Story: Rock Solid

A ripple of anxiety rushes through this weary crowd when a man in charge lifts his bullhorn to announce that the next boat to Alcatraz Island will be the last boat of the day. Everywhere, people are fussing with video cameras, fanny packs and guidebooks. A woman in front of me spins towards the cluttered gift shop of Pier 33 and screams for her son. “Darren! Get your butt over here or you’re not going to Alcatraz!” Two men standing behind me start counting aloud the number of tourists in front of us in line, estimating their chances at getting on this last ferry. They count 142, plus Darren, who still hasn’t joined his mother. Our odds look good. Let’s go to Alcatraz.

Find a guidebook that doesn’t list Alcatraz as the premier tourist destination in San Francisco and that guidebook will likely be older than 1973, when the Rock was first opened to the public. More than 1.3 million people visit Alcatraz Island every year, the kind of shorts-and-sneakers sightseeing melee that makes most locals cringe. When I first arrived for a weeklong visit in San Francisco this summer, I had trouble finding locals who had actually been to the infamous prison turned national landmark that floats just a mile away from their glittery skyscraper shore. “I really should go, I can’t believe I’ve never been,” is what most say. “It’s a madhouse down there, I’m not going near that thing,” is what a few others say. I myself have visited San Francisco a dozen times, somehow never actually making this cattle call pilgrimage. Now that I’ve been, I really can’t imagine why it’s taken so long.

There’s only one way to get to Alcatraz Island – a choppy, ten-minute ride on a ferry operated by Alcatraz Cruises, the private company that enjoys an exclusive contract with the National Parks service. More than 5,000 people want to take this ride on a typically busy summer day and tickets often sell out a week in advance. This kind of demand is often what makes for an obnoxious tourist experience, the push and shove, irritable reality of too many people clamoring to all capture the same precious memory. But Alacatraz has been dealing with unruly behavior since 1868, when it first opened as a military prison to house deserters. And while disciplinary methods are a bit less draconian today, Alacatraz still manages to tame the tempers of modern visitors, thanks in no small part to an exceptionally captivating audio tour.

It turns out to be the boat ride to the island that delivers the expected festival of “me first” and “look at that” moments. As the mainland peninsula of San Francisco begins to drift away, the rear decks are crowded with cameras snapping the city's undulating skyline, Transamerica to Coit Tower. Far enough away from the dock, the boat rocks forward under the stampede to the bow of the boat. It’s a gorgeous day when I visit, unseasonably warm and sunny, and the view of the windswept expanse of bay from the Golden Gate to the Oakland Bay bridge easily charms everyone. Railing space on the bow is precious real estate and I’ve managed to claim just enough to stand sideways, wedged in between a boy carelessly wagging an ice cream sandwich and a woman operating a video camera. Her lens is fixed on the steadily growing blob of rock and crumbling concrete on the horizon. She doesn’t pan left or right, doesn’t zoom, doesn’t narrate. There’s Alcatraz, off in the distance. And now it’s slightly larger. And now, a little larger still. The only sound on this ten-minute Steadycam tableau will be the paper bag rustle of wind on the microphone. I’m happy she’s not my mother and that I will not be asked to watch this movie later.

The boat disgorges on Alcatraz’s only dock, where a park ranger gives a brief introduction and invites everyone to watch an award-winning documentary prior to receiving an award-winning audio tour. I can’t resist the opportunity to get ahead of the crowd, so I bypass the movie and charge uphill to the main entry where I run headlong into the large crowd that’s just finished watching the previous showing of the movie. Nothing gained, I wait politely for my turn at the audio tour pick-up station.

Something wonderful happens when you strap on a headset and click play on a well-produced audio tour. Real time visuals and audio narrative combine for a time warping effect that beats the plasma out of simply watching a documentary on A&E. The Alcatraz audio tour is 30 minutes of spellbinding storytelling – all of it narrated by actual prisoners and former correctional officers – backed with realistic prison sound effects. With pauses in the audio tracks to allow time for moving from room to dreary room, the entire trip takes an hour. In more popular areas, like the high security cells of Al Capone and Robert "the Birdman" Stroud, the crowds make it difficult to lose myself. But in quieter moments, when I do find myself momentarily alone in the narrows of a musty old cell-block, or the dark, suffocating confines of “the hole,” I forget that I’m listening to an audio tour at all.

Former prisoner Leon “Whitey” Thompson opens the tour in a raspy voice, recalling his state of mind when he first arrived on the island. “I was a man that had total hatred in them days,” he says. “I hated anything that walked or crawled on this earth. I was a man who was dead inside.”

Narrative like this blends seamlessly with realistic sound effects that animate the experience of life on Alcatraz. Catcalls, whistles and shouted insults are background to an explanation of what it was like for a new prisoner to walk to his cell for the first time, paraded by guards down the cell house thoroughfare known as "Broadway." Fight sounds, including a cringe-worthy knife stab, punctuate a short tutorial on shiv making. And even though it’s nearly 95 degrees outside today, I shiver a little when prisoners recount how cold and damp the daily confines of Alcatraz could be.

The most engrossing track of the audio tour reenacts a bloody 1946 escape attempt that devolved into a riot, where sirens blare and guards shout desperately as they lose control of their violent charges. The audio directs me to the hallway where National Guard troops dropped grenades through the glass roof of the prison to subdue its disorderly contents. As I stand looking at the pockmarked floor, explosions reverberate through the headphones. Escape attempts, terrible food and violent retribution; the message delivered by the audio tour is clear. Prison is a miserable place, even one as mythified as Alcatraz.

When the tour is over, far too quickly, I’m back on the dock, waiting for the last boat back to shore. Everyone who’ll take the boat back with me is also waiting here, though they’re far more relaxed than when we first arrived. Orderly. Disciplined even. No one hesitates when the man in charge lifts his bullhorn again, asking passengers to form a single file line to board the boat. I’m not sure if everyone is eager for escape, ready for dinner or just still lost inside the vivid re-creation of the last hour. What I do know is that I'll be telling everyone on the outside to get in line, do some time at Alcatraz.