Jim O'Donnell's Page

Utö

The ferry left Turku at eight in the morning. The sea was perfectly still, but the ice had heaved and broken and patches of gray appeared through the crinkled crust. A Spanish bird watcher said that the ice was closing behind the ferry and it made him feel as if the world were closing behind him. He watched for migrants from the outer deck.

We passed through a field of large, flat, geometrically shaped ice sheets and then into open sea. The water was gray, the sky was gray and only the thin line of white ice in the distance separated the two.

The ferry had three decks. One was below the water line and used as sleeping quarters for the crew. The second was a dark hold with six small windows, a television and seventeen reclining chairs. A black Labrador retriever was curled asleep in a wire cage near the stairs. On the third deck were the sitting areas, with tables and chairs and benches. Those on the outside were bolted to the ship. From the third deck, the crew served coffee and pastries, sandwiches, beer and liquor.

In the corner of the indoor sitting area sat a group of five people: two men, a boy with an unfortunate bowl hair cut, and two women. The women were mother and daughter and they drank beer for breakfast. You could tell the women were mother and daughter by their makeup. Each had caked it on lavishly but neatly and a pronounced line under their chins marked where the makeup ended. Their bleached hair reached for the ceiling like a forest ant hill. When they stood, they reached and danced, adjusting their tight pants and tucking in their acrylic blouses. They were happy and they slapped each other’s hands to make a point. They winked at the younger men on the boat, not yet aware that their beauty had failed. Their men were sullen and silent and ashen-faced. The men drank beers too but they drank faster than the women.

On the outside deck there were several bored soldiers on their way to the base at Utö. There was also a man with a thin, strong body whose face reminded me of a handsome version of Lenin. He said he came from Kuopio, in central Finland, and had come with his wife to ride the ferry and drink all day. It was their vacation. He wore a black denim worker’s cap, a black denim jacket and black denim pants. He had black cowboy boots on his feet. His wife followed about a yard behind him. She smoked incessantly and greedily. Her hair was dyed black and spiked. She wore blue and white rayon like the Finnish flag and slurred that she was proud to be Finnish. The soldier boys laughed at her. She was nervous on deck and continually fiddled with her glasses. She pitched her cigarette butt into the sea then said she wanted another beer. I saw them later, sprawled and sleeping in the corner booth by the computer.

At Utö, the clatter of heavy machine gun bullets splashing into the sea greated the ferry. The ice had broken and nearly cleared. A crowd of boys decked out in fatigues and porting loaded assault rifles greeted the ferry. In a high tech, glassed-in observation tower, a man trained his field glasses on the m/s Aspö. I suddenly became worried that, as a foreigner, maybe I wouldn’t be allowed onto the island. The armed boys, however, were more interested in the crates of beer than in me and, trailing a bent old man I’d seen on the ferry; I disappeared into a maze of red and yellow homes and cottages and climbed up the island’s one hill to the stone lighthouse.


The sea was large and cold and spread to the horizon. Ice clung to the rocks. A group of gulls fought over something that had washed up on the rocks. The wind blew out of the north and smears of snow reached to the shore.

Utö, although no more than a spot on the map, was a military base containing a garrison of several dozen conscripts. There was a small village of fishermen, a public school of one student, a weather station, a museum and the lighthouse, which was draped in white sheeting and scaffolding and undergoing extensive renovations. There were virtually no trees.

To the north of Utö I could see the island Jurmo, a long, fish-shaped piece of land ranging northeast to southeast across an open channel. Both the wind and the sea currents meant that, between Trunsö and Utö, everything in the water ends up on Jurmo’s shores.

Sometime in the early 16th Century, the people of Jurmo took to lighting tremendous bonfires in an attempt to attract passing ship - usually traders plying the old route between Stockholm and Tallinn - for a closer look. When the ships were close enough, the islanders attacked from small, swift, shallow-hulled boats. They were reputed to be particularly bloodthirsty, especially the women. They slaughtered the entire crew and all of the passengers, and then helped themselves to the merchandise. In this way, the islanders of Jurmo grew rich.

But they took it too far. In 1530 the Swedish King Vaasa, fed up with the disruption of trade, ordered the island destroyed. Every living thing was killed, and the original forest burned to the ground. The island was abandoned for nearly a century.

Yet one teenage boy was said to have escaped. He hid under a rock and then made his way south to Utö. He found a nearly bare, rocky island with just enough fish and birds to survive. There may have already been a tiny Bishopric on Utö when the boy arrived - possibly of Bishop Henrik’s doings during the initial Swedish crusade into Finland. But there may have been nothing more than the random and dilapidated huts of a few seasonal fishing families. Whatever it was he found, he must have found it irresistible, for on Utö, he established a large family from which nearly every native islander claims descent.