The message was clear. The first crop of strawberries, always much anticipated by Swedes as the kick off to the blissful but short Nordic summer season, were forbidden. Within their tart sweetness, there was risk of unseen menace – nuclear radiation.
My host father and I heeded the warning. My host mother, Marika, a practical but stern woman smiled over a blue ceramic bowl of ripe fruit. She popped the red jewels into her mouth with relish. Smaklig. Tasty.
She didn’t keel over. We didn’t join her.
April 26, 1986, marks the 40th anniversary of the explosion of reactor #4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. The catastrophe exposed the reactor core to the elements, sending harmful radiation into the wind. A power station in Sweden was the first facility outside of the USSR to detect and report atmospheric radioactivity and sounded the alarm in the west, a full two days after the explosion.
Unbeknownst to us at the time, the first wave of nuclear radiation wafted over Scandinavia, followed by the invisible threat drifting over most of Europe. At the time, information was scarce. Nobody on the ground, including me, a 17-year-old Canadian Rotary exchange student living with my Swedish host family ] in a small town, had a clue what was happening.
It’s unlikely you’ve heard of the place where I spent 11 formative months of my youth. Karlskoga’s claims to fame are the giant cannon perched on a hill above the town, and its status as the summer home of Alfred Nobel. His simple white manor house, Björkborn is a museum honouring his legacy as the inventor of dynamite and as a peacemaker, a status achieved almost by accident. After reading his own obituary, mistakenly published while he still lived and breathed and in which he was eulogized as a merchant of death, he changed his life trajectory with the help of a substantial fortune, establishing the Nobel Prize, awarded annually by Committees in both Sweden and Norway.
The city may have been small, but it played host to some grand adventures during my year abroad. Living with strangers and making new friends while learning a new language granted me a sense of independence and helped form the person I would become. And as it turned out, 1986 was an eventful time to come of age.
The year was monumental well beyond my personal sphere. The world roiled with events of significance. The Challenger disaster on January 28th. My fellow exchange student friend from Settle, Washington, collapsed at our school locker as the news filtered down of the immense human tragedy that day.
Exactly one month later, Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme was murdered in downtown Stockholm while walking home from the cinema. The depth of shock and mourning in my temporary homeland was deep. Such violence was unfamiliar to this neutral country, and it marked a baptism into a terrible club of other countries whose leaders had been assassinated. His murder remains unsolved.
Late April’s Chernobyl catastrophe was the apex in an unholy disaster trilogy. Its existential, opaque threat was veiled, just like the radiation in the air. After the news broke, my parents placed a frantic long-distance phone call to see how I was. In typical teenage ennui, I reported that I was fine, nobody knew anything, which was certainly true. The Soviet government of Mikhail Gorbachev suppressed any news and event details for days, if not years.
In a twisted irony, our group of Canadian and American exchange students had just returned from the Soviet Union a few weeks prior to the accident. We’d been invited to visit the USSR in March, and I successfully begged my parents to bankroll my participation for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
We spent five days in Leningrad, crossing by train from Finland and encountering a lengthy border delay where our bags and Sony Walkmans were extensively searched. We arrived to enjoy a late-winter landscape of bare, crooked trees, towers of brutalist architecture, the beauty of Catherine the Great’s 18th century Hermitage Museum and the solemnity ofPiskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, built to honour victims of the 900-day siege of Leningrad. The visit, along with memories of our group’s mass food poisoning and the painful hilarity that ensued are still vivid forty years on.
That one month later we’d be contemplating the catastrophe of a nuclear holocaust was a lot. It’s likely my youthful optimism kept the darkest thoughts at bay. After all, this was the best year of my life so far. It was inconceivable that a nuclear accident was going to get in the way of my coming-of-age-year. How fortunate for all of us that it did not.
Forty years on, I think I’ll celebrate with a bowl of strawberries.
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