street roots
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Nov. 23, 2012
‘Sounding the deeps of his nature’
Remembering Ted Jack
BY ISRAEL BAYER
S T A F F W R IT E R
ied Jack was a simple man. He lived a
very complex and hard life.
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Born on a boat off the Alaskan
coast into a youth spent in orphanages, Ted
ran away from a world he would never
speak about. He was all of eight years old.
Learning how to look after his needs at a
very young age and not to rely on others,
Ted lived a life few human beings could ever
imagine.
Ted did what many young men and
women have done throughout the centuries
when faced with surviving in the world
without an education and a family safety
net: He learned the life of a fisherman.
From age 11 until his early-20s, Ted
worked on fishing boats in the Bering Sea
and in canneries along the Alaskan coast,
two of the most grueling and dangerous
jobs in the world.
“He would go out on the fishing boats
during the season, make good money, stay
in hotels and party really hard and then
he’d be back staying in his tent for the rest
of the off season,” says Mellani Calvin, a
friend and one of Ted’s former social
workers. “He would mostly work on smaller
fishing boats that flew under the tax radar,
not the big commercial operations.”
To look at Ted’s life through the
interviews with friends and social workers,
and having my own relationship with Ted,
much of his life would appear to be filled
with one tragedy after another. It would be
hard to argue anything different. There
were also moments of triumph.
By the time Ted was 20, he was living
homeless under trailers, in tents and in
doorways. He began hearing voices in his
head and self-medicated with alcohol. Ted’s
life had become a living nightmare with
hallucinations and hearing voices. He found
himself traveling from town to town,
hopping trains and taking solace again and
again in alcohol.
His life became a cycle of violent fits of
rage, fist fights, broken bones and binge
drinking He was even hit by a car. All of
this resulted in countless trips to the
emergency room and jail in his early 20s.
Over the next few years, Ted was
hospitalized in several psychiatric units
throughout Alaska and the Pacific
Northwest, roaming from one institution to
the other while experiencing homelessness
and alcoholism in between. His health was
taking a beating.
In 2000, it seemed that Ted wanted the
pain and the voices in his head to simply
stop. That December, he lit himself on fire,
suffering second- and third-degree burns.
He became obsessed with doing this again
the following year. On more than one
occasion Ted had tried to commit suicide.
He was only 30 years old.
In 2002, things went from bad to worse.
Ted was savagely attacked by several men
and left to die homeless on the streets of
Anchorage, Alaska. Doctors had to fuse his
vertebra together. The attack also
aggravated his scores of traumatic brain
injuries. He spent the next three months in
a Seattle rehabilitation center learning to
walk again, and the rest of his life disabled.
See TED JACK, page 9
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