A week or so ago I posted a news story I wrote several years ago about a trial in Nome. One result of that experience has stayed with me for years and I've thought about it quite often particularly when I am writing about other people.
You see, a couple of weeks after the trial, I was walking along Front Street in NomeAlaska (that's the way NomeAlaska folks say it, one word) and approaching me from the opposite direction came Ron Bloomstrand, the fellow who was convicted in that long trial I had written about at such length.
My first reaction was absolute panic. Could he have read the story? Did he recognize me? My mind raced through the story looking for anything he might have taken exception to. Nothing popped up but who knows what someone else would think?
I was about to make a quick detour and cross the street when I noticed he walked toward me with something of a shuffle and I realized he was chained at the ankle to four or five other residents of the Nome Jail. I learned later it was a normal trip taking prisoners to the library. Whew. I stepped to one side and we passed each other with no sign of recognition.
On further reflection I picked up a lesson I would carry the rest of my life. Prior to my winter in Nome, I had always worked for larger urban newspapers, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland and, yes, even Anchorage. Often stories written in those places came from phone conversations or observations, often without the slightest person-to-person contact. Chances were good I would never see that person again, let alone be recognized. But in a small town like Nome, with a population of fewer than 4,000 souls, anybody you write about you can expect to see on the street, in a store or perhaps worse in a late-night bar sometime in the near future.
Here's another example.
A few months later I wrote another long story about nationwide trafficking in endangered animal parts. One aspect of that story involved several polar bear skins from bears allegedly killed by Natives in the Nome area and ending up on the black market in New Orleans. The day that story came out I chanced to look out the front window to see a pickup truck idling double parked on Front Street in front of the office, the driver reading a Nome Nugget spread before him, a rifle hanging ominously from a rack behind him in the cab of the truck.
I looked right and left and saw three other similar vehicles their drivers involved in the same pursuit. Nothing came from it but it further solidified the lesson I had learned.
It made me think more carefully about the people I wrote about in the future, consider their reactions, feelings, possible actions. It went beyond concern for personal safety. In general people no matter who they are deserve some consideration when their lives are spread before the general public. And, since that time I have always tried to put that consideration to work in anything I have written. I'm sure I haven't always succeeded, but with a lot of things, I can say I understood and I tried.
Here's an example. A woman described for me some very personal experiences she had endured. She was very open telling me things she said she had never told anyone else. I wrote her story and then giving her that consideration, I let her read what I had written saying if she didn't want me to, I wouldn't include it in what I was doing. I had never done that before with anyone. I was fully prepared for her to tell me she would have preferred I didn't go with her story. But you know what? She told me she cried when she read it and then said please leave it in. I did, happy that it had gone that way, and with that lesson from NomeAlaska firmly cemented into my mind.
Old news
Friday, January 26, 2018
Saturday, January 20, 2018
Old news
In the winter of 1980 and '81 I went to Nome to run the Nome Nugget, Alaska's oldest continuously published newspaper for my friend Mark Fuersteneau who had just purchased the Nugget while he toured newspapers Outside. My first task there while Mark was still around was to cover the first murder trial in years in Nome. At the time I was reading Norman Mailer's "Executioner's Song," a non fiction account of the life of Utah murderer Gary Gilmore. If you have ever read any of Mailer's non fiction you know the excruciating detail he goes into.With that influence I went off to cover the trial. The verdict came down in the middle of the night a week later on the day we had to prepare the paper which had to be shipped to Anchorage by airplane for printing and sent back to Nome for Thursday distribution. So first thing in the morning I started writing telling Mark about two pages typed double spaced. I don't recall how many pages I wrote that morning but it was a lot more than two. As a matter of fact it filled half the front page, two full inside pages and jumped a couple of times to the back of the book – on deadline. To this day I think of this as the best news story I ever wrote. That is not comparing to anyone else, but me comparing my writing to my writing. However I will tell you this: after the paper came out both attorneys came to the office and purchased several copies and both said they wanted to send them to their law school professors. Later in the week the judge took me to lunch and told me it was the best trial story he had ever read. It certainly is the longest, so be warned.So here it is, the best news story I have ever written.
After a week-long trial, a Superior Court jury early
Tuesday morning returned with a verdict, finding Ronald Bloomstrand, 33, of
Nome, Alaska, and Hay River, Northwest Territories, Canada, guilty of
manslaughter.
