienation, the offi cial name given to purple tracksuit and rubber galoshes, in the September 2008 issue. a vast region in northern Ukraine the apparent owner of this ramshackle

Photographs of a barn swallow caught in a net, and a pine tree near the Red Forest, by Steve Featherstone LETTER FROM UKRAINE 41

(41-48)Featherstone Final2cx2.indd_0426 41 4/26/11 8:27 AM mud farm. Nyah nyah nyah, the woman the questions raised by Chernobyl After rolling up our nets in Pisky, muttered, tapping an iron mallet were existential. The radioactive cloud we drove to Chernobyl, our base for against her thigh. A wiry man stum- that was released transgressed physical the next six days. On the way, I was bled around the corner of the barn, boundaries as easily as it undermined alert to any sign of affl iction or blight smiling crazily. He had a deeply tanned fl imsy political dichotomies: East ver- in the passing landscape, but the face and glassy, bloodshot blue eyes. He sus West, good versus evil, commu- blank verdure of the fi elds and the raised two fi ngers to his puckered lips. nism versus capitalism. A nightmare forest beyond revealed nothing ex- “He wants cigarette,” Gennadi trans- for an uncertain age, Chernobyl her- traordinary. Hand-painted billboards lated. Sorry, I said. The man kept talk- alded the end of the Cold War and appeared occasionally, advertising the ing. “He was liquidator,” Gennadi said. prefigured the diffuse terrors of the Zone’s beauty with depictions of “He drive tractor. You know liquida- dawning millennium. pointy green pines and slender white tor?” I nodded. It was the sort of bland Lately, Chernobyl’s reputation has birches set on the banks of curving locution favored by Soviet apparat- undergone a peculiar transformation. blue ribbons of water. The scenes chiks. More than 700,000 miners, sol- In many articles that appear on its would be charmingly naïve in the diers, and construction workers were anniversary, the nightmare has manner of grade-school artwork but mobilized from every corner of the changed to a comeback story. The for the Orwellian captions printed Soviet Union to clean up—or Zone is no longer a wasteland, the beneath them. forests are the peo- liquidate—Chernobyl’s aftermath, of- story goes, but rather a lush wildlife ple’s wealth, one billboard pro- ten equipped with nothing more than refuge renewed by the irrepressible claimed. protect the forests! shovels. Anybody who lived this Chernobyl was an ancient town, close to the Zone was either a liqui- and had 10,000 residents at the dator or related to one. They are like FUKUSHIMA RAISED PRACTICAL time of its evacuation. Today it ghosts drifting across the poisoned serves as an administrative outpost QUESTIONS ABOUT NUCLEAR landscape. The man put his fi ngers and garrison for the police who to his mouth again. POWER, BUT THE QUESTIONS RAISED patrol the Zone’s 1,100 square “He wants money,” Gennadi BY CHERNOBYL WERE EXISTENTIAL miles, mostly searching for looters said, “for bread.” I handed the man and poachers. Near the center of a wrinkled fi fty-hryvnia banknote town we passed under a mysterious and went back into the barn. Tim forces of nature. Eager to rebrand the square arch made of pipe, wrapped in and Anders sat in Gennadi’s car, tak- Zone as Europe’s largest nature pre- frayed canvas and connected to a lat- ing blood samples from the swallows serve, the Ukrainian government has ticework of pipes that snaked above they’d netted. They caught thirty introduced a small herd of endangered the unruly grass. Stray cats and dogs swallows that day, less than half the Przewalski’s horses to the Zone and roamed the streets, as well as men in number they’d caught fi ve has dabbled in niche tourism. End- woodland camoufl age. We pulled into years earlier. times enthusiasts can now take day the parking lot of a building that re- trips to the forbidden city of Pripyat, a sembled a self-storage shed, with cor- In April, Japan upgraded the severi- postapocalyptic Disney World com- rugated metal walls painted mustard ty of the disaster at the Fukushima nu- plete with a creepy amusement park yellow. It is Chernobyl’s only hotel, clear power plant from 5 to 7 on the and authentic Soviet-themed sets. shipped here prefab from Finland international scale of nuclear catastro- The notion that an Arcadia has soon after the disaster. Eleven bare phes, offi cially making it equivalent to risen from Chernobyl’s rubble isn’t fl agpoles stood out front, a sullen re- Chernobyl. The scale, which measures entirely unfounded. Wolves, moose, minder of the days when interna- the total amount of radiation released black storks, lynx, eagle owls, otters, tional delegations descended upon as well as health and environmental and many other rare species have been Chernobyl to sort out what had hap- impacts, obscures fundamental differ- spotted there. Some scientists believe pened and what to do. Anders stood ences between the two events. Cher- that the absence of human activity has at the hotel’s entrance, fi ngering the nobyl’s radioactive inventory was re- benefi ted the Zone’s plant and animal needles of a hemlock tree that he leased in a cataclysmic explosion and life, outweighing the negative effects gleefully pronounced a mutant. fi re that burned out of control for ten of radiation. But Tim and Anders “It is especially pleasing because it days, spreading signifi cant radioactive don’t buy it. Over the past decade, is by the front door,” he said. Anders fallout over half the globe. The radio- they’ve published more than twenty has the ruddy complexion and misan- active emissions at Fukushima, esti- scientifi c papers suggesting that the thropic frame of mind of a man who mated at 10 percent of Chernobyl’s, Zone’s ecosystem is little more than a spends a lot of time outdoors, away have leaked out slowly over the course sickly clone of the natural world out- from people. of weeks, much of it ending up in the side its borders. “How can you tell?” I asked. sea. But the equivalence also obscures “It’s not a lunar landscape,” Tim ex- While I hadn’t expected to see giant a deeper shift in the way that we plained to me. “It’s not a complete void spiders stalking Chernobyl’s derelict think about the unthinkable. Fuku- of life. It’s much more insidious than neighborhoods, the mutant hemlock shima has raised practical questions that. Because everything’s still there, it’s looked just like the other trees, a lit- about the future of nuclear power, but just being modifi ed at some low level.” tle bushier maybe.

