Dorothy Wall on “My Grandson Wants to Go to Chernobyl”
Naturally, my poem started with my grandson, inveterate champion of animals large and small, his comment, off-hand and serious, when I told him about an article I’d read on the rebounding wildlife in Chernobyl: “I’d like to go there.” He’s drawn to animals, also the unusual, the intriguing. What could be more compelling than a wild place denuded of people, drifting backwards in time to its original state, given over to animals.
Early memories of my grandson, at 3 or 4, are of him climbing on a small stump and lunging over the edge of the compost bin, head-first, to get at the delectable worms and crawly things. Thrilled! Or heaving aside our garden rocks to discover worms and salamanders beneath, his up-reached hand showing me his wriggly treasures. At 4, he came racing to our front door, and when I opened, announced, “I’m an entomologist!” a word he’d just learned.
The curiosity and freshness of a child, the regression to a pre-human state of nature at Chernobyl, the birth of a poem–all kin on some level. I read what I could about the processes going on at Chernobyl in our absence, human absence. After the nuclear power plant explosion on April 26, 1986, an area called the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, 1,600 square miles, was sealed off to people. Villages abandoned, left to the weather, power lines sagging. But wildlife thrived. Scientists studying the area were taken by surprise at the degree of regeneration, the growing populations of wolves, brown bear, lynx, beaver, owls, eagles, hawks, bats, swallows. Even swans swimming in a radioactive cooling pond. An incredible testimony to adaptation and survival in the face of our destruction, the speed with which nature finds new opportunity. This is what my poem celebrates and marvels at, the imperative to live and multiply. And the remarkable, sobering fact that radioactivity has had a less lethal effect on wildlife than human presence.