Making a Watch Your Own in a Disaster Zone: Vintage Seiko 6309-7040

Making a watch your own, in a disaster zone: Vintage Seiko 6309-7040

Gareth Munden ©

For a long time I wanted a Seiko 6309 ‘Turtle’ Dive watch. I had looked on Ebay, the normal mix of mods and redials. Nothing that I wanted. So I moved on, forgot about it. I have a love of really beat up watches, one that have lived a life. I guess that have that feeling of an old pair of Redwings, worn, but miles of walking left in them. Then one afternoon looking on the ‘Bay. There with a Dutch dealer that sells many used Seiko Dive watches was a 1981 Seiko 6309, boy was it me. The text on the dial was almost gone, the lume was faded and the hands in a bad way. I love them rough and this was the one. 

1984 Seiko 6309 

The watch didn’t disappoint. In fact I liked it more on the wrist. Sure it wasn’t my most expensive or rarest watch. It’s a pretty common model, run of the mill. But something about I enjoyed. It did get me thinking about history of our watches. This Seiko clear had a life before me, it had the scars to show. But I know nothing of where it had been before, what adventures it may have seen.  But I did feel it had been out there, doing things. Then a few months later there was an opportunity to have an adventure of my own. 

Something I have wanted to do for a long time came about. A conversation with two friends about going somewhere interesting to take photographers, to see something different. One of them suggested ‘Let’s go to Chernobyl’. I have always been drawn to places that have their history unsanitised. Where you can feel the part in a way a museum can never do. Places where the wounds are still open. They may never heal and because of that we can learn something, something real and tangible. 

A couple of weeks later I was packing. Getting my camera kit clean, reformatting my cards and  all those little jobs you need to do before a trip. I was starting to think about what watch I would take. Now maybe to most this is not important. But for me things like this are. I wanted to take something that I’d need not be precious about, something that feels like it’s seen the world. I was drawn to that 6309. The Seiko was built for no nonsense adventure, not the desk adventure of a modern watch, but the out in the field kind of adventure. It had history, but maybe I felt I needed to give it my history. My mind was made up on this, the Seiko 6309 it would be. 

A few days later a small team of us were on a mini bus from Kiev with our driver and fixer. It was the break of dawn and we were travelling north toward the exclusion zone. Through a flat almost bland European landscape. A heavy grey sky, but warm for a late winter in Central Europe. A sense of the mediocre overcomes me in the back of the mini bus. 

By breakfast time we arrived at the checkpoint of the 30Km exclusion zone. A kind of fairground feel as tour coaches of excited teenagers arrive, line up for their selfies, I find myself beaming in front of a Soviet tank. I couldn’t help myself. We sign our waivers and given our Dosimeter. This will become our go to as we travel deeper into the zone. 

The author just had to do it.

As we head towards the 10Km inner zone our mini bus and the coaches go our separate ways. We head into the abandoned model town of Pripyat. The town built to house the Chernobyl nuclear power station workers and their families, a town built as the best example of what the Soviet Union could do for its people. Evacuated days after the 1986 nuclear accident the town now sits in silence, the only sound is our team disembarking from the mini bus outside the Pripyat Hospital. We stand outside and try to take it in. At the time this was considered a state of the art hospital, but it lacked one facility, the ability to deal with radiation at the level found in the area around the reactor after the accident. Because no one believed that such an accident could occur, the power station was full-proof. We enter the Hospital over a pile of sand, knowing this is out of bounds, but we are drawn in. Our fixer tells us that we must watch our step and be back here in one hour. I look down at the Seiko and that rare time I actually set my bezel and really need it.

As a group we spilt up. I move down a corridor into a labyrinth of broken glass and half light. The deeper I walk in, the closer I get to that Saturday in 1986 when No.4 reactor exploded. I feel embarrassment as I take pictures, as if I am watching the accident unfold in front of me, but I do nothing to help. Because I can sense the pain and fear of the victims of the disaster. None of them understood the suffering that would await, the horror of radiation sickness at these doses. But the building understands and communicates that to me as I go room to room, deeper and deeper and father from 2020. I enter a room and a chair is left as if a patient still sits waiting to see a doctor, a doctor long since gone. I take a long down at the 6309, the lume long since lost its light. I turn the Seiko towards a window. My hour is almost up. I retrace my steps and find our fixer and driver smoking at the entrance to the hospital. They tell me we will now go to our a hotel in the town of Chernobyl. The rest of the group come out of the darkness of the hospital and we climb back on board and head out the zone to the town of Chernobyl. 