42 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2011

(41-48)Featherstone Final.indd_0422 42 4/22/11 2:25 PM Anders gave me a thin smile. “Well, to a nuclear reactor. That’s techni- fuel assembly loaded in the core melt- I’ve only seen perhaps a few hundred cally true, but meltdowns aren’t all ed so completely and quickly that it thousand of these trees in my life,” he created equal. In 1979, Three Mile fl owed like lava into the reactor build- said, “but okay.” He plucked a spindly Island’s Unit 2 reactor experienced a ing’s basement, burning through layers blue wildfl ower from the ground and partial meltdown. Years later, when of concrete and steel. The reactor con- twirled it between his fi ngers. technicians cracked open the reac- tained 211 tons of nuclear fuel. No- “Mutant?” I said. tor’s pressure vessel, the thick steel body knows exactly how much was “Myosotis stricta,” Anders said, “the capsule that contains the nuclear- ejected in the explosion or vaporized straight forget-me-not.” He mashed fuel rods, they were surprised to fi nd in the fi re, but the lowest estimate is the fl ower against a microscope slide, that nearly half of the rods had melt- around 8 tons. Chernobyl released 400 scribbled some notes in his fi eld book, ed. But the molten fuel hadn’t times as much radiation as the Hiro- and began walking down a side street, burned through the vessel’s thick shima bomb, and it dispersed its in- his pale blue eyes scanning the dense steel liner. A full accounting of the ventory of radionuclides in a way that

undergrowth for additional speci- chaotic situation unfolding at the was inherently more polluting. It was mens. There was a haunted stillness Fukushima plant won’t be possible in essence a nuclear volcano. Within to the air, which smelled sweetly of for some time, but it’s clear from the a week of the bomb’s detonation, 90 chestnut and locust blossoms. Across released radionuclides—iodine-131, percent of its radiation had dissipated. the street, clouds of gnats rose into cesium - 137—that some if not all of But in many European countries the the slanting light as two stout wom- the fuel rods in three reactors were consumption of berries, mushrooms, en swung scythes into a wall of damaged when dropping water levels and wild game is to this day restricted weeds. The liquid notes of a nightin- allowed temperatures to soar, as were because of contamination from Cher- gale’s song mingled with opera play- the fuel rods in the spent-fuel storage nobyl’s fallout. ing on some unseen radio. Overhead, pools in four reactor buildings. The area around the hotel in Cher- I glimpsed a swift’s black silhouette When the spent fuel rods heated up, nobyl is considered “clean” by Zone splitting the sky. Two swifts, Anders they began to crack, which released standards, with about three times the corrected me, fl ying in tandem. And huge amounts of hydrogen gas that background radiation found elsewhere they were mating, he said. It oc- likely exploded and blew the thin in Europe. Still, it was high enough to curred to me that despite their igno- metal roofs off the reactor buildings. sharpen one’s sense of mortality. On rance of the corruption of the earth Did the rods at Fukushima get hot our fi rst morning, as we gathered in passing under their wings, the amo- enough to melt? We won’t know for the parking lot before breakfast, a rous swifts, like every other living certain until radiation levels drop cuckoo called from the trees. Accord- thing in the Zone, were enough for technicians to inspect ing to Ukrainian folklore, Gennadi probably radioactive. the reactors. said, the number of calls corresponded A steam explosion literally blew the to how long you will live. A meltdown is often thought to 2,200-ton lid off Chernobyl’s Unit 4 “I’d rather avoid counting them,” be the worst thing that can happen reactor, exposing its nuclear core. The I said.

