Escape from Alcatraz (Sunday Times)

August 16th, 2009

The pilot kills the engine and we drift to a stop until we are rocking in the waves. Alcatraz is fifteen metres away, my starting point. A mile and a half across the bay, lies the prize of San Francisco – a thicket of skyscrapers shimmering in the early morning haze. It’s the moment that I’ve been dreading but which hundreds of inmates would once have longed for – a chance to swim to freedom.

The powerful mythology of Alcatraz refuses to die. When fog is not shrouding the Bay, the prison’s implacable architecture of cellhouse, water tower and lighthouse are clearly visible, a grim but fascinating reminder of the most notorious Devil’s Island of all. Named by a Spanish explorer after alcatraces – pelicans – it spent most of its inhabited years as a US military fort and prison. Only in 1934 did it become the infamous federal penitentiary and then for just 29 years before high running costs led Attorney General Bobbie Kennedy to order its closure. But by then its reputation was assured. 45 years on, it attracts over a million tourists a year and the previous day I had been one of them. And despite the hundreds of camera toting people disembarking at regular intervals, the tour manages to convey the island’s bleak otherworldliness.

Think of Alcatraz inmates and you see brutal master criminals – Al Capone, Robert “the Birdman” Stroud, George “Machine Gun” Kelly. Yet in reality many were lesser criminals who had fallen foul of prison authorities and been transferred here. Standing in D block with your eyes closed to simulate solitary confinement, only the most heartless visitor will not empathise with these outlaws. Burt Lancaster playing Stroud in the 1962 film Birdman of Alcatraz summed up the inmate’s lot in classic Hollywoodese: “You sit and listen to your heartbeat. And you hear your life ticking away. The thing that swells in your head until you lose your mind is that you know, absolutely for sure, what’s coming next.” As with a great Cathedral, walking through the Cellhouse transports you to a different time. But for the real Alcatraz experience you have to make your own escape.

I strip off and feel the tart Pacific breeze on skin protected only by a pair of speedos. This has been the hardest decision of all – to forgo the reassurance of a wetsuit. Already I have the advantage of an accompanying boat, its pilot, and Gary, a local swimming guide who has planned my route against the strong tides. Wetsuits insulate and distance you from your surroundings you but if I’m going to escape from Alcatraz I want to know what it feels like. At least that was the plan, but now looking at the 16 Celsius, slate grey water of San Francisco Bay I can almost feel the chill leeching through my bones.

We wait as a tanker lumbers past and leaves me a clear run – the rest of the Bay is empty at this hour. Gary tells me it’s time. There’s nothing else for it but to jump in. Stinging and now fully awake, I swim to the “beach” which is covered by the high tide, take a few steps on the submerged pebbles, and touch the cliff where I’m to start from.

In 14 attempts involving 36 inmates, only one man, John Paul Scott is known to have definitely reached land. And when he clambered onto the rocks beneath the Golden Gate, he was so weakened – it was December and he had been swept away by strong tides – that he was taken to hospital before being identified and returned to Alcatraz. In two other attempts the men were never seen again, presumed drowned. The second and most famous of these took place in June 1962 and was dramatised in Don Siegal’s Escape from Alcatraz. It is the story of how Frank Morris – played by Clint Eastwood – and brothers Clarence and John Anglin, after months of digging with spoons, climbed onto the roof through the ventilation shaft and paddled away on a liferaft made from raincoats. To this day it remains the great unknown of Alcatraz lore – did they make it? Although some of their possessions were later discovered in the water their bodies were never found, leading romantics, including Siegel, to suggest that they got away.

So why was Alcatraz so difficult to escape from? On the tour, former inmate Darwin Coon who was signing copies of his autobiography, aimed a good putdown at my attempt. “It wasn’t the swim that kept us from doing it, it was those guns and watchtowers!” And yet the swim was crucial to Alcatraz’s escape-proof reputation. At only a mile and a half from land, distance was not the problem, and neither were the sharks the authorities liked to talk up. While there are Great Whites in the nearby ocean, San Francisco Bay is home to only harmless varieties. No, the real battle is against the tides and cold. The temperature ranges from 10 to 16 degrees while the powerful tidal flow from the Pacific can exceed seven miles an hour.