Bloomstrand had been charged with first degree murder
in the shooting death of Harris Okbaok of Teller last June 22 in Nome.
As Judge Paul B. Jones polled the jurors at the 2
a.m. meeting Bloomstrand sat quietly at the defense table on the south side of
the courtroom, his lean, stoic Indian face showing little emotion, the same
demeanor that had sustained itself throughout the trial, failing him only once.
Where he had faced a life in prison, the verdict on the lesser charge
threatened a maximum 20 years, not a situation to cheer but better than what
might have been.
Monday, January 15, 2018
Confession of a reluctant racist
. Perhaps Martin Luther King Jr. day is a good one for this, especially when the American racist in chief is claiming he is the least racist of anybody we might meet.
I have never felt I was a racist. Even though I grew up in a lilly white suburb and never interacted with a black person except for a couple of days in Florida, until I went into the Army, I made it a point at least in my head that we are all equal. I can say this at least: I didn't like all the racist jokes that went around in the 50s, I never laughed at one and I never told one and that was about the extent of my active social responsibility.
I lived through the civil rights movement in the sixties very sympathetic to the cause, though I don't recall doing anything about it,except for sophomoric college discussions. Still I felt I was always on the right side of racism issue.
So I Moved to Alaska which has its own racial issues. One summer day I was driving through a lake district on the Kenai Peninsula looking for a place to fish. I had had some luck on Hidden Lake the winter before so we pulled in there.
There was one of those pickup trucks with a camper in the bed parked next to a picnic table where a family of black people sat enjoying a meal.
The immediate reaction that came to my non-racist mind was I don't want to fish here. It wasn't specifically because of the African-American family, it was because if they were there, the only fish around were probably carp, not exactly a rational insight in Alaska waters.
But you see as I grew up, I used to see black women sitting on camp stools, their stockings rolled down to below their knees and fishing for carp in the Buffalo River. In my mind black people meant carp and I don't ever want a carp.
At the same time I was totally embarrassed by that obvious racist thought even though no one until now knows I had it.
Thinking about it I would bet there aren't many of us who haven't had some such thought about someone of another race at some time or other and to that extent we are all racists. The object then is to admit it and then fight it within ourselves, like alcoholics trying to remain sober. They will always be alcoholics but they can do something about it by staying sober. Perhaps we are all racists and knowing that and admitting it, we can live better lives understanding it and doing what we can to fight it within ourselves, and in the process treat our brothers and sisters on the planet with a measure of respect and an honest attempt at understanding.
Some folks on facebook relayed similar thoughts on the subject. They are worth reading. I am adding them as I receive permission from the writers.
Gretchen Small i have been having that same internal dialogue with myself for some time. i was raised by parents who were very non-racist by the standards of the day---- but as the years roll by i have dug deeper into my subconscious responses---and yes, racism is embedded in me due to the culture i grew up in. i have tried all my life to not let that be who i am, but cultural fabric is woven deep into the psyche of every member of that culture. Tim, our children were raised in a more racially open milieu than we, and they give me hope. the MLK Dream could never come in an easy blink of conscious rationale. deeply embedded subconscious responses are persistent weeds that are only rooted out with patient effort. the passing generations sometimes falter backwards, but human evolution marches forward. if there is a Homo sapien species surviving into the next century, the fruits of our internal moral stuggles will bear fruit.
Sharon Wright LA Unified School District started bringing black kids from East LA to our high school by bus in the 1960s. We had a diverse student body: white Christians & Jews, Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans, but no blacks until they were brought to our neighborhood. I had no black friends in high school but worked with black adults from age 17 on. Dated a black surfer in college who took 3rd at Huntington Beach one year; my father would have gone apoplectic had he known. So considered myself non-racist. Then I moved to Juneau, Alaska which in 1971 had a substantial Native population. It was more brown than white. Hmmm, whole new concept to accommodate. Moved around the state a bit and one night, flying into Fairbanks from Outside, I discovered I'd locked my keys in our pickup. My little guy & I were locked out in the cold & dark. I thought & thought--had wire in the pickup bed--and here came two black guys about my age. Hey! I said, "I've locked my keys in my truck. Can you help me?" "Sure," they said. Surveyed the wire, said, Yep, we can do this! One wiggled the window down just a hair, bent that wire around into a loop on the end, slipped it in and bent it around to go down to the lock (remember when there were door locks you could pull up by the knob on top?) and pulled it up. Thank you, thank you! Off they went and off we went. Then the little guy said, "Mom, how did you know those guys would know how to get into our truck?" Hmmmm, was I being a racist? I just read this to Dave & he said, Nah. If they'd been white, they probably would've known too. I helped Nick (a Native friend) break into his truck when he locked his keys in it.