Photographs of a dead moose calf at an abandoned collective farm in Vesnyanoe, and a collage of family photos in an abandoned cottage in Korogod, by Steve Featherstone LETTER FROM UKRAINE 43

(41-48)Featherstone Final2cx2.indd_0426 43 4/26/11 8:27 AM Anders frowned as if I’d disputed the ioned with triangular yellow radiation- vous excitement, radiation levels law of gravity. “It does not matter,” he warning signs. reached as high as 300 μSv/hr. said. “That is how long you will live.” The trees thinned out to make “Silence!” Antoine shouted. Before entering the modest dining room for columns of giant transmis- “That means in three hours you get room of the canteen across the street, sion towers strung together with miles your maximum,” Luc whispered, refer- we were required to stand on a radia- of dead wire. And then, looming ring to the annual limit of 1,000 μSv.1 tion detector. The machine looked above the tree line, appeared the red Anders and the fi lm crew pressed like a doctor’s scale made from the and white candy-striped ventilation farther into the forest, but I hung back back end of a ’59 Cadillac. I slid my stack of Unit 4, now faded and dull. to take photos. The forest fl oor was hands inside two chrome-plated brack- Everybody turned to look. Through strewn with slabs of broken concrete, ets and stared at three lamps the size breaks in the trees I caught glimpses rolls of rusted chain-link fencing, ce- of taillights. In a few seconds the ma- of the “sarcophagus,” a hulking gray ramic pipes, rotten wooden crates, and chine rendered its judgment with a edifi ce that entombs the remnants of old vodka bottles. A park bench rested green fl icker. I was clean. Chernobyl’s reactor. The road atop a pile of debris as if inviting us to As we ate, a French fi lm crew shuf- branched, and the sarcophagus fell sit and admire the view. For a time I fl ed in, disheveled and bleary-eyed. away behind us. Leonid, our driver, could hear Antoine shouting “Action!” They were making a documentary turned onto an unpaved access road and “Arrêt!” Then it was dead quiet about wildlife in the Zone, and they’d and stopped next to a burial mound. apart from the click of my camera’s arranged a few days of shooting with Nobody seemed alarmed by his choice shutter and the lonely echo of a cuck- Tim and Anders. The director, An- of parking space. oo calling for a mate. toine, was a short, frenetic man wear- “What’s the radiation level here?” I Without a dosimeter I felt as ing black Ray-Bans. He leaned over asked Tim. He shrugged. though I were walking through a Tim’s shoulder. “Two, maybe three microsieverts minefi eld. I had no idea what lurked “Maybe we can talk about differ- per hour,” he said, as if he were guess- beneath the carpet of pine needles ent sequences?” Antoine asked. He ing the temperature. He pulled out a and moss, so I decided to retrace my suggested that they start by fi lming color-coded contour map of the Zone steps back to the car. I stumbled into Tim and Anders leaving the hotel to and laid it on the hood of the car. He a copse of pines that formed a rough work in the Zone. Did Tim have a traced our route from Chernobyl, his circle. The trees all had aluminum Geiger counter with a big display on fi nger coming to rest on an area called identifi cation tags wired around their it? Something that would look good the Red Forest, a blotch the shade of trunks, and a rusted sign was stuck in on camera? rare sirloin indicating some of the the ground at the edge of the circle. “I think so,” Tim said. highest concentrations of radioactive The sign was illegible, but I was pret- “We can even turn on the beeper,” isotopes in the world. ty sure it wasn’t an invitation to hang Anders added drily. “Don’t put anything on the ground,” around. I threw my tripod over my “Perfect!” Antoine said. Anders said sharply. “Don’t touch the shoulder and ran. Once I hit the After breakfast Tim and Anders vegetation. Don’t put your fi ngers in meadow, breathing hard, I slowed to a made a show of hauling their gear up your mouth while you’re here. Don’t!” walk and promptly swallowed a black and down the hotel stairs for an hour. Antoine fi lmed Anders doing a bird fl y. Raising my hand refl exively to my With each take, Anders grew more census, a scientifi cally rigorous form of mouth, I remembered Anders’s warn- exasperated. TV was the stupidest bird watching. Following a course laid ing: Don’t! I hacked the black fly’s thing ever invented, he railed. It out in his GPS, Anders walked across sodden little corpse to turned people into fat zombies. We a scrubby meadow, stopping every fi fty my lips and spat it out. were waiting by the car for Antoine’s yards or so for fi ve minutes to count all signal when two thrushes fl ew over- the birds he could see or hear. He Most of what we know about head. The sight of them seemed to scribbled a dozen names in his black the effects of radiation on human calm Anders, and he admitted that fi eld book, but I could identify only beings comes from the Life Span the documentary might not be a bad the hoopoe’s eerie low-pitched whoop- Study (LSS), a body of medical data thing if it drew attention to what was whoop. Radiation levels increased collected over decades by the Radia- happening to the Zone’s wildlife. steadily as we entered a forest of Scots tion Effects Research Foundation Driving north out of town to the pine. It began to rain, and black fl ies (RERF) from Japanese atomic-bomb reactor complex, we passed a road sign swarmed around our heads. The docu- survivors. Thanks to the LSS, we announcing the village of Kopachi. mentary’s producer, an urbane young know the amount of radiation it There was no village, just a cluster of Parisian named Luc, showed me his takes to cause your large intestine grassy mounds where houses once dosimeter. It was pinned at its maxi- stood. Hundreds of such mounds dot- mum 9.99 microsieverts per hour 1 The Environmental Protection Agency es- ted the Zone, marking places where (μSv/hr). Anders’s dosimeter gave a timates that the average U.S. resident re- liquidators had buried material too reading of 23 μSv/hr —more than a ceives a radiation dose of 3,600 μSv annual- ly from all sources, natural and manmade. radioactive to leave exposed—houses, hundred times the background radia- The International Council on Radiological vehicles, even the topsoil itself—all tion around the hotel in Chernobyl. Protection recommends that people not ex- bulldozed into trenches and pincush- Deep in the forest, Luc said with ner- ceed 1,000 μSv annually.

