them. I wanted to see what could not otherwise be seen, to inspect
the remains of the human era. The Zone presented this prospect in a
manner more clear and stark than any other place I was aware of. It
seemed to me that to travel there would be to look upon the end of
the world from the vantage point of its aftermath. It was my under-
standing, my conceit, that I was catching a glimpse of the future. I
did not then understand that this future, or something like it, was
closer than it appeared at the time. I did not understand that before
long the idea of the Zone would advance outward from the realm of
abstraction to encompass my experience of everyday life, that cities
across the developed world would be locked down in an eff ort to
suppress the spread of a lethal new virus, an enemy as invisible and
insidious in its way as radiation and as capable of hollowing out the
substance of society overnight.
The minibus slowed as we approached the checkpoint marking
the outer perimeter of the Zone. Two policemen emerged from a
small building, languidly smoking, emanating the peculiar lassitude of
armed border guards. Igor reached out and plucked the microphone
from its nook in the dashboard.
‘‘Dear comrades,’’ he said. ‘‘We are now approaching the Zone.
Please hand over passports for inspection.’’
ou feel immediately the force of the contradiction. You feel, contra-
dictorily, both drawn in and repelled by this force. Everything you
have learned tells you that this is an aff licted place, a place that is
hostile and dangerous to life. And yet the dosimeter, which Igor held
up for inspection as we stood by the bus on the far side of the border,
displayed a level of radiation lower than the one recorded outside
the McDonald’s in Kyiv where we had boarded the bus earlier that
morning. Apart from some hot spots, much of the Zone has relatively
low levels of contamination. The outer part of the 30 Kilometer Zone
— the radius of abandoned land around the reactor itself — is hardly
a barren hellscape.
‘‘Possible to use this part of Zone again, humans today,’’ Igor said.
Someone asked why, in that case, it wasn’t used.
‘‘Ukraine is very big country. Luckily we can spare this land to
use as buff er between highly contaminated part of Zone and rest of
Ukraine. Belarus not so lucky.’’
Immediately you are struck by the strange beauty of the place,
the unchecked exuberance of nature fi nally set free of its crowning
achievement, its problem child. And everywhere you look, you are
reminded of how artifi cial the distinction is between the human
and the natural world: that everything we do, even our destruction
of nature, exists within the context of nature. The road you walk on
is fi ssured with the purposeful pressure of plant stems from below,
the heedless insistence of life breaking forth, continuing on. It is
midsummer, and the day is hot but with the sibilant whisper of a
cool breeze in the leaves and butterfl ies everywhere, superintend-
ing the ruins. It is all quite lovely, in its uncanny way: The world,
everywhere, protesting its innocence.
‘‘All the fi elds are slowly turning into forest,’’ Igor said. ‘‘TheIgor,
a Chernobyl
tour guide,
measuring
the ground
for
radiation.
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Photograph by Mark Neville for The New York TimesY
P. The Voyages Issue