These are the practicalities, but the real key to the Alcatraz myth is the paradox of its location, isolated in the middle of the windswept Bay and at the same time within sight and sound of one of the world’s most free spirited cities. “It was all there for you to see…” wrote Jim Quillen, an inmate from 1942 to 1952. “Everything I want in my life, and it’s there. It’s a mile and a half away and yet I can’t get to it.”

I trot back into the Bay and start to crawl away from the island, seeking rhythm in my strokes and breathing. The water is a greenish hue and I can see no more than a foot or two ahead beneath the surface. After a fitful night dreaming that fog would separate me from the boat, cramp would disable me and a shark would finish me off, it’s a relief to be swimming. Sunlight strafes the Bay from my left, in the distance ahead rise the hilly streets of San Francisco, while to the right the Golden Gate Bridge glows orangey red. I feel lucky to be a protagonist in this famous setting.

I am by no means a pioneer. Gary estimates that about 5000 people a year do the swim, the vast majority local, with Swimtrek the niche British swimming holiday company taking only a dozen people here in 2008. But as with its other destinations, numbers look set to grow as swimmers seek out more and more exotic challenges.

Just as I am starting to think this is going to be a straightforward swim, the swell strikes. Every time I take a breath on the right, my mouth fills with salt water. Beforehand I imagined I’d have time to contemplate the prisoners’ various escapes. But in truth you are living in the moment. How do I feel? No cramp? Good. How is my stroke, how is my breathing? Am I on course?

A quick look back and I see I’ve come more than half way. I stop to admire the Golden Gate before launching into it again. My body is by now engulfed in an exquisite glacial stillness. I seem to be coping with the swell by rolling more from side to side but the tide is fast pushing me to the left. As my sightline of the twin apartment blocks of Russian Hill slides further to the right, Gary shouts for me to change course to a grey naval vessel. I can see the huge white cruise ship, Norwegian Star, looming to the left. I’m noticing a heaviness to my muscles now and is that slight tickling in my right calf, the precursor of cramp? Still, I’ve no choice. It’s simply a battle against the tide. I look up at the boat. “Head for the breakwater straight ahead,” Gary now shouts. He’s pointing to a seawall between the naval vessel and the cruise ship. I remember the pilot saying that there was a 100 metre exclusion zone around the latter, which doesn’t leave much margin for error. If it looks like I’m getting too close they’re going to make me swim round it to the left, I think. I speed up my stroke but still the wall is not getting closer. The cruise ship is sneaking towards me. I redouble my efforts. No change. I give it everything. A look – is it closer? Perhaps. I keep at it. The next time I look I’m definitely gaining on it. And then it’s only 20 metres to the wall and I know I’ve made it. I have got through the current and am safe from Norwegian harpoons. A few strokes later I reach out and touch the solidity of the pier. Out of breath, with tired, refrigerated limbs, it’s mere relief at this stage. “Great job,” says Gary. He tells me my time – 35 minutes, 40 seconds. In the boat I dry myself, my body on fire from the cold and pulsing with endorphins and the buzz of success. It’s only eight o’clock in the morning – if only all days could start this way.

It’s night and I’m lingering over lobster and mascarpone ravioli in RNM, one of the many sophisticated yet laid back places to eat in San Francisco. A beer followed by a half bottle of Californian red is helping me reminisce about my escape from “the Rock”. Darwin Coon was right. There were no guards, watchtowers or prison cells stopping me. But no matter. Being a tourist is all too often an aimless and passive existence. Throw yourself into the Bay and you become a player in your own Alcatraz narrative. I raise my glass and make a vow: “From now on buddie, I’m going straight.”

The trip was supported by Swimtrek and British Airways.

Entry Filed under: Foreign reportage, Lidos/wild swimming, Travel