44 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2011

(41-48)Featherstone Final2cx2.indd_0426 44 4/26/11 8:27 AM to slough its lining, and how much you live in the Northern Hemi- shed’s metal walls had been carted off it takes to raise your risk of getting sphere there’s probably a little bit of by looters long ago.2 leukemia after age fifty. While it Chernobyl in you right now. Is all I helped carry the bird nets and poles provides the basis for virtually every this radiation making us sick? May- into a cow barn identical to the one in international health standard re- be. Maybe not. There’s no analogue Pisky. Swallows darted in and out of garding acute radiation exposure, to the LSS for Chernobyl, no orga- broken windows, chattering in alarm. the LSS is a poor tool for predicting nization like RERF compiling medi- In 2001 Tim and Anders published what might happen to people cal data on the millions of people their fi rst paper together on barn swal- chronically exposed to low doses of directly affected by the fallout, and lows, linking the partial albinism they radiation. To wit, no advisory body thus no reliable statistics for diseas- discovered in some birds to elevated in the world has identifi ed a “safe” es associated with low-level radia- radiation levels. The paper made news dose of radiation. Standards de- tion exposure. As far as we know, outside academic circles because every- signed to protect nuclear workers potato chips will kill us body likes a good mutant story, and and cancer patients are based on long before plutonium. Tim had photos to go with it. In Pisky, the principle that any exposure to he’d shown me a barn swallow with radiation can harm you. Over a bot- On our third day in the Zone it partial albinism. White flecks were tle of Ukrainian cognac one night was raining, and a gray mist hung sprinkled in among the rust-colored at the hotel, I asked Tim whether over the green fi elds. According to feathers of the bird’s throat. It didn’t he worried about getting cancer Tim’s radiation maps, we were fol- look like much, but genetic mutations from working in the Zone. lowing a lobe of heavy fallout that that fi nd expression in an organism’s “Relative to cognac and smoking, pointed west from the reactor like a physical appearance are often subtle. you mean?” He winked. For argu- pink finger. Far on the horizon I The film crew didn’t want me in ment’s sake, he continued, let’s say could see the giant mesh radar array their footage, so I grabbed a dosimeter that you had a one in a thousand belonging to Chernobyl-2, a former and went exploring in the abandoned chance of dying from the radiation Soviet military station. Beyond the village. The fi rst building I came to was here. That risk wasn’t equivalent to ten- kilometer checkpoint the road an old brick schoolhouse. Rain smoking; it wasn’t cumulative; the turned into an obstacle course of drummed on the metal roof as I stood probability remained one in a thou- potholes and fallen tree branches. in the vestibule, adjusting to the dark- sand no matter how many times you Leonid sawed the steering wheel ness. A doll’s head lay on a shelf next visited. Tim tapped cigarette ash back and forth, muttering to himself to some dusty canning jars, and the into an empty water glass. But maybe with every jolt. Trees and bushes en- warped plank fl oor was littered with the health risk was cumulative, he croached on the road, at times scrap- children’s shoes and faded rubber mused. Maybe in each of the twelve ing the doors. toys—a pink whale, a blue cat. There years he’d been coming to the Zone “I like this forest, almost jungle,” was an organic quality to the ribbons he’d ingested a certain amount of ra- said Igor Chizevsky, a technician at of wallpaper heaped along the base- diation that incrementally upped his the Chernobyl EcoCenter and our boards, as if the walls were shedding odds of getting cancer. He took a offi cial guide. His job was to make sure their skin. Outside, trees and bushes drag on his cigarette, exhaled out we didn’t stray into sensitive areas like had grown right up to the brick. I the open window, and said, “But I Chernobyl-2, even though it had been walked to a ruined store in the center would argue that everything we eat, decommissioned long ago and pictures of town. A fallen tree had staved in the everything we drink, all this pro- of it were easy to fi nd on the Internet. roof, and rain streamed down the splin- cessed food, all the pesticides that Soviet- era paranoia has a long half- tered rafters. There was nothing inside. contaminate everything in our high- life. On my fi rst day in Chernobyl, an The store had probably been cleaned ly technological, artifi cial life—it all irate military offi cer interrogated me out in the fi rst few weeks after the melt- adds up.” in the street for taking pictures of a down. Turning to go, I caught sight of In other words, modern society Lenin statue. Igor bailed me out, but a wooden abacus lying on the floor has invented so many ways to poi- not before the offi cer berated him for amid piles of rotting leaves. When I was son us that a few extra gamma rays not keeping a closer eye on me. I growing up in the anticommunist fer- get lost in the noise of our dying. bought him a bottle of brandy for the vor of the Eighties, it would have been Background radiation is every- trouble I’d caused. a comfort to know that citizens of the where, always has been. Cosmic rays By the time we reached the village Evil Empire tallied their grocery bills from above. Radon gas from below. of Vesnyanoe, the greenery had swal- with an abacus. Uranium pulsing in the polished lowed the road altogether. Leonid granite vaults of New York City’s turned down a grassy lane that ended 2 Illegal salvage is a cottage industry in the Grand Central Terminal. Fly in an at an abandoned collective farm. Zone. In 2008, Ukraine’s state security airplane, get a CAT scan, and you There were about a dozen outbuild- service arrested several men at a checkpoint receive an extra dose. And then ings made of red brick rising from a for attempting to steal a helicopter used in the Chernobyl cleanup. The men planned there’s the radiation we carry in our sea of meadow grass. Leonid parked to convert the chopper, whose contamina- fl esh and bones, souvenirs from de- on an asphalt pad that used to be the tion level was thirty times the legal limit, cades of nuclear-weapons testing. If floor of a large tractor shed. The into a theme café.

