A lesson in writing learned on NomeAlaska's Front Street

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.

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