Surrounding the pool table in the back room of Camp Kingston can be found a pop-up art show of "Love Letters to Kingston" with photos, collages, drawings, doodlings, embroidered kerchiefs, handwritten letters, and one coiled snake. (What is love without a snake?) The emblematic photo may be of a car windshield pasted with fallen pink petals. In the same way the walls are pasted with affection expressed dozens of different ways. And contrary to my contrariness I have a photo series mixed in with the rest. Do I love Kingston? I guess I do.

I prefer to believe I'm a tough-hearted adherent to the dictum: Never love anything that can't love you back. Cats, yes. Goldfish, no. Physical objects, such as wedding photos or a deceased father's neckties (in my case), are treasured keepsakes, a reminder but not the love itself. But Kingston, an abstraction I can't even hold in my hands. What's to love? And how?

Here's how.

Let's go back to March 2020, the month that began with washing our hands with soap for twenty seconds and ended with the pandemic lockdown. At the time I lived in a upstairs loft at the Shirt Factory, which gave me a balcony view of the ambulance dispatch down the block. Busier than ever? Honestly, I couldn't say, but I heard every siren and feared for the worst.

In the city many people became prisoners of their apartments. At seven in the evenings they'd raised their windows to bang on pots and pans like the chimes of freedom. Oddly enough, I had the opposite experience. In mid-March I came down with a hacking cough — on the sidewalks people backed away as if I might be Typhoid Mary — but after I quarantined I was ready to burst free. For my afternoon outings I decided to walk every street in Kingston.

I hate to think of myself as a branded person, but a dozen years earlier a friend and I had compiled our "Walking Woodstock" columns from Woodstock Times into a book that became a local bestseller. We followed with The Pocket Guide to Woodstock presented as a historical walk around the village. Ever since then I've felt like an official "walker." And I'd been encouraged to write The Pocket Guide to Kingston. So at the peak of the pandemic with everything closed and everybody hunkered down at home, I knew there was no better time to explore this small city still rather new to me. By four or five in the afternoon I was out the door and headed in new directions. No maps, no planning. I wanted a voyage of discovery.

The first lesson of walking is nobody walks. Not really, especially not those with dogs, but it's remarkable how many streets and roads you can cover without encountering fellow pedestrians. But this is nothing new. Even Thoreau in the 1840s was viewed as oddball for preferring his own two feet to a horse carriage or a train. In Walking Woodstock I declared walking to be "the last radical act" left in Woodstock, and I brought the same spirit to Kingston, fancying myself as a rebel afoot — not just against cars, but speed, urgency, the demands to do something important with my time. I'm convinced I think best at walking speed, most clearly, most content. Did we not evolve as a species to walk? Why cheat ourselves of such a human experience?

My first destination was the water tower up on wooded ridgeline I'd glimpsed through my windshield countless times. I'd seen it, but where exactly was it located on what street? From the Shirt Factory, I crossed the railroad tracks and entered the cemetery that looked straight up at the tower. At the rear of the graveyard I encountered a fence, the bane of any walker, but someone had jimmied open a gap, so I slithered out and marched up a short a street to a dead end. Above could be seen the guardrail for another dead-end street up on the ridgeline. What the hell. I wasn't stuck with a car. I scrambled up into the tangled vines crowding this sunny hillside strip, then thrashed my way over into the trees where the climbing was much easier.

Trespassing? I suppose. But I felt like a kid again, a kid whose whole world is the neighborhood of surrounding houses and yards, the short cuts through hedges and trees, the secret hideaways and forts. No doubt, I rapidly fell in love with this walking project because I was reliving my childhood. Not since elementary school had I found so much adventure in my immediate surroundings. As an adult I'd become an avid peakbagger — the Catskills 3500 Club, the Adirondack 46ers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire — but now all I cared about was Kingston. No car required.

Past the guardrail, I reached the water tower, a giant white ball on a ring of stout legs, a monumental structure worthy of my climb and far more impressive than it had ever looked through my windshield. Even better were the panoramic views between houses of the Catskills on the skyline. Not the kind of postcard scenery I expected from Kingston, and a perfect spot for future sunsets. As I headed down the street I passed several brick Tudor homes, a little English enclave. At that point I realized that my tripartite understanding of Kingston was wrong. Not just the Uptown Stockade District, Midtown, and the Rondout, this city had a lot more variety. One afternoon, wandering off onto the side streets off the road down to Wilbur, I found find myself at the pond entrance to a farm, a pocket valley I would have sworn had been airlifted in from Montana. Such are the rewards of not knowing where you're going.

South of Washington Avenue I wandered up into the mid-Twentieth Century, the rolling green expanse of lawns and ranch houses and cul-de-sacs, wealth and loneliness. I can't say it wasn't pretty, the open space and the well-kept homes, the sweeping views of the Catskills, especially at salmon pink sunsets. But I felt loyal to the older Kingston below where we live packed close together in modest, comfortable homes marked by our own yard keeping and personality. It felt more democratic, more Whitmanesque, more committed to his vision of America as a vast tribe of lively characters, not a nation of hierarchy but of shared humanity. In older Kingston you could walk from a run-down boarding house to an elegantly restored colonial in 10 to 20 minutes. We may not know each other, but we really do live together.

My favorite destinations were the hills, or what we have for hills: the rugged, once-mined and ravaged limestone geology that fronts the Hudson River at Sojourner Truth State Park, then swings around through Hasbrouck Park, the Rondout, and Wilbur. I first moved to Kingston because the brick factories reminded me of Hoboken in the 1980s, where I landed after college, but now I was back in the woods where I truly belonged. Cliffs, caves, twisted trees — what's not to love if you're still living by your inner nine-year-old? One day, winding up a road from Wilbur to Green Kill, I discovered a small cemetery that dated back to the Civil War and extended like a flat buttress above the creek valley. Stately white pines. Simple grave markers, some with small flags. Then marching up the grassy flank an imposing tom turkey in full red wattle mode to show me who was the boss around here. How can you not love a town where you can get stared down by a wild turkey?

Every walk brought its own little adventure. Hacking through thickety woods I suddenly stepped out onto rear corner of the Twaalfskill golf course to discover a marvelous view of the Rondout creek and railroad bridge nearby. One evening at dusk in a deep vale in the Rondout, I came upon a lot crowded with school buses, as if like crows or vultures they mobbed together for the night. As summer arrived so did the billowing afternoon thunder clouds. More than once I waited out a strafing downpour in a doorway. Not every discovery was so romantic. Always on the hunt for good graffiti, I peeked around the corner of the flood retaining wall behind Kingston Plaza only to spot a homeless encampment, or at least a discarded easy chair and several men I thought it better not to disturb. Part of the deal in walking Kingston was to see all of it, or as much as I could. The legal notices pasted on the doors of rundown houses as well as the bald eagle perched in a tree by the beach. The troubled folks sprawled on a bench on Broadway as well as the digital generation texting at tables in front of Rough Draft. The old saw that love is blind proved to be wrong. The more I saw of Kingston the deeper my affection grew. Footstep by footstep I was rooting myself to this town.

Late in my perambulations, I brought along my Covid companion, my scarecrow, to share some of my favorite discoveries. My photos in "Love Letters to Kingston" capture some of our moments. The exhibit will up until April 24.