LETTER FROM UKRAINE 45

(41-48)Featherstone Final2cx2.indd_0426 45 4/26/11 8:27 AM I canvassed the rest of the village, eating the apple had made him famous cident, 45,000 people were living wading through stinging nettles and in New York! “I remember some anec- there and enjoying all the modern pushing aside coils of bramble, mind- dote,” Igor said, turning serious for a conveniences the Soviet Union had ful of falling into hidden wells. I felt moment. “One question: You can eat to offer. Now it’s become the Zone’s my way through darkened rooms, apple from Chernobyl?” public face, a monument to life at treading warily on fl oorboards spongy “You can?” I said. the zenith of Soviet power. Its build- with rot. I heard nothing but the “Yes, of course,” he said. “Eat, you ings and streets have been well docu- scrape of my boots and the steady pat- can. But your shit, need bury in ground mented in photographs and films, ter of rain on the leaves outside. Dur- three meter.” and even digitized in loving detail as ing the Zone’s evacuation, people were Igor suggested we check out a big a setting for violent video games told to leave everything behind, that pond behind the barn. He pried open such as Call of Duty 4. they’d be coming back in a few days. a gap in a barbed-wire fence, and we Just beyond the checkpoint into They never did, of course, but few clues slipped through it and crossed a fi eld of the city we drove past a four-foot-tall to their existence remained. Looters coarse grass. The sun came out, and a Jesus hanging from a varnished cruci- had stripped the Zone bare, right down soft breeze silvered the birch and willow fi x, and cruised slowly down a wide to the lightbulbs. In Vesnyanoe and trees shading the shoreline. The bul- boulevard littered with poplar branch- other villages I visited, I found only a rushes clattered. Fish nipped at insects, es. Ten-story apartment towers rose few sticks of broken furniture, a keyless sending ripples over the pond’s lily- amid plazas and parks that had re- accordion, and a hand-carved curry covered surface. verted to meadow and forestland. We brush that would make a quaint deco- “Steve, you come here,” Igor shouted. stopped at a former heavy-equipment ration in some oligarch’s summer da- “Very beautiful picture.” repair facility that Tim suspected of cha. Once, in the drawer of an over- I circled the edge of the pond. harboring a barn-swallow colony. A turned dresser, I discovered a framed There was Igor, standing next to the few birds fl ew in and out of the open collage of black-and-white family por- carcass of a moose calf. The calf lay on mechanic’s bays, but from the ground traits. Many of the photos showed a its side, half submerged. A black water we couldn’t see any roosts. We grim man with blunt features and beetle the size of a tea saucer clawed climbed a fl ight of rickety metal stairs thick hair swept back off his square at its nose, and frogs squatted on its and entered a warren of offi ces and forehead in the style of Stalin. In one bloated rib cage, snapping at fl ies. The locker rooms on the second fl oor. The blurry picture the man was in a coffi n breeze shifted, fi lling our nostrils with detritus of looters cluttered the nar- adorned with fl owers, dressed in a suit, the stench of rotting meat. As we row hallways: overalls, rubber boots, his limp hands propped on his chest in backpedaled toward the barn, Igor gas masks with the fi lters pried out. a gesture of supplication. asked me not to tell our “French Employment records with black-and- When I returned to the collective friends” about the dead moose. I sus- white ID photos glued to them were farm the others were standing around pected that he didn’t want Antoine to spilled across the fl oor of a washroom. waiting for Antoine to fi nish interview- exploit it for propaganda. The exis- We found the skeleton of one swallow ing Tim and Anders. Gennadi opened tence of moose, even a dead one, was trapped inside a double windowpane, his trunk and came at me with a snow more anecdotal proof that the Zone but no evidence of a colony. brush. “Your trousers,” he said, and was a teeming wildlife preserve. On the way back to the hotel, Tim vigorously brushed the backs of my legs. But Antoine didn’t need a moose asked Gennadi to swing by the Cher- I hadn’t noticed that I was streaked to prove his point. He just would nobyl plant. It was close by, and he with a chalky white dust from rubbing have to expand his scope to include wanted me to see it. We pulled up next against plaster walls. some of the Zone’s less photogenic to a monument to Chernobyl victims “Radiation-remove device,” Igor wildlife, like ticks. Later that night, I in the middle of an empty parking lot joked. killed two that I found in my under- and got out to gaze at the sarcophagus. Gennadi dropped the snow brush in wear. And at dinner I brushed a tick It was bigger and more decrepit than a garbage bag to keep it from contami- off Igor’s shoulder, crushing it be- I’d expected, like a battle- worn con- nating the stuff in his trunk. Sasha, the neath a drinking glass. Then Anders crete aircraft carrier run aground. French crew’s guide, leaned against his reached over and pinched one off my Somewhere in its dark, dripping cham- van, smoking a cigarette. His strong shirt. Instead of killing the tick, he bers was a species of mutant black cheekbones and deep-set green eyes dropped it on his plate, folded his fungus that, according to some scien- seemed oddly familiar. arms, and watched it crawl away. tists, possessed the unique ability to “I think I’ve seen that guy on the “Some joys must be feed on radiation. Remote-controlled Internet,” I whispered to Igor, “eating shared,” he said. robots piloted into the heart of the an apple in the Zone. He’s crazy.” sarcophagus have sent back pictures of Igor pointed to his chest. “I took One cloudy afternoon, we went bizarre heaps of corium. A by-product picture,” he said proudly. He translated to Pripyat to scout for barn-swallow of the meltdown, corium is a highly what I’d said to Sasha, who grinned and nesting sites. The city was once a radioactive slag of liquefi ed concrete, told Igor that he wasn’t afraid to eat the workers’ paradise, purpose-built in steel, sand, chunks of the reactor’s apple, that he was still alive, wasn’t he? 1970 for Chernobyl plant staff and graphite moderator, nuclear-fuel rods, And now look—the picture of him their families. At the time of the ac- and God knows what else. Nobody can

