following an old georuby tutorial -- getting a data extraction error

[Third Replicator]

I followed this tutorial closely:

http://ym4r.rubyforge.org/tutorial_ym4r_georuby.html

(and updated the form to Rails 2+ syntax.)

And everything is fine except that

poly = zcta.the_geom[0] # This is supposed to yield the contour of
the shape as imported from the .shp shape file. But I'm only getting
a single character.

produces only the number "255"

because zcta.the_geom is a string.

in Ruby 1.87-p72, [] gives the ASCII value of the first character.

I'm just wondering what I should be doing to make this work right?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

***