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The Move

Alaska Bound

By Forrest RhodesPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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I will never forget the day CPS came and took me away. I was living in a motel in Port Angeles when this man came. He sat down on the bed and looked at me in the eyes and asked a simple question. “How would you like to go live with your father in Alaska” to which I immediately replied, “Only if my mom can come too”. He assured me she would telling me that they would fly me up there first and then let my mom get her things together and send her up after. I was 11 years old, and I was ecstatic at the thought of us all being a family again. The reality was very much the opposite.

I was sent up to live with my father in what you would very much call a rural community. I lived on an Island called Kosciusko Island in a community called Edna Bay. Named after a prostitute who lived there and would sleep with all the old loggers. There were 7 kids in my school and we didn’t have any running water or electricity. We used a generator at night and would use a wood stove for heat. Here I was, showing up on my dad’s door step, 11 years old, and afraid. At the time I was removed from my mom’s custody, I was drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes and weed, and never had any real guidance. My father is a hard man. A good man, but a hard one. He will out work almost anyone and has a never back down attitude. He also liked to drink. And would go on benders for days and sometimes weeks at a time. So again, here I was, 11 years old. Separated from everything I had ever known, and placed with a man I didn’t know very well. I will never forget that day. I was flown into Naukati and took a short skiff ride to Tuxekan Island. My dad was falling trees at the time for a friend of his and we stayed on a tug boat named “The Flying Tiger”. When my dad got done with that job we went to Edna Bay in what was to be my home for the next couple years.

The summer came and went and in my mind, my mom was still going to be joining us when school started. I remember the first day of school. The teacher (we only had one for the whole school) had us write a report about our summer. I wrote about coming to live with my dad and how excited I was that my mom would be coming soon to join us. I wrote about how I couldn’t wait to be a family again. It was shortly after that, I found out that she was never coming and that all my dreams of being a family were broken. I felt heartbroken and betrayed. Not just by CPS, but by my mom and dad as well. I held a lot of resentment towards my dad for that. I felt as if my trust had been broken. Little did I know at the time, that he had no control over it, and I know telling me that my mom wasn’t coming, was the hardest thing he ever had to do.

Life went on and I slowly become adjusted to life in the sticks. My dad had bought me a 3 wheeler and I would take it out and ride it. It was one of the only ways to have fun in a land where there is literally nothing. The days were filled with school, chores, homework, and occasionally hanging out with a friend here or there. As I said earlier though my dad liked to drink. He would keep me up at night and talk about how messed my life was and how he wouldn’t let me turn out bad. He told me of my mom’s past. He told me of things a child has no business knowing about their parents. He told me my mom’s mother had committed suicide, and how she had done terrible things to my mom. He told me of my mother’s grandpa who had molested her, and about my mom’s father who had beat her. He told me everything. And he told me why he told me. He would say “I only have a short time before you grow up and I came into your life late, you need to know these things so you know what to look out for in the future. You need to understand why your mom turned to drugs and made the choices she made.” I get it now being an adult. But back then after all the things I had been through and all of the things I had seen, I didn’t get it. I hated him for it. I remember wishing he would get hit by a tree he was falling and wouldn’t make it home some days. To this day, I regret ever thinking that way. I was a child and had never known anything other than hurt my whole life and I had so much anger built up towards the world. I remember one night telling him how much I hated him. He pushed me up against the wall and sent me to my room. Later that night, I heard him crying in the living room and went out to apologize. He looked at me and said “son, an angry tongue never lies”. He was right, but also wrong. It took me a long time realize I didn’t hate him, I hated myself, and my life. I hated everything that I had gone through and would lie awake at night wishing it would just end.

I ended up joining a program called peer helpers. Where kids around southeast Alaska would go and learn helpful tools to help prevent suicide. We would do improv and other activities that taught us to help others. Since my first experience with that, I knew that was my calling in life. To help people who are in need. My time in Edna bay came to an end because the school closed down so we ended up moving to a larger community named Naukati on Prince of Wales Island. My time on POW is where I started to get a good sense of who I was. There were 40 kids in my school now and I made lifelong bonds with some of them. I started playing sports and played basket ball, ran cross country, and wrestled. These times in my life were good times. I was always out of the home. Riding my 3-wheeler and hanging out with friends. I remember finally feeling like I belonged somewhere. It was here that I started to write too. And because of that, I was invited to Juneau at 14 to meet with the legislature’s and senators and ended up getting 1.4 million dollars funded to the community to build a new school. A school that I, to this day have never set foot in. I moved away shortly after but I will get to that in a later blog post.

Moving to Alaska was in many ways one of the best things that could have happened to me. I met lifelong friends, got to know my father better, and got to know myself. I will never forget the times I shared with the people up there and am thankful to this day of the experience. It has helped me to relate so much more with people. I mean, after all, when you lived the life I have it’s easy to find at least one thing that I have in common with people.

Thanks for reading a bit more about me. I plan on opening up more about my times and go into detail about certain events but in order to not confuse or bore anyone I kind of need to give a little back story first. So you can get to know WHO I am and WHY I write.

With love,

Forrest Rhodes

travel
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About the Creator

Forrest Rhodes

Father of 6

I make capes out of curtains and pretend to stick pens up my nose.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but nobody likes to read a picture book more than once.

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