I have never felt I was a racist. Even though I grew up in a lilly white suburb and never interacted with a black person except for a couple of days in Florida, until I went into the Army, I made it a point at least in my head that we are all equal. I can say this at least: I didn't like all the racist jokes that went around in the 50s, I never laughed at one and I never told one and that was about the extent of my active social responsibility.
I lived through the civil rights movement in the sixties very sympathetic to the cause, though I don't recall doing anything about it,except for sophomoric college discussions. Still I felt I was always on the right side of racism issue.
So I Moved to Alaska which has its own racial issues. One summer day I was driving through a lake district on the Kenai Peninsula looking for a place to fish. I had had some luck on Hidden Lake the winter before so we pulled in there.
There was one of those pickup trucks with a camper in the bed parked next to a picnic table where a family of black people sat enjoying a meal.
The immediate reaction that came to my non-racist mind was I don't want to fish here. It wasn't specifically because of the African-American family, it was because if they were there, the only fish around were probably carp, not exactly a rational insight in Alaska waters.
But you see as I grew up, I used to see black women sitting on camp stools, their stockings rolled down to below their knees and fishing for carp in the Buffalo River. In my mind black people meant carp and I don't ever want a carp.
At the same time I was totally embarrassed by that obvious racist thought even though no one until now knows I had it.
Thinking about it I would bet there aren't many of us who haven't had some such thought about someone of another race at some time or other and to that extent we are all racists. The object then is to admit it and then fight it within ourselves, like alcoholics trying to remain sober. They will always be alcoholics but they can do something about it by staying sober. Perhaps we are all racists and knowing that and admitting it, we can live better lives understanding it and doing what we can to fight it within ourselves, and in the process treat our brothers and sisters on the planet with a measure of respect and an honest attempt at understanding.
Some folks on facebook relayed similar thoughts on the subject. They are worth reading. I am adding them as I receive permission from the writers.
Gretchen Small i have been having that same internal dialogue with myself for some time. i was raised by parents who were very non-racist by the standards of the day---- but as the years roll by i have dug deeper into my subconscious responses---and yes, racism is embedded in me due to the culture i grew up in. i have tried all my life to not let that be who i am, but cultural fabric is woven deep into the psyche of every member of that culture. Tim, our children were raised in a more racially open milieu than we, and they give me hope. the MLK Dream could never come in an easy blink of conscious rationale. deeply embedded subconscious responses are persistent weeds that are only rooted out with patient effort. the passing generations sometimes falter backwards, but human evolution marches forward. if there is a Homo sapien species surviving into the next century, the fruits of our internal moral stuggles will bear fruit.
Sharon Wright LA Unified School District started bringing black kids from East LA to our high school by bus in the 1960s. We had a diverse student body: white Christians & Jews, Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans, but no blacks until they were brought to our neighborhood. I had no black friends in high school but worked with black adults from age 17 on. Dated a black surfer in college who took 3rd at Huntington Beach one year; my father would have gone apoplectic had he known. So considered myself non-racist. Then I moved to Juneau, Alaska which in 1971 had a substantial Native population. It was more brown than white. Hmmm, whole new concept to accommodate. Moved around the state a bit and one night, flying into Fairbanks from Outside, I discovered I'd locked my keys in our pickup. My little guy & I were locked out in the cold & dark. I thought & thought--had wire in the pickup bed--and here came two black guys about my age. Hey! I said, "I've locked my keys in my truck. Can you help me?" "Sure," they said. Surveyed the wire, said, Yep, we can do this! One wiggled the window down just a hair, bent that wire around into a loop on the end, slipped it in and bent it around to go down to the lock (remember when there were door locks you could pull up by the knob on top?) and pulled it up. Thank you, thank you! Off they went and off we went. Then the little guy said, "Mom, how did you know those guys would know how to get into our truck?" Hmmmm, was I being a racist? I just read this to Dave & he said, Nah. If they'd been white, they probably would've known too. I helped Nick (a Native friend) break into his truck when he locked his keys in it.
