Pabbi[1] was the sort of man who strode onto a sales lot in 1978 and dropped nine thousand dollars cash on a muscle car, the kind made famous in the American movie Smokey and the Bandit—you know, when Burt Reynolds played a Southern bootlegger gunning a black-and-gold Trans Am across the country? My father could have driven his car straight onto that Hollywood set and landed a part in the sequel.
There’s no way I could have learned that fact from Pabbi firsthand. But from my earliest memories, around age three or four, I developed a visceral sense of my father’s personality based almost entirely on the car he’d chosen to drive. It took four decades longer before I began to understand what drove Pabbi from his home country of Iceland and a career of navigating ships across the North Atlantic to the boatyards of Seattle and the Wild West of Alaska crab fishing, where the outcome of his choices would reverberate to three continents.
Like many other Western countries at the time, Iceland briefly experimented with prohibition in the early twentieth century. Oddly, while wine and hard liquor became legal again (albeit highly taxed) by the 1930s, beer remained illegal until 1989. The only ale to be found on the island was léttöl, a light beer with a maximum of 2.25 percent alcohol by volume. This seems an outrage in a country with obnoxiously strong Viking bloodlines, and yet the law persisted for nigh on seventy-five years. Locals took to mixing this substandard léttöl with shots of vodka or whiskey, creating a kind of Frankenstein boilermaker called bjórlíki. With such a relentless demand for hooch, the question was always where the hard stuff could be procured cheaply while flying under the state’s radar. Everyone knew that those who worked the international shipping and air routes had the best access to off-island sources.
I knew none of this history when I visited Iceland for the first time on my own in 1999, around my twentieth birthday. During that trip, some older relatives took me on a boat ride in Reykjavík’s Faxaflói Bay and revealed, while sitting in the ship’s galley, that my father had once been arrested for smuggling alcohol into the country. I was stunned. They were chuckling over the story, but I felt lost trying to place this event in the paper-thin narrative I held back then of Pabbi’s life, pieced together only from the most iridescent bits my mother and a few others had shared. I had been told how helpful he had been as a child growing up on a remote farm; how thoughtful and generous to others; how conscientious, hardworking, and well-dressed he was; and of course, how much he had loved my mom—all of which I still believe to be true. The trouble was that he had sounded almost like a magical being, never quite human. And then that revelation had dropped.
Why hadn’t anyone told me about this before?
My ignorance wasn’t my fault, but I felt ashamed for not knowing this basic fact about my father. I pictured him driving his Trans Am around Seattle with this enigmatic history and wondered what else I didn’t know. Nobody else brought up the story again, though, and so out of deference to my elders (a trait I had absorbed from my mother’s Thai culture), I felt obligated to file it away in my mind. It dwelled there in silence, even while I lived in Iceland for several years, until my paternal grandmother, Amma, passed away in 2022. I was forty-two years old.
In parallel with the grief of losing our matriarch, I began to feel a strange lightness—as if a heavy lid had begun to lift from my long-suppressed curiosity. I was married with two young children by then, and had precious few stories to pass down to our kids about their Icelandic grandfather. Pabbi had established our family in Seattle, there was no question of that, but we had little idea when or why he had left Iceland. I wondered if the answer had something to do with the rum-running story from long ago, realizing there might be a paper trail somewhere. Luckily, with the Internet and the knowledge of Icelandic I had worked to gain over the years, it was now possible to consult sources outside the family for more information.
From my own home in Seattle I began browsing Icelandic newspaper archives from the 1970s, where it became evident that booze-smuggling networks were vast and impossible to ferret out, stretching across the North Atlantic to Antwerp, Rotterdam, Hamburg, and even to the former Eastern Bloc. Merchant marine shipping routes were vital for keeping many Icelanders in the drink, and it was apparent that nearly everyone on these ships was aware of what was going on—from the lowest viðvaningur cadets on up. Though the long-distance networks couldn’t be effectively dismantled, local sailors were vulnerable to shakedowns by authorities when the opportunity presented itself.