condition of nature is returning to what it was before people. Moos-
es. Wild boar. Wolves. Rare kinds of horses.’’
This is the colossal irony of Chernobyl: Because it is the site of an
enormous ecological catastrophe, this region has been for decades
now basically void of human life; and because it is basically void of
human life, it is eff ectively a vast nature preserve. To enter the Zone,
in this sense, is to have one foot in a prelapsarian paradise and the
other in a postapocalyptic wasteland.
Not far past the border, we stopped and walked a little way into a
wooded area that had once been a village. We paused in a clearing to
observe a large skull, a scattered miscellany of bones.
‘‘Moose,’’ Igor said, prodding the skull gently with the toe of a sneak-
er. ‘‘Skull of moose,’’ he added, by way of elaboration.
Vika directed our attention toward a low building with a collapsed
roof, a fallen tree partly obscuring its entrance. She swept a hand
before her in a stagy fl ourish. ‘‘It is a hot day today,’’ she said. ‘‘Who
would like to buy an ice cream?’’ She went on to clarify that this had
once been a shop, in which it would have been possible to buy ice
cream, among other items. Three decades is a long time, of course, but
it was still impressive how comprehensively nature had seized control
of the place in that time. In these ruins, it was no easier to imagine
people standing around in jeans and sneakers eating ice cream than it
would be in the blasted avenues of Pompeii to imagine people in togas
eating olives. It was astonishing to behold how quickly we humans
became irrelevant to the business of nature.
And this fl ourishing of the wilderness was at the expense of the
decay of man-made things. Strictly speaking, visitors are forbidden
to enter any of Pripyat’s buildings, many of which are in various-
ly advanced states of decay and structural peril, some clearly ready
to collapse at any moment. Igor and Vika could in theory lose their
licenses to enter the Zone if they were caught taking tourists into
buildings. It had been known to happen, Igor said, that guides had
their permits revoked. This had put them in something of a double
bind, he explained, on account of the proliferation in recent years of
rival outfi ts off ering trips to the Zone. If they didn’t take customers
into the buildings — up the stairways to the rooftops, into the former
homes and workplaces and schoolrooms of Pripyat — some other
guides would, and what people wanted more than anything in visiting
the place was to enter the intimate spaces of an abandoned world.
One of the Swedish men who accounted for about a third of the
group’s number asked whether any visitors had been seriously injured
or killed while exploring the abandoned buildings.
‘‘Not yet,’’ Igor said, a reply more ominous than he may
have intended.
He went on to clarify that the fate of the small but thriving tour-
ism business hung in the balance and depended, by consensus,
on the nationality of the first person to be injured or killed on a
tour. If a Ukrainian died while exploring one of the buildings, he
said, fine, no problem, business
as usual. If a European, then the
police would have to immediate-
ly clamp down on tour guides
bringing people into buildings.
But the worst-case scenario was,
of course, an American get-
ting killed or seriously injured.
That, he quipped, would mean
an immediate cessation of the
whole enterprise.
‘‘American gets hurt,’’ he said,
‘‘no more tours in Zone. Finished.’’he tour made its way to the edge of the city and to the abandoned
fairground we’d seen on the minibus that morning — on the
‘‘Top Gear’’ segment and the music videos. This was Pripyat’s
most recognizable landmark, its most readily legible symbol of
decayed utopia. Our little group wandered around the fairground,
taking in the cinematic vista of catastrophe: the Ferris wheel,
the unused bumper cars overgrown with moss, the swing boats
half-decayed by rust.
The park’s grand opening, Vika said, had been scheduled for the
International Workers’ Day celebrations on May 1, 1986, the week
following the disaster, and the park had therefore never actually
been used. Beside her, Igor held aloft the dosimeter, explaining
that the radiation levels were by and large quite safe, but that cer-
tain small areas within the fairground were high: the moss on the
bumper cars, for example, contained a complex cocktail of toxic
substances, having absorbed and retained more radiation than
surrounding surfaces. Though I can’t say I considered it, moss in
general was not to be ingested; the same was true of all kinds of
fungi, for their spongelike assimilation of radioactive material.
Wild dogs and cats, too, can present a potential risk, because they
roamed freely in parts of the Zone that had never been decontami-
nated eff ectively, and they carried radioactive particles in their fur.
I leaned against the railings of the bumper car enclosure and
then, recalling having read a warning somewhere about the perils
of sitting on and leaning against things in the Zone, quickly relo-
cated myself away from the rusting metal. I looked at the others,
almost all of whom were engaged in taking photographs of the
fairground. The only exception was Dylan, who was on the phone
again, apparently talking someone through the game plan for a
new investment round. I was struck for the fi rst time by the dis-
proportionate maleness of the group: out of a dozen or so tourists,
only one was female, a young German woman who was at present
assisting her prodigiously pierced boyfriend in operating a drone
for purposes of aerial cinematography.
There seemed to be a general implicit agreement that nobody
would appear in anyone else’s shots, because of a mutual interest in
the photographic representation of Pripyat as a maximally desolate
place, an impression that would inevitably be compromised by
the presence of other tourists taking photos in the backgrounds
of your own. On a whim, I opened up Instagram on my phone —
the 3G coverage in the Zone had, against all expectation, been so
far uniformly excellent — and entered ‘‘Pripyat’’ into the search
box and then scrolled through a cascading plenitude of aesthet-
ically uniform photos of the Ferris wheel, the bumper cars, the
swing boats, along with a great many photos employing these as
dramatic backgrounds for selfi es. A few of these featured goofy
expressions and sexy pouts and bad-ass sneers, but a majority were
appropriately solemn or contemplative in attitude. The message,
by and large, seemed to be this: I have been here, and I have felt
the melancholy weight of this poisoned place.
Pripyat presents the adventurous tourist with a spectacle of
abandonment more vivid than anywhere else on Earth, a fever
dream of a world gone void. To walk the imposing squares of the
planned city, its broad avenues cracked and overgrown with veg-
etation, is in one sense to wander the ruins of a collapsed utopian
project, a vast crumbling monument to an abandoned past. And yet
it is also to be thrust forward into an immersive simulation of theI was being
confronted, I realized,
with an exaggerated
manifestation ofmy own disquiet about
making this
trip in the first place.39
T
P. The New York Times Magazine“
“