Jan Williams Simone Here is an incident I remember. From a very young age I had and still have strong beliefs about how to treat other people. One day I was at Low Library at Columbia University, pregnant with my second child, and working on my master's thesis. I was really tired, so tired that I desperately wanted to close my eyes and sleep for just a little while, even though my chair was sort of in the middle of a room. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a young black woman digging through her bag set on the floor next to me, very near my purse and pile of books. There was a lot of carpet around her; she didn't have to be there. I deliberately thought to myself, if I pick up my bag and put it on my chair with me, she will be offended. So I didn't. The next thing I knew I was still sitting there but had clearly dozed off. I didn't even look in my bag. It was only later, when I went to pull out my wallet, that I saw it was gone. All of my old photos, including a precious one of my parents when they were young, my driver's license, whatever money I had, etc., gone. I never thought of myself as having any more than the mildest prejudices. What lesson was there to learn? It was to be more wary. But I don't think my new wariness was racially tinged, because thieves have no color. It was sort of a reverse prejudice operating in my mind - don't hurt anyone even if they might hurt you. Is that some sort of insidious reverse racism? If it had been a white woman kneeling on the floor next to my purse in the middle of a room, I would have been just as vulnerable. But maybe I would have moved the bag.... Becoming street smart - that is a lesson you usually learn the hard way.Betty Sederquist Our generation carries a lot of these racist undertones whether we realize it or not. I try to do the right thing, but my socially attuned daughters call out my missteps on a regular basis. Interesting to examine all of this. I grew up in a lily-white, conservative part of the country. My sometimes liberal parents bent over backwards to accommodate the rare black folks who came our way but had some interesting opinions on Jews. My French mother hated people from Algeria. This nonsense goes on and on.A friend sent this link to me.. It's a magazine article dealing with this subject. I couldn't manage to get the link copied but if you search How to stop the racist in you | Greater Good Magazine greatergood.berkley.edu. It's a good read and like a lot of things we worrry about in life, it's comforting to know others have the same anxieties.
Saturday, January 13, 2018
I'll see your bet and raise three nukes
. The last thing I heard from the radio before I fell asleep last night was Trump claiming his tough talk was the reason North and South Korea are talking these days.
The first thing I heard on waking up this morning was ballistic missiles were heading for Hawaii.
Put that together for a minute.
First thought was sitting in a remote situation far from any likely target, I probably didn't have an immediate problem, except maybe given the reliability of North Korea's missiles, I might take a direct hit, but my danger would most likely be exposure to radiation somewhere down the line.
Then the thought process came in how we might have gotten to this point.
That too might be credited to Trump's tough talk. He said it like that was his idea all along. Given all his temperamental tweets, that's unlikely.
Regardless, his "tough talk" probably caused more concern in this country than North Korea, especially those of us on the exposed West Coast.
It's not a game of poker, you don't bluff with nuclear weapons, period. Tough talk, indeed could have gone either way. Two hot heads comparing the size of their buttons is not the way toward resolution, it is the way to destruction that could spread worldwide. Once again, YOU DO NOT BLUFF WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS. The fact they exist is enough.
How deep is the fear in this country and how believable is a missile threat? One friend of mine on facebook who is vacationing in Hawaii wrote about feeling that threat and in the helplessness of the situation she did the only thing she could think of: She called her family to tell them she loved them.
I don’t have the answer to this, but I wonder if it would have been as terrfying if we took Trump’s sabre rattling out of the picture. I recall during the Obama terms, North Korean threats were greeted with some hilarious memes ridiculing Kim and the NC military. I haven’t seen one attempt at humor this time around.
So who created that kind of concern among Americans? Of course there is Kim Jon Un in Korea but the one who escalated with his supposed bluff is right here in this country and he lives in a big house while the rest of us pay the rent and one day we may pay dearly. Bluff, indeed.
The first thing I heard on waking up this morning was ballistic missiles were heading for Hawaii.
Put that together for a minute.
First thought was sitting in a remote situation far from any likely target, I probably didn't have an immediate problem, except maybe given the reliability of North Korea's missiles, I might take a direct hit, but my danger would most likely be exposure to radiation somewhere down the line.
