Alcatraz National Park is famous for the immersive experience it provides visitors. You can clamber around much of the island (though nowhere that is home to either dangerous broken things or feathered newborn things). You can sit in a jail cell! You can look at actual replicas of the actual replicas some prisoners made of their own heads as part of a daring escape (chronicled by a TV show called America's Most Wanted, which actually created said copies of copies)! Period bottles, tools, toiletries, and knick-knacks! We even got to see an almost-fight (two dads, one child instigator)! All of this, and the justly famous audio tour.

None of these features would be as effective, though, without such a proper introduction to set the mood:

You're guilty. "Everyone is," you mutter, but then again not everyone is here, on some pier waiting to be shipped to that island prison they set up. To your immediate left is a horizontal metal bar, physically mirrored on your right. This is not home, does not promise a hearth any time soon, and the smattering of foreign languages coming from the crowd suggests that any families to be found are of the variety that find themselves in a prison together.

You're moving - at times - through a snaking line. At this bend, your identity is verified by a little guy who scribbles nothing in particular on your papers. The next change in linear direction reveals an inappropriately cheerful man who takes your photo in front of a large picture of the island. When you wonder, out loud, if the conditions there are bad enough they won't even send the photographer, the skinhead in front of you mentions that he heard they at least let you have a copy of your photo after your time, though there's some kind of fee attached. He says he heard about one guy who tried to steal it; doesn't know what happened to him. You wonder if the signs advising against just such a heist back up his story, or helped to write it.

It smells like people, stagnant sea, and simple foods. A large steel ship is droning up to the dock. Some kind of pre-recorded warning is playing on a loudspeaker somewhere. The final bend in the line is just ahead. It's where you get your ticket punched - for Alcatraz.