Russky Island

A sturdy ferry by the name of Vladimir Rodik makes the fifty-minute trip out to the sparsely inhabited Russky Island every couple of hours. Although the island is now connected to the mainland by an massive cable-stayed bridge, which cost about $1 billion to build, the majority of the inhabitants live on a part of the island not serviced by the bridge. To get to this part of the island, it is still necessary to take the ferry. I paid the 43 rubles (about $1.30) for my passage and stood out on the deck as we sailed off into the Gulf of Peter the Great. The entire waterfront is a rotting industrial landscape. The capacity of the port is laughably small, with old fashioned cranes that would be incapable of servicing the types of large container ships that even we receive at home in Charleston, South Carolina. Indeed, the ships moored in the harbor were all tiny. Of course, the population of Vladivostok is about the same size as Charleston’s, but for a port city that sits right between the Asian powerhouses of Japan, China, and Korea, the port seems tremendously underutilized. From a distance, Vladivostok looked like a city crammed into too little space, the air above it hazy with pollution and the buildings wedged in like boxes of cereal in a supermarket. The two new bridges stand as modern giants against the otherwise unremarkable cityscape. Still, the city is beautiful for its location on a hilly peninsula with views of gulf from every hilltop. The ferry carved through a narrow inlet that then opened up into an enormous interior cove, surrounded by the heavily forested hills of the island. We motored past a crumbling concrete pier where fishermen had congregated around a beached trawler.

We docked at the pier and the passengers rushed down the swaying wooden gangway and onto the shore. There was nothing around except for the shabby passenger terminal and a billboard slapped up against an abandoned building advertising “Brooklyn Pizza.” A decrepit concrete staircase curved up the side of the hill and into a forest. I followed a few people up and after a minute of two came out into a block of residential apartments with laundry hanging from the windows and little girls playing in a flooded playground. A little farther on I found an old industrial site where Central Asians were living in little wooden cabins. I continued down the road and passed a few country homes with old women in headscarves working the dirt or walking with buckets of water from the communal well. A few children were riding bikes up and down the road, dodging the odd stray dog. A tall green stretch of sheet metal fenced off the territory of a monastery. The golden dome of an Orthodox church glittered over the top. I came to the front gate, pulled the chain handle down and walked inside. I was immediately greeted by a middle-aged woman in a plaid shirt whose shoulders came almost up to her ears because of her painful hunch. Monks were running to and fro cutting wood and feeding the cows. A calf was tied up away from his mother and was bellowing loudly until the bearded black-robed monk came with the feed bucket. Inside the church a christening was going on. I stood and watched at the door as the priest raddled off by rote in the old church-Slavonic. The little boy stood with his father, looking around a bit nervously at all of the old monks with their long scraggly beards and funny costumes.

On the far end of the bay I came upon a deserted factory with the year 1940 written in a light-colored brick above the main building. At the main gate a stray dog scared me off. I don’t think it was a mean dog, but I have become rather nervous around dogs on old industrial sites because sometimes they are really trained to attack. I kept my distance and found another way in through the rusty sheet metal fence, which had large sections torn away. Stepping through, I noticed a big carpet of wet insulation, which was probably asbestos. I made sure to step around it, though I am hoping that the particles would be pinned down when wet.

Before long I started heading back to the pier to catch my ferry. On the way, I passed a girl who was leading her horses down to the beach. With time to kill, I leaned up against an overturned boat and read a book. There was a Russian sauna nearby and every once in a while men would run outside and jump into the water. A woman with her small daughter started cursing at one naked man, but he just laughed it off and said “I’m not trying to show her.” Russians have a more lax attitude towards public nudity. I slept in the lower passenger deck on the way back. A cold had been coming on all day and I was exhausted by the time I got back into town. But, it was a day well worth it.