A sign that greets you as you approach Alcatraz by sea. A group of Indians settled on & held Alcatraz in the 70's for 19 months to protest their Reservations being taken away form them. And it worked!
For our last day in San Fran, seeing as our flight to Buenos Aires wasn’t until 2230, Ric & I ventured out to Alcatraz. I mainly wanted to do it so I could finally put to good use my Sean Connery impersonation & state numerous times, “Welcome to The Rock!”, a line that he uttered in the movie of the same name. When mimicking Connery most people either choose this or the standard, “Bond. James Bond.” (Usless Trivia Point #3096)
Giz spending some quality time in a cell!
On our Tour Of The Bay yesterday, we’d pretty much seen Alcatraz from each side but from afar & decided it was worth a closer inspection. It was an interesting few hours. I’m glad I went but it wasn’t a ‘fantastic’ experience & I guess it’s not that type of attraction. They provided you with a MP3 player that talked you through a walking tour of the main cell block. It’s won all sorts of awards & I can appreciate that it would as it doesn’t just have one monotone voice relaying fact after fact, it uses the voices of actual inmates & wardens who had been interviewed. The cells themselves were tiny & I can’t imagine a life confined to that small a space - a great deterrent for my grand ideas of a life of crime!!
I remember reading in a news article, in New York I think, that there was a group who had a little clout behind them, who were campaigning to have Alcatraz demolished. Their claim was that having such a ‘bad’ iconic place as a tourist attraction was detrimental to San Fran. They wanted to erect in it’s place, a Worldwide Centre For Peace or some such thing. The first of it’s kind in the world. I can understand & appreciate their argument but it would then only be another mark of progress when another piece of modern history is mowed down & replaced. The same can be said of the Turkish Governments attempts to plough up & asphalt over sections of Gallipoli.
Ric in Solitary Confinement.
In the case of Alcatraz, a weird thing was noted by both myself & Ric. It was falling apart or had been left to go to ruin in sections. Some of this was now due to the fact that a number of sea birds now used Alcatraz as a nesting home during the winter. Certain parts were not open to the public due to this very fact. It didn’t bother me & it was interesting to see Nature taking back what had once been Hers. Cracking up through the concrete, climbing over walls and steel pipes & slowly eroding Mans presence.
Even more interesting is that I’m currently reading a great book based on the same theme. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to open up topics of discussion, think about what we humans, as an entire race, are doing to our planet, who looks at a plastic bottle & instead of holding onto it for another 500m to a recycling bin, dumps it in a waste bin. It is an incredible experiment of both thought & imagination that is based on fact & current findings.
The book is called “The World Without Us” and is written by Alan Weisman. The whole basis of the book is how quickly it would take Nature to reclaim our cities & societies if we were to just vanish. It starts off sounding a little weird but asks nothing more of any Hollywood movie - imagine we all just vanished, quickly, off the face of the earth. Be it a virus, aliens abduct us, we are taken to Heaven or Hell but not via an asteroid or worse, a nuclear strike, but something that would leave the world as we know behind & intact. How quickly would Nature rise up and take over…?
Signs of Natures rusting away what was Ours and replacing it with Hers.
Each chapter focuses on a certain area of the world or an accepted civilised, worldwide practice & goes far back into the past and traces how animals, early humans & the climate were in that particular area or how that practice came to be. This is all based on fact - fossils, documentation, photos, the small & few places in the world where man hasn’t entered and eradicated etc. Stuff that we’re aware of but never all at once - well maybe, via some BBC documentary!! It then turns to fiction based non-fiction as it tries to decipher if land would return to how it was, if animals would return, natural evolution & how long it would take to undo the damage done by our practices. I’ve always said that we’re about 30 odd years behind where we should be in regards to ‘being Green’, we’re more like a minimum 200yrs behind & that’s if we disappeared tomorrow…!
My Shadow behind bars..!
All the “what would happen” is all based on interviews with scientists, engineers, zoologists, marine biologists, oil refiners & palaeontologists. It’s well researched & written and in some places, quite jaw dropping. How quickly some of our major cities, like New York would fall is scary & how much damage, that you & I are unaware of, has already been done & due to Natures slow but always effective evolutionary process, will take thousands of years to undo.
A better idea, from the port, as to how parts of Alcatraz have been left to ruin. Alot of the garden & buildings are still maintained, just not all.
I’m not going to harp on about it anymore but it’s the perfect book for people to read, especially after “An Inconvenient Truth” & the swing to elect Kevin “Green” Rudd… And yes, I will be an even more anal retentive & annoying bastard recycler & light turner off-er-er now!!
Finally, a photo of the photo they tried to flog to us - we're actually standing in front of a backdrop...! What's worse, it was all done from the San Fran Docks..! Worse again, people bought them (not our photo, their own)!!
No comments:
Post a Comment