In a story that ran in Oxford American late last year, author Patsy Sims recalls meeting a man accused of being a ringleader with the Ku Klux Klan, as well as organizer of the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. She conducted the interview in her motel room. “I realize now…that choosing to interview him in my motel room was not the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”

Reading Sims, I felt a twinge of recognition. I know well that craving for details, which make up the raw material of story, and my utter abandonment to do whatever it takes to get them. It’s a character trait of the journalist.

While this penchant of mine hasn’t brought me face-to-face with a killer, it has required me to step out of my comfort zone and into moments of adventure. From chasing bad guys at midnight in the seediest sides of Orlando to scanning the pitch-black Ocala National forest in a sheriff’s helicopter using a heat seeking infrared camera to find two lost little girls and a dog.

The most thrilling assignments that I remember usually took me aloft: from the co-pilot seat of a Virginia businessman’s private jet, for example, or in the open cockpit of a 1940s-era biplane in Hunterdon County, New Jersey.

In truth, though, it’s not the daring circumstances that have branded themselves in my brain, as much as the emotional landscape I’ve had to navigate. One of the most memorable was hearing a career paramedic give details on a call she answered in 1978, after only six months on the job. She and other first responders entered the Florida State University Chi Omega Sorority house at 2:00 a.m. and discovered the murder scene created by Ted Bundy. “We found one patient beaten and still alive,” she said. “We didn’t know there were multiple patients.” They just kept following the trails of horror.

There are other agonizing remnants that replay in my memory. Like the day I spent at the beach with a Boy’s Town teenager, which turned out to be my baptism into the carnage of sexual abuse of children. “My mother knew about it, you know,” the fifteen year old said as she dangled her legs on the edge of a fishing dock. “For all those years, he was doing that to me…and she let him.”

In author Patsy Sims’ KKK story, she pondered the panic she eventually felt at midnight, after concluding the interview. “I had never allowed fear to interfere with an assignment,” she writes. Yes, that too is familiar.

I’ll be embarking on yet another daring journalist adventure later this month to study under Patsy Sims in Baltimore. Like my lifetime spent chasing stories, I’m quite sure there will be no regrets.