Free The Best American Travel Writing 2012 by Jason Wilson

government and apparently free of any unusual health problems.
    We’re in the tiny village of Upachich, deep in the zone. There’s Ivan himself, dressed in a sleeveless shirt with only one button and a pair of trousers that have seen so much yard work he could be a man from any of the past few centuries. When we met him half an hour ago, he had just finished gathering up his small field of hay with a pitchfork, building the kind of hayrick Monet and Van Gogh loved to paint. There’s Ivan Ivanovich, his son, who was helping him, with designer stubble and a wristwatch that place him somewhere in the past few decades. The two of them are still dripping and red-faced from their labors. And there’s young Ivan’s mother, Dasha, wearing a timeless Russian babushka headscarf and a subtle, sublime smile.
    It feels like we haven’t walked into a home so much as a story by Gogol. Corncobs are drying on a line. Indoors, there’s a big stove with a built-in shelf on top for sleeping on in winter, buckets of potatoes standing on the floor, scraps for the hens, a basin with its own cistern you fill up from the well.
    Ivan the son is busy wiping down the table, spreading out sheets of newspaper for all the foodstuffs: eggs from chickens pecking under our feet, tomatoes from the garden, bread, a bowl of tiny forest raspberries, a whole dried river fish, crystallized and orange from its time smoking in a homemade stove. It’s all local and it all looks great, but most tempting of all are the mulberries hanging above my head. They resemble elongated blackberries, and there’s something about the way they’re growing among the elegant oval leaves of the tree that makes them irresistible. I’m dying to reach up and grab one, but they frighten me. We’re only 10 miles from the power station.
    Whatever you do, friends advised before we came, don’t eat anything that grows there.
    The older Ivan comes out of the house carrying a glass jar full of clear fluid in his trembling hand.
    â€œVodka,” someone declares appreciatively.
    That’ll be safe, I think to myself: shop-bought.
    â€œNo, no. Samogon,” Sergey explains, eyeing the jar with a gleeful twinkle. “Better than vodka.”
    Samogon?
    â€œHomemade.”
    My heart sinks. The local moonshine. But before I can ask if it’s really safe to drink, we’re clinking glasses, wetting our fingers, and I cautiously take a sip.
    â€œYou’re not exactly drinking as you should,” Sergey notes, suggesting that I chug.
    â€œClean—it must be clean!” declares one of the Ivans.
    Sergey is already slamming down his empty glass. What can I do but oblige?
    Conversation begins to flow. Sergey starts expatiating on the advantages of village life. “When you want make business, make networking, you live in the city. But here, there is natural food, for example this samogon, it is so good for you.”
    I’m far from sure, but the dad gets up and shows me round the garden. He wants me to see where the tomatoes grow, and the grapes and vegetables, and where he finds the root he uses in his special medicinal vodka. Swaying, puffing, he pulls up a little plant, then lumbers off to the pond to rinse it: a lump of ginseng.
    A couple of samogon shots later, my fears have abated and I’m tucking in like the rest. The fish is so smoky my eyes water, and soon my hands are stained blood-red from all the mulberries I’ve eaten. A bird starts singing. Flakes of sunshine shift over us. The hay is in, there’s a pig fattening for Easter, and the oats are almost ready for the scythe. If this isn’t rustic life at its timeless, bibulous best, what is?
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    Most everyone in Chernobyl displays a predictable bravado about living with radiation. In the relative cool of the evening, the workers on their two-week shifts gather outside the guesthouse to sit on tree stumps and chew the fat, drink beer, smoke