Then the thought process came in how we might have gotten to this point.
That too might be credited to Trump's tough talk. He said it like that was his idea all along. Given all his temperamental tweets, that's unlikely.
Regardless, his "tough talk" probably caused more concern in this country than North Korea, especially those of us on the exposed West Coast.
It's not a game of poker, you don't bluff with nuclear weapons, period. Tough talk, indeed could have gone either way. Two hot heads comparing the size of their buttons is not the way toward resolution, it is the way to destruction that could spread worldwide. Once again, YOU DO NOT BLUFF WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS. The fact they exist is enough.
How deep is the fear in this country and how believable is a missile threat? One friend of mine on facebook who is vacationing in Hawaii wrote about feeling that threat and in the helplessness of the situation she did the only thing she could think of: She called her family to tell them she loved them.
I don’t have the answer to this, but I wonder if it would have been as terrfying if we took Trump’s sabre rattling out of the picture. I recall during the Obama terms, North Korean threats were greeted with some hilarious memes ridiculing Kim and the NC military. I haven’t seen one attempt at humor this time around.
So who created that kind of concern among Americans? Of course there is Kim Jon Un in Korea but the one who escalated with his supposed bluff is right here in this country and he lives in a big house while the rest of us pay the rent and one day we may pay dearly. Bluff, indeed.
Wednesday, January 3, 2018
On being a good moose neighbor
. .  |
| There are parts of five moose in this picture. |
I went to the picture window to see if the mountain was out. It wasn't, but there was a moose browsing through a thicket at the bottom of the hill right next to my trail.
Now that put a kink in my plan. Sure, I could make some noise and chase it out of there, but that's poor form when you live with wildlife. Moose are stressed in winter, food is in short supply and their energy gets down and they don't need any extra stress. Best to leave her alone. I am in no hurry. I took a few pictures and started some indoor projects, all the time watching her while she took her sweet time. Two hours later she hadn't moved 20 feet. An hour after that I took another look and watched as she calmly laid down. Interesting, she laid there for some time her head up her ears alert, as if making sure it was safe to sleep. Then while I was beginning to lose daylight for my snowmachine sojurn she seemd to sigh and then stretched her neck out, put her her chin down on the snow and most obviosuly went to sleep. How rude.
Counting the time she spent alert listening for danger, she laid there for almost three hours.
Toward 3 in the afternoon I looked down to check on her and I heard a sound in the woods off to the west. It sounded like a human talking in a normal voice, too far away to hear what was being said.
Only a couple of minutes later at least four and maybe as many as six moose burst out of the forest from that direction heading right for my sleeping friend. She sprang up in a heart beat. What I saw as I wrestled with my camera to get it to focus on the moose instead of some damned twig somewhere betweeen us (later I remembered how to go to manual focus) was a big bull a couple of smaller moose, probably mature cows and a couple of yearlng calves. One of them was bawling while it ran past. I assummed it was one of the calves, maybe hurt. They moved through pretty fast, though the bull stopped for a moment to check out the moose that had been there all day.
Then they all moved off, the group northeast toward the river and my cow somewhere up the hill to the southeast.
That was when the snow started falling. That took the last of the potential fun out of the snowmachine riding for me and I went back indoors for a good long nap. Tomorrow is another day.
Monday, January 1, 2018
New Year's Eve 2017
The one spot of color came when a Pine grosbeak joined the chickadees and redpolls around the feeder, but that even took flash to bring out the color.
After pounding out new trails on snowshoes yesterday, I finally drove the snowmachine up to the cabin today, one of those major successes necessary at the beginning of each winter here.
Indoors there's a Bob Dylan retrospective on the radio and a rack of lamb thawing on the wood stove for a late New Year's Eve dinner, wine chilling on shelf outside the kitchen window.
Thinking best wishes in the New year to everyone, and in my head that includes all the folks on those lists of people being discriminated against. I am not religious but I like to ask myself at times WWJD.
For the future my only wish is that events in 2018 don't turn 2017 into the good old days.
An updare on the tweaker house
A happy new year update on that tweaker house I worked on since July. My friend's son, daughter-in-law and two children began moving into the almost finished remodel yesterday. Dec. 30
The original story
The original story