46 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2011

(41-48)Featherstone Final2cx2.indd_0426 46 4/26/11 8:27 AM get near the stuff to remove it. I asked In the Zone we were defenseless on the ground. After twenty-fi ve years, what the radiation levels were this against gamma radiation. We could its black branches were still perfectly close to the reactor. Tim took a drag only heed our dosimeters and try to intact, as if it had been dipped in pitch on his cigarette and fl icked the butt minimize exposure. To prevent con- and laid out to dry. In a healthy forest, into the parking lot. tamination from alpha and beta parti- the tree would’ve been a heap of mulch. “Oh, it’s an X-ray kind of day,” he said. cles, we wore rubber boots in the Radiation, Tim and Anders hypothe- “You like go see big fi sh?” Gennadi worst areas. At the end of the day, we sized, had effectively mummifi ed it by inquired. scuffed them in the “clean” grass inhibiting microbial decomposition. “Sure,” I said, and went to grab my along the roadside and wrapped them The dosimeter I’d borrowed was reading camera gear. Gennadi stopped me. in garbage bags before getting into 116 μSv/hr, an order of magnitude “You cannot take picture,” he said. “Is our vehicles. In the fi eld, we ate food higher than anything we’d yet record- forbidden.” that Gennadi had bought in Kiev off ed. I slid the device back into my pock- The parking lot was adjacent to the a bath towel that he spread across the et and jogged to catch up with Tim. reactor’s cooling pond. I’d read some- trunk of his old Ford sedan. We In our white Tyvek suits, we trekked thing about giant catfi sh living in it, washed our hands constantly, and we across clearings where nothing grew some as big as torpedoes. We stood on never touched our faces while outside, except rubbery patches of lichen the a rail trestle over the pond, tearing at least not consciously. color of overcooked peas. The conifers apart bread slices left over from lunch. On our last day in the Zone, we re- began to take on shapes like poorly The bread bobbed around for a while, turned to the Red Forest to gather oak cultivated bonsai shrubs. Stunted by white blobs dissolving into the black leaves for an experiment. It was cold radiation, they lacked symmetry, and water. Nothing happened. and drizzling. Tim opened a box of their gnarled branches twisted in all “Now is cold weather, and wind,” disposable Tyvek suits, the kind worn directions except up. Consulting his Gennadi said. “When is very calm, big by hazmat workers. This time we were GPS, Tim pushed through a dense wil- fi s h c o m i n g .” going into the “real” Red Forest, he low thicket and halted at the edge of a Then, in a series of lazy splashes, explained. We set off across a meadow, swamp. To reach the woods on the the bread chunks began to disappear, skirting burial mounds, our legs swish- other side we’d have to bushwhack one by one. It was too overcast to see ing in unison. In the forest I recognized around it. We zigzagged over the knob- the catfi sh, but I could imagine their piles of debris from the last time I was by terrain, hopping from one tussock of sluggish bodies sliding down to the there, but I soon lost track of where I sedge to another. Just as we gained the murky bottom of the cooling pond and was. The pine trees grew closer, dim- other side of the swamp, the Tyvek settling there in a puff of ming the watery gray light filtering bootie covering my right foot snagged radioactive sediment. down from the needled canopy. The on a willow branch and tore complete- inert silence of the forest was occasion- ly away. My foot plunged past the ankle There are three basic types of ally broken by a crow’s raspy croak or into the cold brown water. ionizing radiation: alpha, beta, and the shrill whistle of a fl ycatcher. An “Fuck!” I shouted. gamma. Like X-rays, gamma rays are hour passed before we found what could “You’re wearing boots, right?” Tim very high-frequency photons. They only generously be defi ned as an oak said, looking over his shoulder. I lifted my pass easily through most materials, tree. Three feet tall and lacking a cen- foot to show him my dripping running including flesh. Gamma rays strip tral trunk, it resembled a bush. We shoe. His eyes widened. “Oh,” he said. away electrons from atoms, disrupt- stripped off the few yellowish leaves “Yeah,” I said. “Sneakers.” But that ing cellular chemistry. In high doses, clinging to its spindly branches, stuffed was only half the story. The previous day they can destroy tissue, which is the them in a Ziploc bag, and moved on. I’d stepped on a large-bore trocar at an principle behind cancer radiothera- The pine forest yielded to open abandoned veterinary clinic. It punched py. Unlike gamma rays, the other meadow. A crosshatch pattern of through the sole of my rubber boot and two types of radiation, alpha and scorched trees lay in the rough grass, sank deep into the ball of my right foot, beta, are composed of subatomic par- and more blackened trunks stood out which had throbbed painfully ever ticles with mass. They don’t travel like rotten teeth amid stands of white since. That was my excuse for slogging nearly as far as gamma rays, and they birch saplings. These were remnants of through a radioactive swamp in a pair of can’t penetrate anything much the “real” Red Forest, a large tract of running shoes—comfort. I mentioned thicker than a sheet of paper. But if evergreens adjacent to the Chernobyl none of this to Tim. I lurched behind you inhale a mote of radioactive reactor that got hit by the worst of the him through the woods like a zombie, dust, eat contaminated food, or ab- fallout. (Almost overnight, the ever- trying not to put too much weight on my sorb radionuclides through an open greens died and their needles turned injured foot, the ripped Tyvek pant leg wound, alpha or beta radiation can orange, hence the name.) Soviet liqui- fl apping behind me. We found another do a lot of damage. Lodged in your dators razed the forest, sprayed the area oak tree on a greasy patch of dirt and lung, a molecule of plutonium, which with a polymer to keep radioactive dust leaves that had been torn up by wild is a powerful beta emitter, will ravage from blowing around, and replanted it. boar. Kneeling on a blue tarp, Tim nearby cells until it’s flushed out The natural forces of decay and regen- scraped fungus from the oak’s branches weeks or years later (if at all) through eration had been subverted. I stopped with a trowel. My dosimeter gave a read- natural biochemical processes. next to a thirty-foot Scots pine resting ing of 90 μSv/hr. I squatted down and

