Chernobyl

I went to Chernobyl when I was a kid; we drove through the swamp from my family’s farm. I remember sitting in the back of my grandmother’s Gorky, a GAZ-24, and the smell of cigarettes, borsch, and kompot. I was sipping a bottle of homemade brew from my right hand and cradling the mud ball destined for my cousin’s head in my left. I saw some deer along the road and then some wolves and then a bear and a couple of foxes. This could have all been the machinations of a young and very bored mind.

We were going to go see Pripyat. My uncle knew a guy who worked as one of the guides, and we got access when no one else was around. Pripyat is cool. My friends today think it’s just a bunch of empty buildings, but that’s what they miss about what it really shows. It’s a preserved relic of a bygone time when everything was collapsing but all you could do was hold on. Chernobyl operated for years after the disaster because power was so scarce that the other reactors couldn’t be turned off without causing brownouts in Kyiv. I miss those years of simple adventures and stale, shitty post-Soviet beer, but at least now the animals can play and it can all be left to decay.