I'm not sure whether this is an affliction shared by others of my age in the "internet" generation, but whenever I hear about something I don't know about or understand, I feel compelled to investigate it (possibly a result of my reading plenty of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a youngster) until my internal hard drive and imagination is fully sated and sleepy from the overzealous consumption of information. As a perfect example of this gnawing hunger for information, I recently discovered Chernobyl. Now this may come as a surprise to those of you who were actually alive for this incident, but I had only been dimly aware of the name... a shadowy presence of disaster, until I recently played the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl. After exiting the game, I immediately called up my friends Firefox and Google for an intimate discussion on the subject. And what I discovered was that the makers of the game didn't have to stretch their imaginations very far to come up with a nightmarish and moody environment in which to place the storyline. The idea of a community being abandoned by it's residents is certainly not a new one. Ghost towns in western America are visited with frequency... and their shells are admired with a sense of history and poetic loss. In reading about Chernobyl however, I was stuck by a different sort of sensation; one of fear, anxiety and immediate loss. To quote wikipedia: "In order to reduce baggage, the residents were told that the evacuation would be temporary, lasting approximately three days. As a result, Pripyat still contains personal belongings." Can you imagine? This would be akin to a modern day Mount Vesuvius; "hey, the mountain is about to explode, but we'll let you back to get all your shit in a couple days", after which you find that all your knicknacks are buried with the rest of Pompeii under a million tons of ash and rock. Oh, and by the way, you aren't going to be able to live there for another 600 years, sorry. It's hard to imagine, let alone empathize with, the people who have lived around disasters like these, but it's not as if this is an isolated incident... It's just that in the case of Chernobyl, the result can be attributed to human error.
Here are a couple of interesting links relating to this post:
Photos of the area
An interesting Chernobyl poem
1 comment:
Most of the personal belongings from Pripyat are actually long gone - stolen by looters throughout the years. School rooms still have a lot of desks, books and papers scattered about.
I personally visited the Chernobyl area for two days in June 2006 with a friend and former resident of Pripyat. We toured the Chernobyl Plant (including the Reactor 4 control room), several of the abandoned villages, and Pripyat. I have posted a photo journal of my trip at:
My Journey to Chernobyl: 20 Years After the Disaster
Post a Comment