LETTER FROM UKRAINE 47

(41-48)Featherstone Final2cx2.indd_0426 47 4/26/11 8:28 AM switched the selector to read alpha and the numbers of critters decreased. Mikh- the open door, cradling a swallow in beta radiation, in addition to gamma. ilivschyna, by contrast, hummed with his palm. The bird rested on its back The reading shot above three digits. everyday life. Dragonfl ies, robber fl ies, for a few seconds, getting its bearings, “113 and counting,” I said. and iridescent blue butterfl ies fi lled the and then disappeared in a metallic “Looks like you found yourself a hot air. Fat honeybees droned among clus- blue fl ash. Smiling crookedly, Anders particle,” Tim said. ters of purple and pink wildfl owers. In glanced at his wristwatch and called “125, 126 . . . ” As the number ticked the forest, dozens of bird species hidden out the time to Tim. upward, I did the math in my head: 600 in the dark understory contributed Along with Gennadi and two other times the radiation level at the hotel in chirps and warbles. Hunting for oak Ukrainian volunteers, I was entrusted Chernobyl; 1,400 times the background leaves, we came to a clearing that had with the delicate tasks of counting eggs level of my home in upstate New York. been trampled by wild boar. Tim and disentangling the birds from the Sitting here for forty-fi ve minutes was scooped up a handful of crumbly black nets. I was pretty good at it by then. equal to getting a chest X-ray. soil. Lots of turnover here, he said, refer- Once, three swallows fl ew into the net “Probably a few molecules of pluto- ring to the high rate of decomposition. at the same time. I slid two of them nium,” Tim said. I imagined comic-book Towering over us was a giant oak whose into a linen sack and hung it on a nail. rays of green light shooting through me branches started fifty feet above the The third swallow had black Sharpie and felt a vertiginous tingle in my legs. ground. We’d need a cherry picker to smudges on its white underbelly, mark- Given the radioactive baptism I received collect any leaves. Tim slapped the oak’s ing it as a returnee. I ducked under the back at the swamp, it was probably a massive trunk. “It’s the same basic com- net and stepped into the courtyard. good idea to avoid any unnecessary ex- position,” he said. “The Chernobyl area The bird felt weightless in my hand, posure. I leapt to my feet. Tim laughed is just a much simpler version.” like a sachet of dry twigs wrapped in and flapped his arms like a chicken. The environmental impact of fall- tissue paper. It cocked its head as if to “Bawk-bawk-bawk!” he cackled. out from the damaged reactors at Fu- ask whether I was going to let it live. I We left the Zone for good later that kushima will take a long time to assess, tossed it into the air. The swallow afternoon. The sun broke out from be- but it’s safe to say that it won’t begin to dipped toward the ground, righted it- hind the clouds as we approached the approach the level of damage wrought self, then hurtled into the sky to join last checkpoint at Dytyatky. The check- by Chernobyl. Towns may have to be the others wheeling and chattering point guard walked around Gennadi’s abandoned for years while Japanese au- above the courtyard. car, holding a wand attached to a large thorities fi gure out how best to decon- As they processed the last few birds, metal box. For a moment I thought he taminate them, but there will be no Tim and Anders were in