Into the Forbidden Zone by William T. Vollmann Page A

is close to the plant, but they say it is not just distance but also geography,” he explained. Suddenly we reached a yellow signboard, no more impressive than any sidewalk restaurant’s, whose red letters warned: DANGER: ENTRY IS RESTRICTED 10 KILOMETERS FROM HERE. We had entered the voluntary evacuation zone. From here on, the road was quite empty. The next village was virtually lightless, except for the yellow windows of three sidewalk vending machines from which no one had yet pulled the plugs. Another sign for Futaba and an indication that we were still on Highway 288 separated us from the following village. Now it had become nearly pitch dark, although I could infrequently make out the silhouettes of forest ridges.
    I told the driver that this excursion was very interesting. He chuckled: “I am ready to cooperate as much as possible, because anyway I don’t have much longer to live.”
    There came another winding stretch. Soon we would arrive at Miyako Oji  (twenty kilometers from the reactor), beyond which rose a mountain that would, I hoped, protect us from beta particles and gamma rays. I inquired whether there might be any legend relative to Miyako Oji; the driver replied that there was not. “What’s popular in this vicinity is beetles for the kids. They produce them here.” As a matter of fact, the interpreter had once purchased a pet beetle for her sons (although whether or not it came from Miyako Oji she did not know); it failed to thrive, I am sorry to say. When we turned right at the junction for Inaki, it was quite dark. “Most of them are gone, I guess,” said the driver.
    And so we came to the inner ring, where tall signs with black and red letters interrupted the road, the prefecture proclaiming that further travel was forbidden while the police merely announced that it was restricted. In the darkness beyond lurked a police riot bus, empty or not. Since there was nothing to see and the hazards (including perhaps arrest) were unknown, I could not in good conscience ask the driver and the interpreter to go any farther that night, brave though they were. We did take a spin through Miyako Oji, whose houses seemed intact but dark. A lonely white dog trotted up to the taxi, looking up at us hopefully; as we continued on our way it darted crazily back and forth. The driver remarked that the evacuation centers such as Big Palette did not allow any pets, which therefore had to be left behind. Should I have tried to take it to some animal shelter in Koriyama, if there were such a place? Who knew how contaminated the creature was?
    “It’s the first time that I’ve seen this here,” said the driver. “It’s like a ghost town. About twenty years ago in Koriyama, on Christmas Eve a cable fell, and there was a blackout, so black! And this is the first time since then.”
    As we began to drive away from the reactor I pulled my mask off and instantly tasted dust in my throat, which made me anxious, because what if the dosimeter were lying? It was all I had to go on, really.
    The old driver said, “What’s the most scary around here is the wind that comes from the sea. That’s when the radiation comes. In summer, that’s when it comes.”
    A quarter-hour later, at eight o’clock, the dosimeter clocked 2.5 millirems.

THEY DID IT FOR THE NATION
     
    ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, a Sunday, which began chilly and breezy while the dosimeter displayed its predicted 2.6 millirems and the hotel television explained that the overflow trench for the contaminated reactor would soon itself overflow, we set out for the danger zone once more. As before, I wore my ball cap (a convenient resting place for airborne beta particles), my house-paint-spotted old raincoat (quite inappropriate for appearance-conscious Japan) whose virtues were its hood and its expendability—this magnificent accessory was intended to go over a disposable poncho whose sleeveless armholes I would seal with masking tape around the raincoat’s