I had brought a second set of all the exotic items for the interpreter (who in due course would inherit the dosimeter). Needless to say, the poncho, gloves, masking tape, and shoe covers had not graced my person so far on this adventure; all the other clothes I had been wearing unstintingly, day after day, since I had to suppose that everything I did not store in Tokyo might become contaminated, so why throw away more than I had to? Although I succeeded in showering every day except in Oshima, I doubt that I made a very professional show. The notebook I carried, a scarlet-spined yellow affair emblazoned with a pink-tutued ballerina who curtseyed from beneath a cloud of multicolored butterflies, might have been what tipped the scales, causing policemen to snicker softly the instant my back was turned. Never mind; even in former years, when I had been younger and slimmer and needed to dress up for interviews in my one and only business suit, my best achievement was a look of mild surprise on the interpreter’s face, accompanied by this encomium: “You look almost handsome!”
On last night’s drive to Miyako Oji we had brought with us our yellow kitchen gloves, respirators, et cetera, but the dosimeter persuaded us not to use them. Moreover, we both would have felt ashamed to protect ourselves so ostentatiously without doing likewise for the driver. In my American imaginings of this final visit to the hot zone I had envisioned a walk of some sort, probably on my own; any taxi driver would have stayed inside the vehicle, with the windows cranked up against beta particles. Just in case someone accompanied me, I brought double everything.
Now of course this does not excuse me from having forgotten the safety of any hypothetical third party; never mind the fact that a sane person might well decline to drive anywhere that such accoutrements were advisable; in short, last-minute logic (and decency) prohibited the interpreter and me from setting forth in any such dress, although we did bring them with us just in case.
And so we each wore a medium-quality surgical mask, purchased at a nursing supply store in San Francisco; we offered our new driver, whom I will introduce in a moment, a fresh mask of his own, but he was satisfied with the one he had. I wore my hat, raincoat (unzipped as long as we were in the car), heavy shirt, light shirt, underwear, jeans, socks, and shoes. Upon our return to Koriyama the yellow gloves would go on, the shoes would get wiped down with a damp cloth before permanent removal to a plastic bag, and then pretty much the rest of that day’s clothing, as well as the gloves, also got disposed of in a suitable place — contaminated presents for a contaminated town. The fancy respirators, the backpacks, and all the other usable items we gave away to an evacuee at Big Palette that night, before proceeding to the gymnasium for our radiation screening.
As it turned out, this day’s accrued dose would be no higher than the previous two Koriyama days: 0.4 millirems in twenty-four hours.35 I flatter myself that prudence played a part in this result; I paid attention to wind direction as well as distance, and consulted the dosimeter every few minutes; still, we seem to have had two very lucky days (a statement I intend to retract should I come down with some cesium-characteristic cancer within the next few years). The interpreter later informed me that in the newspapers she had read that the maximum recorded radioactivity suffered by any inhabited place fell forty-odd kilometers north of the reactor: 16,020 microsieverts over twenty-one days, which worked out to seven millirems a day; at that rate it would have taken only sixty-six days to achieve my ceiling of five rems.36
First we went to Big Palette. I hoped to find an evacuee who knew how to enter the inner ring without police interference. En route, the driver explained that Koriyama was “the Oriental Vienna,” an appellation I never would have imagined. My tongue was still tingling and stinging from the potassium iodide. The driver said, “Well, we have no direct impact from the reactor, but I don’t like the rumors.”
As soon as we stepped out of the taxi we spied people passing in and out of Big Palette. I stopped a youngish-looking woman who was carrying her granddaughter against her chest. The child and her mother were from Ohkuma, five kilometers from the reactor; the grandmother hailed from Kawauchi Village, right on the edge of the twenty-kilometer inner ring. It was to Kawauchi that we would go today.
The grandmother said, “We had been helping the victims since the twelfth,” the day after the earthquake and tsunami. “On the sixteenth, we ourselves were made to evacuate. It’s like I’m seeing a dream. The life is hard. My daughters are all living very close to the reactor, so they lost everything.”
She did not want to visit Kawauchi just then, and a man who was going there today preferred to organize his things first, so we hired the driver at the head of the long line of taxis that waited there; the driver said we must visit his company’s office first. I spoke against this, expecting as usual to be quashed by some higher-up, but there was nothing to it; his boss came out and inspected us, after which he and the driver worked out a price. I said that the journey might possibly take longer than our agreement arranged for, in which case I could pay more. The driver, unassuming to the point of shyness, appeared uninterested in these details.
We were still in central Koriyama when the meter went to 2.7. “Ehh!” cried the interpreter anxiously. Feeling a trifle nervous myself, I put on my second-best mask, the surgical one I had worn last night; so that now in that department I approximately resembled my two companions as we took Highway 95 toward Ono.
We twisted up through the yellow-green hills, the bamboos shining in the sun, a man working the soil; that wasn’t yet prohibited here, as it already was in Iitate Village, which lay forty kilometers northwest of the plant and hence outside both evacuation zones; it was said that the inhabitants of Iitate would soon have to evacuate.
I found myself checking the dosimeter more often than usual. The driver was silent. My upper lip sweated within the mask. Coming down into Ono, we saw some broken stone along the road edge which might have had nothing to do with the earthquake, and a few specks of snow on the mountainside. It seemed like such a beautiful place to go hill-wandering. The driver pointed out some nara trees (good for growing mushrooms, he said; a few days later, the news screen on the bullet train from Hiroshima to Tokyo announced that mushrooms in a certain zone near the reactor could no longer be harvested, having exceeded the legal radiation limit). Nearly everywhere I looked in Ono there were small, square garden plots where vegetables were coming in, in neat rows, young and green; were they poisonous? The sun was strangely warm on my wrists, or perhaps they were tingling from the potassium iodide. “They are farmers,” the driver remarked with satisfaction; and I knew that he too must have had rural origins.