Another day of our trip commences in Sunny San Francisco. January back home in Toronto is a much different beast. Here: balmy. Home: blizzard. Here: sweater weather. Home: perma-parka.

With temperatures more like late spring where we’re from, my partner Peter and I set off for Alcatraz. We’d planned a number of day trips ahead of time—Muir Woods, Pier 39, the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. But when it came to Alcatraz, this was a suggestion Peter made with a probably not face, as he posed the question : “You wouldn’t be interested in that, would you?”

My answer: “Um, hells YES I would. Do you not know me AT ALL?”

For those of you who don’t, let me tell you: I am fascinated by history. Not just by the things that remain, but by the stories that a place can hold and the roles these places play in our collective story. Alcatraz has for many years been a bucket list item of mine. It’s somewhere that I want to see first-hand; to experience and absorb. By osmosis, perhaps, as if simply breathing the air and feeling the rock beneath my feet, I will finally know Alcatraz.

But herein lies the difficulty which makes Alcatraz so tantalizingly haunting. I can never truly experience it first-hand. The Alcatraz that fascinates my historical curiosity is the one which existed in the 1930s. It is the one from whence the most terrible stories of this prison come, and it no longer exists. What remains is the sanitized tourist version that is safe and scrubbed of terror. Of boredom. Of yearning. Of solitude and violence and humanity at its worst.

But if that’s all there is, then I’ll take it. And let’s be honest: deep down I know that I don’t want to know the real Alcatraz. I have a healthy dose of respect for the truth of its past, and am fully aware that I am looking back with naivety. With rose-tinted glasses that paint The Rock in a nostalgic light that I’ve picked up from movies like The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.

I won’t waste your time by recounting facts. I won’t rehash told-to-death impressions of what it was like to approach the shore and look upon the imposing collection of structures that dwell atop the island of the pelicans (the origin of the name Alcatraz supposedly derives from the Spanish alcatraces for said bird). So many before me have done that already. You can look it up online. This post is not about that.

I do have a few factual takeaways that made an impression on me, and if you’ll indulge me a moment, I’d like to share them because I don’t think they’ve been told to the point of cliché like other experiences have. First, there were the marks in the hospital wing from the rubber bullets that were shot during the filming of The Rock movie. Now that’s damn cool, because it blends my present with Alcatraz’s past. Ed Harris and Nicolas Cage stood right where I did. And so did (bestill my heart, this is AWESOME SAUCE!!) Tony Todd—Candyman himself!

Yes, I am a Candyman fan, but that’s a story for another day.

Then there was the story of the Birdman of Alcatraz. Turns out the movie didn’t quite tell it true. According to the record, Robert Stroud may have been a bit of a sociopath. He was certainly a troublemaker, and may not have actually contributed to ornithology the way the books remember. There were also the dungeons of solitary confinement, and how still and pitch-black the air was once they shut the doors and turned off the lights. It was so silent and thick that you could hear yourself breathing but wondered if you were really hearing it. To imagine how dehumanizing and maddening it must have been for the men who had to spend weeks on end down there…

But here’s the thing: I can’t imagine it. Not really. My imagination can never do Alcatraz justice, because my imagination is shaped by my reality. As I was walking the corridors and reading the displays and hearing the audio recordings, I have to admit that I was thinking how cool it would be to turn a place like this into a renovated, uber-quirky mansion. No one who had truly experienced, absorbed, been twisted by the true Alcatraz would have heard that and thought me sane.

And so, to the point of this post. I set foot on Alcatraz, but what did I come back with? Well, dear reader, it is this—Alcatraz gave me a new reverence that I wasn’t expecting to gain. As someone who is haunted by forlorn, lonely places with a past, I found that I was looking forward to the future, and what Alcatraz could become. Because blending the past and the present is me to the core, but I hadn’t realized it quite so vividly until this day. My love for history is not just about looking back, it’s about carrying the tapestry of the past forward and pulling out threads of beauty, in whatever form they exist.

In the end, I came to understand that it wasn’t Alcatraz the place that was a stain on human history, as I had always assumed. It is what humanity did within its walls and on its grounds. It was what the inmates did (or didn’t do) to get there in the first place, what they did to each other once they were there, what they did to the guards, what the guards did to them. Alcatraz isn’t those men and those horrors. It is a symbol of them. A reminder. But not an embodiment. For those that lived through it, and those who didn’t, I honour what they must think of the place at the same time that I honour what it is now: a piece of our past that has a profound place in our present and our future.

Alcatraz reminds us always of who we as human beings are, and what we can do to each other. But while I was reminded of this, I was also able to see it for what it could be with a little creativity. And that in itself was a reminder that Alcatraz is not a total representation of humanity. It is just a part.

Humanity is so much more than that one small island and the buildings that dwell upon it.