a buoyant might detect my wet sneakers and pants, Japanese version of the Red Forest, no mood. They debated where we should which were balled up inside a garbage partial-albino barn swallows. The pine celebrate that night, their banter oscil- bag in the trunk. But the gate opened, trees will grow straight and true. The lating between Anders’s droll misan- and we drove the two-lane road toward birds will sing from their branches. thropy and Tim’s chummy good humor. Kiev. Babushkas sat in the shade, selling And fallow spinach fields dusted by Anders reached into a linen sack, strawberries and spiky bunches of the cesium- 137 and strontium-90 will buzz pulled out a swallow, and laid it on the herb sweet fl ag in preparation for Holy with the rough music of cicadas, even table. Its tiny black feet were curled Trinity Day, when Ukrainians remem- if there are no people against its downy belly. “Dead?” Tim ber their dead. Gennadi stopped the car around to hear it. asked. Anders nodded. Too many birds in Mikhilivschyna, a large tract of forest in one bag, he mumbled. The blame fell thirty miles from Chernobyl that Tim I accompanied Tim and Anders on on me, but there was no way to tell and Anders used as a control area (back- our last day together to a dairy farm whether it was my bird or one of the ground radiation there is only .03 μSv/ in Voronkov. The swallow colony volunteers’. I began to explain how hr). Tim always packed extra shoes, and there serves as a control group. They there weren’t enough sacks for all the he lent me a worn pair of black Reeboks. sat at a battered table inside a barn, birds, but the contempt on Anders’s I bent down to tie them and noticed a surrounded by Ziploc bags stuffed face stopped me cold. bunch of red ants tugging at a molted with glass vials, boxes of microscope “I didn’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.” cicada shell. I couldn’t recall ever seeing slides, and a plastic cup of Nemiroff “Well,” Anders said, and cleared his a single ant or hearing a cicada’s buzz vodka that they used to sterilize the throat. He didn’t fi nish his sentence. But when I was in the Zone. Then a grass- thermometer. Tim filled out work- I knew what he was thinking. We owed hopper ricocheted off my shin. sheets and labeled vials filled with the bird more than the casual cruelty of “Is it me, or are there more bugs blood and sperm. Anders handled the our ignorance. Anders scooped up the around here?” I asked Tim. birds, playing them like a concert pia- dead swallow and pinched its wing tips “You noticed?” he said. “It’s pretty nist. Every movement of his fi ngers— together. He fastened them with a met- striking.” tapping beaks, spreading wings, jab- al clip attached to a digital scale by a Two months earlier he and Anders bing lancets—was calibrated to cause metal rod, just as he had done with all had published the fi rst extensive study the minimum amount of discomfort. the other birds. Then he held up the of insects in the Zone, and their fi ndings By the time he reached the fi nal pro- scale and called out the swallow’s mirrored their work on bird populations. cedure, to gauge a bird’s stress reac- weight, as the swallow dangled from the Basically, as radiation levels increased, tion, he seemed relieved. He stood by rod in perverse imitation of fl ight. ■

48 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2011

(41-48)Featherstone Final2cx2.indd_0426 48 4/26/11 8:28 AM