Pripyat Hospital

The small supermarket in Chernobyl is filled with everything we want as a team. Vodka, Paprika Crisps and Chernobyl Disaster Fridge Magnets. I stand outside with one of the team and we eat our crisps and watch the comings and goings of this strange little town. Slowly past us drives a police petrol car, from nowhere a dozen of Chernobyl’s stray dogs appear, barking franticly and surround the police car. Just then our fixer exits the shop with her assortment of nourishment “Everyone hates the police” She says as she boards the mini bus. 

We arrive at our hotel. It in the style you find only in the old Soviet Union, a kind of rock hotel Monster drink vibe. A vending machine containing ‘Zone’ Tee shirt with the ☢️ symbol just so you know what you’re dealing with. I take off the Seiko as I climb into my bed, just because I can I measure it’s radiation with the Dosimeter,  it the same as the background, low. I try my hair, the same. Guess I am OK, no need to buy the Tee shirt. 

The next morning we have our breakfast of fried eggs and I think orange juice and are joined by our fixer. “So today Pripyat, would you be interested in seeing inside a housing block? It’s against the rules, should we do it?” I am not really taking this in. Boris Johnson is on the TV on the Ukrainian news channel. I ask the fixer what he is talking about “Coronavirus” is her one word answer. 

We walk the main square of Pripyat. In the distance we see a rucksack wearing group following a flag, we head the opposite direction. The Dosimeter comes to life with load beeps, it is pointed around and we look down, we are all stood around a manhole that seems to be the source of the radiation. Our fixer approaches “That’s pretty high, we better get moving” 

We arrive at the foot of an empty and abandoned tower block “we can get a great view of the sarcophagus from the roof top” So we climb, past empty rooms and over broken glass. One of team points out there are no insects, no spiders webs. We climb higher and higher, it begins to get darker and darker, less and less alive, more of a sarcophagus than the reactor itself. The rest of the group start to full behind. For a moment the only sound now is my breathing and the glass underfoot. But, I stop, I hear a sound, the sound of someone approaching, out of the half light a dog appears, one of the strays of Pripyat. It has followed me in the hope of a snack. I climb through almost total darkness and turn a corner and I am bathed in light, light from an open doorway above me. I can see the grey of the Ukrainian sky, a brilliant grey after the darkness of the climb. I emerge onto the roof top. The rest of the group reach arrive to the roof just behind me, all of us stop to look in wonder at the distant reactor, wrapped in white as if it were a body awaiting mourners. But as I slowly approach the edge something else catches my eye, something to me much more profound something strangely beautiful. My mind goes back to our fixers words “Pripyat is a model town, the finest home and faculties of its time”  But below me that model town has been swallowed whole. Swallowed and returned to nature. Trees appear as if the streets are full of people rushing to their reactor jobs. But these people and these jobs are gone. There is a total silence below me, no song bird, no sound of children playing. The trees stretch endlessly before me, I can see into the heart of Belarus, a country that never truly recovered from the man made disaster. I lean over the edge and it is time to raise my camera and take the images that express how I was feeling. 

We regroup at the bottom and once again board the mini bus for our last check out at the 30Km zone. We have have to hand in our personal Dosimeter that we have worn round our nects the whole time. They measured our complete dose of radiation when we were in the zone. I ask our fixer if they let us know our dose “No” she tells me, not even if it is high I ask “No they don’t tell you” I ask her what then is the point in measuring it “I don’t know” she replies. 

Back in Kiev our hotel receptionist tells us the flights in and out of the country will stop tonight and that we’re booked on the last flight out. We have that feeling we’re going from one zone to another. But we do make that flight and we do all get home, I don’t become one of those trapped in hotel stories that unfold in the next few months. 

It is when I’m home that I open my computer to start looking at the images I had taken in the exclusion zone. I always wait a week or so, just so I have some distance. But by then the country is in complete lockdown and we can not leave home. So that distance doesn’t come. I go to my watch draw and open it. Today’s choice has to be my Seiko 6309, it is my Chernobyl watch, I have made a history with it. Whenever I now wear it I think standing in Pripyat hospital and feeling the ghosts around me. That sense that a history is still on going. This Seiko in it own small way is part of that history. 

Gareth’s work from Chernobyl will feature in the next issue of Rucksack Magazine @rucksackmag