Alcatraz and Paul Simon.

Today I am going to Alcatraz. Yes, I have a job and now I am feigning my third dentist appointment of the year to go to Pier 33 and board the boat at 2:50pm. You may ask, "why?." And let me tell you, I've asked myself that very question.

Alcatraz has been a reoccurring mirage in my life. A bi-annual trip to SF throughout my childhood repeatedly brought me to the docks of Fishermans' Wharf- where people, including myself liked to point out recognizable disturbances along the horizon line. The most popular of course: "Alcatraz!," "Shark fin!," and "The other side of the Bay!" Also, as a young teenager my favorite action flick shifted from Blown Away to The Rock. Too bad Alcatraz isn't shaped more like the Washington Monument because then my whole transition into adolescence would be defined by profound cultural markers.

So, semi recently, I moved to San Francisco. Having never visited The Rock, I felt pretty content looking at it from afar. There are other islands and adventures that I have been drawn to...Angel Island in particular, taking a ferry to Tiburon to drink champagne on a Sunday, biking across the Golden Gate Bridge, exploring the ruins of the Sutro Baths, titillating yes!...but Alcatraz never really pulled at the ol' heart strings.

Somewhere around the turning of the calendar year I read The Wind up Bird Chronicles which promoted me to heavily weigh every image, interaction, and strange parallel experience within my own life. Which, visually first brought me to Alcatraz: Last summer I did my first chalk drawing. Botticelli's Venus emerges from the Pacific flying the Golden Gate bridge behind her as a kite. Later in the summer, accompanied by my first live-in boyfriend, I got hooked on the x- Men series. Within a week I watched the first two films, had roughly thirty nine conversations about genetic engineering, evolution, special effects in film and the hot factor of the Wolverine beard. And then I watched the third one...when the GGB is ripped from the North bay and strategically placed onto Alcatraz. Woman emerges from the sea, struts down Ty baud's SF streets, dragging the bridge from the past whereas the next generation strategically places it at the epicenter of the Bay in the future- only to battle out the future of the world. There, right there.

It is Alcatraz, the 1 1/2 square mile of hardened earth that has witnessed a display of human struggle, on the offensive and the defensive. Used as a fort in the Civil War, a prison for the Hopi Indians in the late 1800's, a community and school, a prison for those who escaped prison, an occupation ground in '69 casting a spotlight on the Native American plight over land ownership, and now a tourist ground like Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean, but without the cool costumes and squirt guns....just National Park Service threads and audio phones. Here the things that cannot be contained, were contained. And those things that escaped this fog entrapped rock mound, are rumored to have ended, drown, eaten or disappeared to South America.

So. All and all I am going. With a free ticket in hand from the currently undefined male figure in my intimate life, and in the midst of my planning a trip to S. America, I embark. Hopefully, hopefully I will stumble across one endangered slender California salamander. Alcatraz, you are not a mirage. You're a rock; you're an island.