When you get older, you often find yourself thinking about your childhood a lot. It’s natural. We remember when times were simpler. We bask in the tales of our youth that have grown impossibly out of proportion--like when we could drink like champs, stay up all night, whoop anyone’s ass in pool, or charm the pants off anyone of the opposite sex at will. Or at least imagine that we could. But sometimes, we find ourselves doing what we, as kids, would never have done back then. Reflecting. That sober second thought not only relegated to the boring stiffs in the Senate, we find ourselves mulling over things we thought we had forgotten, or maybe chose to ignore. Like when we were cruel to kids in the playground. Snatched something from the corner store. Lied and got away with it.
We also face our fears. Like any kid, I had my own in spades. I would never have admitted it, but I was afraid of snakes, heights, water over my head—hell, I was afraid to admit it if I had a crush on someone. Most of us are afraid of getting embarrassed, and I was no different, except I somehow developed an unusual degree of it. I’ll tell you what I was most afraid of though, and it may sound silly. I was afraid of nuclear bombs. No kidding, the thought of mushroom clouds engulfing the world around me was absolutely terrifying in the eighties when I was in my early elementary grades. As an astute observer of world events, history and geography, also unusual for my age, I naturally stumbled upon the topic when learning about World War II. The fact that one single bomb could instantaneously disintegrate whole cities absolutely scared the crap out of me, and why wouldn’t it? That was a huge concept: an unknown enemy could fly silently overhead, and with the drop of a button wipe out my whole family, all my friends, and everything I understood and held dear just like that. Children only have a small scope of personal relevance, and if you don’t understand all the politics, there’s no small wonder how a small child could feel utterly helpless to such an unfathomable terror. Mom and Dad couldn’t help me in that case. Hiding under the blankets wouldn’t help much either.
Fast-forward to the ‘me’ of today. Two university degrees and many more years of world experience and understanding, notwithstanding the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and my fear of The Bomb has been tempered considerably, but now I find myself very interested in nuclear energy, and the consequences of it in our world today. I don’t get into the scientific details, interesting as that may be, and I don’t pretend to be pro or con, because there are indeed both sides to the argument. When accidents happen, such as the scary triple-threat earthquake-meets-tsunami- meets-nuclear-melt-down at Fukushima in Japan last year, we all sit up and take notice. For me, the shadow of a long dormant childhood fear fell over me again. I started to do some reading. I found myself reading about Chernobyl.
I was ten years old when the Chernobyl disaster happened. At a time when the threat of nuclear war was plausible, an accident of that magnitude sent shivers up everyone’s spines. The nuclear power plant near Chernobyl, of the then-Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, situated near the border of modern-day Belarus, suffered a series of explosions during what was meant to be routine testing, releasing a massive cloud of radioactive dust and debris into the high atmosphere. Like a volcanic explosion, the dust carried on wind currents over hundreds of kilometers, but the worst of the fallout naturally settled in the surrounding environs, specifically a small city built nearby in the 1970s as an industrial town for workers of the plant and their families. It is called Pripyat.
While doing some research for a book I am writing, I decided to look up Pripyat as a modern example of a ghost town. You usually think of ghost towns in the Wild West, or in the Canadian north around the Gold Rush in the Yukon. As it turns out, people abandon cities and towns for lots of reasons. It just happens that few of these evacuations have occurred as the result of a nuclear disaster, until Chernobyl happened in any case. You can look up the photos for yourself if you like, but I’ll caution you, it’s like picking up the photo album of a family of which no one is alive to guide you through the pages. On April 26, it will have been 26 years since the explosion and subsequent evacuation. When they made the people of Pripyat leave, they gave them mere minutes, and commanded them to leave everything behind. Officials feared that the more people lugged behind them, the more contamination they unwittingly would drag along. So, what you see in photos of Pripyat after the explosion are snapshots of 50 000 lives on pause, just as they were in the Ukrainian SSR in 1986. In the school, there are desks with books still open. Dolls are laying on beds, most with fabric and mattresses still intact, dinner dishes still on the table, shoes and socks laying out of place on the floor. The streets are empty, with cars parked randomly, asphalt and concrete cracked and split with weeds and shrubs pressing though. There is a Farris wheel in an amusement park sitting perfectly still, the specters of scores of children only an echo remaining around the slowly decaying, rusty structures. And in the years since the city was abandoned, adventure-seeking tourists have seeped back in here and there, leaving graffiti, often in the form of people’s shadows along the sides of buildings and walls. It is truly a haunting sight. Somehow, I find myself wanting to visit it for myself. Call it a case of me wanting to confront my fears, like when you feel you need to touch the hand of a loved one at an open-casket funeral.
The other day, I found a really neat video on YouTube about the city of Pripyat, and more specifically the countryside on the outskirts of town. There were also a number of small villages that had to be evacuated too, and when you see those in the videos, they look much more like the ghost towns in your mind. If you didn’t know better, the little hamlets of wooden cottage-like structures with brick work and lush pastures surrounding them could just as well have been the remnants of a boom town gone bust, like Dawson City or Murdochville. The documentary followed some animals that were thriving in what had accidentally become a nature refuge. Abandoned cats had gone feral, only to have thrived on their own, now masters of the homes in which they once had owners. Three and four generations later, life appears to be moving on. They have no idea that their bodies contain alarming levels of radiation, but otherwise, human influence is nowhere to be found. Birds, fish, insects, and even large mammals like bears, boars and wolves all seem to not only have survived, but thrived. Slowly, the Earth has begun to swallow the last vestiges of human evidence, and Nature has begun to renew what was once stained.
It isn’t lost on me that this anniversary, 26 years on the 26th to be exact, happens very close to the Easter weekend. What does Easter even mean? Good Friday is observed as the day (roughly anyway) that Jesus was hung on a cross until he died. He was removed, placed in a tomb, and presumably he woke up and started to walk among the living again on Easter Sunday when his followers found his tomb open and empty. Talk about your open-casket funeral. The greater story in all this is that Jesus had performed his latest and greatest miracle, showing us that with the strongest of faith, we can rise up and become one with God, through the example and sacrifice of one person. When you aren’t dressing it up in flowery church-like metaphor, it sounds a bit contrived. Then you look at Pripyat. Here is a city and countryside that was rendered uninhabitable. The radiation poison will be there for centuries. Even the Earth itself seemed broken beyond repair. Yet, there is still life. For the flora and fauna that have unnervingly thumbed their collective noses at humanity, this Friday isn’t just Good Friday. It’s a whole generation of them. We all like to think that God is constant, unwavering, perpetual. Pripyat proved that it is possible for people to defeat God, but it wouldn’t happen that day. Sure, he might have been on his knees for a while, but he hung on. Nature had other plans for that place. It is doomed to be a repository for the very worst in human technological advancement, but it is overcoming it faster than we could have imagined. In April, 1986, we ate sumptuously from the tree of knowledge, and as we rushed out, God booting our arses and cuffing us upside the head as we went, we never imagined how the garden would right itself in our absence.
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