Believe it or not, we are still traveling.

We're currently in the San Francisco Bay area, which is a really interesting place to be on election night, I must say. Me, I'd voted several weeks ago by absentee ballot, and Margaret, the only other American in our little family, is too young to vote (unfortunately, as she thinks a great deal more, and more intelligently, about politics than most adult Americans). So we were under no constraints to wait on line at polling places and so on. However, it was an edgy day, waiting for the night's results to start coming in, so we distracted ourselves with some tourism.

The last few times we've been in the Bay area (and we've been here many times, as we have good friends here and it's just cool), we've tried to get tickets to the Alcatraz tour. For one reason or another, we've been thwarted each time. This time, it wasn't a school vacation, it wasn't a weekend, and we didn't foolishly wait until the very last minute before trying to book the tickets. So off we went to Alcatraz at last.


I hadn't expected the tour to be a barrel of laughs, obviously. But I was surprised at just how disturbing I did find it. The reasons are hard to sort out. They involve the nastiness of the place itself (see photos below); the thought of just how depraved and damaged a man had to be for the prison authorities to condemn him to Alcatraz — this wasn't the place for men who had, through unfortunate circumstances or upbringing, just screwed up a little; the thought of being a guard there and having to deal with hundreds of these terrifying and cold-hearted men; the irony of one of the world's great (and hedonistic) cities just over a mile away — close enough for the inmates to hear the music and conversation from the yacht club if the wind was right — when the inmates were subject to such cold, tedium, regimentation, and austerity; and the true horror that was the solitary-confinement cells. The guards were supposed to leave the lights on for the men in those cells during the day, but they seldom did. Men could be confined there for a day, three days, even as long as fourteen days. In the dark and cold and silence. Alone, alone.

The audio tour included a recording of an inmate telling of how, when he was in solitary, he would close his eyes tightly until he saw a small dot of light. "You had to work hard at it, it took practice, but you could get to where you'd put stories in that dot of light, like a movie. And that's what I did."

Another inmate recounted how, when in solitary, he would rip a button off his overalls and toss it in the air. When it landed, he'd spend the next few minutes on his hands and knees, groping in the dark, until he found it. Then he'd do it again. And again. For hours and days.

I was surprised to learn that the guards' and administrators' families, including their young children, lived an idyllic small-town life on the island. There's something creepy about such utter obliviousness to the inmates' conditions and state of mind. It got me thinking, rather uncomfortably, about what suffering we are all oblivious to that goes on out of sight as we live our relatively idyllic lives.

What I found the most distressing, so much that I had to go outside, was the gift shop. Sure, there were some very earnest and worthy books about Alcatraz and the Indian occupation of Alcatraz in the late 60s (which I just barely remember) and memoirs of some of the inmates. But there were also t-shirts cheerily emblazoned, "Alcatraz" (it was a wonder they didn't include an exclamation mark, like the name of some horrible Springtime-for-Hitler-esque musical), and keyrings, and fridge magnets, and pens, and playing cards — playing cards! — all treating the suffering of thousands of people as a tremendous lark. The prisoners suffered. The guards suffered. The inmates' families suffered. The victims of the crimes that landed the inmates in Alcatraz suffered most of all. I see no need to (a) profit by or (b) be amused by that.





Needless to say, after all that we wanted something a bit more life-affirming. So we went to look at the sea lions. I even took a couple of movies for you; imagine my horror when I got error message after error message when trying to post them. Sorry. I did my best.