I have one ambitious project to present today, the year’s final MEGABUS journey, and a true race against time! Last week’s adventure to Santa Rosa Island put me in the mood for some more island adventures, so I decided to be daring and tackle three more islands, this time in the San Francisco Bay Area. Can you guess which ones? Let’s go!
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Part 1: The Isle of Gannets!
At 9:10 AM, I weighed anchor with Alcatraz Cruises, whose massive ferries take an average of 300 people to and from the island each way! At first I thought the island would be swarming with people, but Alcatraz is much bigger than it looks from Fisherman’s Wharf! Alcatraz Island was never just a prison; it’s named after the gannets that nest on the island! It was only in 1850 that Millard Fillmore claimed Alcatraz as an army base to guard the nation’s newly discovered gold assets from foreign thieves! Its time as a prison only spanned 29 years from 1934 to 1963!
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Because of this varied history, I decided to do something a little different! While most of the crowd beelined for the cell blocks, I joined up with Dick, the island CCO (that’s Chief Composting Officer) for a tour of the island’s gardens. After all, gardens were the island’s main redeeming factor. Dick introduced us to the plants still growing on the island after nearly a hundred years and demonstrated their incredible hardiness, starting with a fuchsia (var. Rose of Castile) that was around 70 years old! He pointed out that most people buy fuchsias until the flowers fall off then throw them away. However, this fuchsia proves that patience keeps beautiful things alive!
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Dick led us to his mighty compost pile, which he keeps at a steady 150 degrees Fahrenheit using a layering technique. Then he showed us his ribbons from the Marin County Fair! Only Marin County, he said, would give awards for compost! Still, given the National Park Service’s strict rules on biowaste, Dick has managed to turn all sorts of organic matter into compost (except eucalyptus, which is toxic)!
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While walking through one of the gardens, Dick pointed out a water tower, high above the Pride of Madeira, covered in graffiti. This, he said, was left over from the 1969 American Indian occupation of the island! Members of many different tribes descended upon the then-abandoned island to claim it in the name of disenfranchised tribes everywhere! Though the movement ultimately suffered from disorder after the tragic death of leader, Richard Oakes’ daughter, it marked a new turnaround in Native American cultural revival! The graffiti was covered up after the occupation ended until the National Park Service realized its historical importance and restored it by hand!
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When we made it to the Officer’s Row Garden, tucked down on the hillside, Dick told us how the officers used to come down into this secret garden for tea. It was also here where notorious counterfeiter, Elliott Michener, came to work, thinking it would be easy to escape. What he didn’t count on was that he would actually enjoy gardening, and be really good at it! In fact, after he’d landscaped Alcatraz and finished his sentence, he wrote to Warden Swope, saying “…[F]or the first time I’m learning how much better one can do living honestly than by, say, counterfeiting! We have cars & fat bank accounts… And we have a favor to ask: will you send us a bush of our old ‘Gardener’ rose?”
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I had only blocked out a two-hour chunk for this island, so I unfortunately had to skip through the prison that housed such notorious criminals as Al Capone, “Machine Gun” Kelly, and Robert Stroud, the so-called “Birdman of Alcatraz!” It was also the place where the US government imprisoned 19 Hopi rebels in 1895 for resisting the kidnapping of their children to be placed in “civilized” schools! There are some dark memories hanging over this place, so I hurried to catch the ferry back to the mainland! It took a little hustle downhill and a squeeze through a long line, but right on time, I escaped from Alcatraz!
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Part 2: The Isle of Angels!
At 1:20 PM, I set foot on Angel Island, the last Marin County Landmark! Only a hop, skip, and jump from the town of Tiburon, Angel Island is a popular State Park for hiking, biking, and sailing, but like Alcatraz, it wasn’t always a place for fun and games!
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Spanish Lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala, despite a pistol wound in his foot, landed here aboard the San Carlos on August 5th, 1775, the first European party to enter San Francisco Bay. He named it La Isla de Los Angeles in the Spanish custom, because he landed on it three days after the Feast of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles! The island very quickly became a military outpost, first for the Spanish, then the Mexicans, then the Americans in 1863. The goal of the latter? Keep California from the Confederacy!
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The island is not that big, but when you only have an hour and a half to enjoy it before the last boat leaves for the week, it’s best to go by bike! So, I huffed and puffed my way up the steep roads and landed at the ruins of Fort McDowell, a former staging post for troops fighting at home and abroad! These ruins are eerily beautiful now, and fully explorable, but until the 1950s, Angel Island was a place for processing, rather than exploring. Military troops would stop here first before launching into campaigns against the Native Americans, or later the Axis Powers, then return here once their campaigns ended. In many ways, Angel Island served as the Western gateway to the US, which makes its name even more fitting!
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Anyone entering the US via Pacific had to pass through Angel Island starting in 1892 for document inspection and quarantine as necessary. While this was a fine idea in the beginning, it discriminated heavily against people from China, thanks to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882! Many immigrants were able to get by with little more than a cursory document check, but Chinese immigrants often had to stay in quarantine for months, sometimes over a year! There is now a memorial to these newcomers who received the rudest welcome ever, though the only thing that can repay those who experienced this nightmare is to never let such a thing happen again!
Suddenly realizing I had 15 minutes to return my bike and catch the boat back to the mainland, or else be marooned for a full week, I zoomed back down to the harbor, breaking a few laws of physics! With a stroke of great fortune, I leapt aboard and headed back to Tiburon to push forth to the final island. If only traffic would let me catch the sunset!
The Isle of Gold Dust!
It was a frantic lurch through southbound traffic, watching the sun dip lower in the sky. How I made it to Treasure Island by 4:45 is a marvel! Then again, so is the fact that Treasure Island exists at all! It is an entirely artificial island, constructed from sediment dredged up from the bottom of the bay and from the Sacramento Delta! Because of the sediment from Sacramento, it was named “Treasure Island” because someone imagined the dirt might be full of gold dust!
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Historically speaking, Treasure Island is pretty new! It was built to house the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition and to celebrate the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge and the ascent of California on the world playing field that this symbolized. Visitors described it as a “magic city,” an element of which is preserved in the glamorous statues of at the Administration Building, which you may also recognize as the Berlin airport from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade!
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Originally, the island was meant to become San Francisco’s first airport after the Exposition concluded, but then World War II happened, and the Navy moved in (I’m detecting a pattern here)! The island has been under naval control since, but it has certainly opened up for civilian visitors! In fact, the guard at the entrance station just waved and said “Go right on in!” A friend had asked me to pick up a bottle of wine while I was there, and sure enough, when I found the winery, it was operating in what was once a Naval prison! It is a strange mix of military and civilian life on Treasure Island, but I think that makes it exciting!
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So, after an intense day of island hopping, I finally got to sit down and watch the most spectacular sunset I’ve seen all year. I finished up two counties on my Landmark hunt today, enjoyed two boat rides, and relished the pleasant weather of mid-November. The sun has set over my Bay Area adventures for 2013, but I fully intend to be back here regularly next year!
Yo ho ho, and a bottle of vino!
