Darryl's family is visiting him for the week, and he's taking them to Alcatraz on Friday.
I told him about my favorite part of the Alcatraz tour: standing in the prison cells and listening to an audio tape about the prisoners. One sequence took place outside a cramped cell with a hole in the base of the wall, and the tape described how 3 men managed to escape in the 60s:
"The theory is that they hid away spoons and chipped every night for hours against the wall. After ten years, they managed to dig a tunnel beneath their cells using these spoons, and they slipped out into the duct and escaped."
It's likely that they froze to death swimming to San Francisco, or were eaten by sharks, but there's also a good chance that they have managed to survive. Since this only happened in the 60s, it's quite possible for them to still be alive today.
When I heard this, I knew that it would be undeniably tempting for those escaped prisoners to come back and take the Alcatraz tour, so they can hear themselves described as the only successful escape.
So, there in the dim prison hall, when it got to the part about the spoons, I fully expected one of the white-haired old men standing in the tourist crowd next to me to blurt out,
"Spoons?! That's not how I did it at all!"
My aunt called the view "true torture" when they were here over the Christmas period and I took them to Alcatraz.
ReplyDeleteWasn't that escape made into a movie? Yeap.
ReplyDeleteI visited Alcatraz once.
ReplyDeleteTerrible place.