Prelude to Chaos

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The Atlantic rollers, lashed by the storm winds of the equinox, thundered onto the rocks below the Pen and flung their spray against its walls. Working high on the radio tower, I paused to taste the salt on my lips, watch the gulls wheeling in the updrafts, and look out to sea. For over three years, ever since I had been sentenced, these brief interludes when I climbed to adjust antenna couplings were my only glimpses of the outside world, my only sight of the desolation surrounding the last Federal Penitentiary in the United States.

The last top-security prison on the continent; the final masterpiece of the prison-architect’s art. It stood alone, brooding and massive, at the tip of a barren peninsula. To the north, tides were racing into the Bay of Fundy, to the west, a rocky neck of stunted trees and coarse scrub merged into the forests of Maine, to the south, the coast was a curve of white breakers and distant headlands. And out to sea, to the east, night was rising from the Atlantic Ocean. All around me was desolation, a desolation which separated two hundred million peaceable Americans from wild animals like myself.

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