I could imagine laying down a blanket and sitting for a while. Spring growth everywhere. Birds overhead. I was not entirely sure where we were. I stayed mostly out of the loop, only paying attention when we stopped to regroup, and otherwise just kept moving with everyone else. I assumed we were taking a quick detour near Yanov, maybe even heading to Yanov station before moving on to the city.
The trees were dense enough that it was hard to keep track of direction, and I had already stopped trying to place us on a map based on what I knew of the Zone around Yanov. I was stepping over roots and uneven ground, following the same narrow gaps in the paths ahead of me. It felt like one continuous stretch of forest, no different from the rest of Red Forest, though the radiation readings were lower than I expected.
When I looked to my left, I noticed a large concrete wall rising beyond the trees. At first it looked like some kind of obelisk. As I stared longer, it finally clicked that what I was seeing was a facade. Doorways. Windows. Balconies. An apartment building, heavily obscured by brush and completely out of place.
As I kept walking, the ground beneath me widened, and I noticed the trees ahead of me never fully closed in. There were long, straight lines of sight. What I had taken for a path through the forest no longer felt like one.
The ground was too level. Too wide. The trees held their distance instead of pressing back in, and fragments of asphalt broke through the soil beneath my feet, I was not walking a trail at all. I was walking along what remained of a four lane highway. I was standing on Lenin Avenue, the road that divides central Pripyat, and I had no idea.
I remember pausing and looking to my friend when it finally registered. "We're in Pripyat?" I asked, more surprised than anything.
The road stretched ahead of us in a straight line. Apartment blocks stood back from it, partially hidden by trees. There were signs I had missed, concealed into the backdrop, but nothing clearly marked it as a city anymore. I had seen the same thing elsewhere in the exclusion zone. Buildings resting in the forest. Old road signs half claimed by growth. After a while, it all starts to look normal.
Red Forest was buried after the accident to contain the spread of radiation. Entire sections were razed and covered.
Pripyat was left behind and abandoned.
Standing there 33 years later, the results seemed to be the same. The forest returned where it was buried, and moved in where the city was left behind.
