‘Living beyond the label’

Photo and story by Ryan Fournier

Christopher Dee Gaylord, 29, is a married father of two. He’s enrolled in Peninsula College’s Composites Recycling program, and is a member of the school’s Carbon Club. He’s also a level-three sex offender. He has experience in tree planting and other land work related to fire safety and conservation. Now, as a parent, he hopes to find work that won’t wreck his body.

“I honestly don’t think that I have seen a more hard-working student,” said Emma Jones, navigator for the Composites program. “He has to work twice as hard as everybody else.”

For at least six months between age 10 and 11, Gaylord was molested by an older man “damn near every night,” he said.

In the few years that followed, he became the abuser. When Gaylord was 15, he was convicted of child molestation, court documents show.

He was released at age 20.

“That’s where I started, as far as living life, and look at me now. I’m in college.”

He lives his life among posters showing his picture, registry level and charges. He said when he moves to a neighborhood, he likes to let the locals know who he is right away, so that when the flyers get posted, no one is surprised.

“I’m out there working, and trying to be a citizen just like anyone else,” Gaylord explained.

It’s simpler said than done.

He said he was kicked off a roofing job once, because the property manager received a slew of calls from concerned residents who knew Gaylord’s history.

Though he’s low-income with family, he said he’s ineligible for subsidized housing, because of the presence of vulnerable people, such as children and the elderly.

Gaylord owns a trailer, which is still at his old residence in Port Townsend, where he lived with his wife and sons until coming to Port Angeles for school.

Until he’s able to relocate the trailer, he’s spending nights in a car, or with friends and family. He can only spend 72 hours in a place before posters about his presence have to go up, which is trouble he doesn’t want to bring to people he knows, he said.

So, Gaylord moves frequently, and every week he reports to the Sheriff where he spent each night.

He and his wife don’t want their sons to feel that instability, he said. His wife and the boys stay put as much as possible.

“Both boys will get exuberant,” he said, whenever he makes it back to them. His sons are three and one. “Each time they see me, it’s like they haven’t seen me for a long time… That hurts.”

“It’s become my life to struggle through it,” Gaylord said.

In the future, he hopes he can drop the label, and move on to “living life normally like any other citizen.”

Also, he said he’d like to be an inspiration for others with pasts like his own, and show them that a life can be made despite it.

“But it’s going to take extra work, and you have to put your mind into it.”

‘Living beyond the label’ is a phrase Gaylord borrows from a friend of his with a similar past.

He’s created a saying of his own too: “The monster I am, unless the person I become, every day.”

Gaylord said coming to Port Angeles is “a whole new drive in life,” after being in Port Townsend long enough to be known in the community. “I gotta see where this goes.”