Remember when we were kids? Remember when there were just vast swaths of unrestricted, unfenced, un-cared about land where we could ride bikes, chase one another through the woods and have epic stick fights and (later on) make out, drink beer and/or smoke weed, all away from any form of adult supervision?

Remember when we got older, got jobs, got families, got stress? And we returned to those wild lonely places, many of which were once beating, bustling hearts of industry, so we could get away from other people and get our heads back together?

Remember the other day, when you went to go back to one of those places, a spot that you figured was so out of the way and forgotten that it would always be there for you when you needed it? Remember how you felt when you got there and it was blocked off, fenced in, posted against trespassing?

Kingston’s currently booming, but its busts and the down times that followed had at least one good point — there was a certain live-and-don’t-give-a-s--t attitude about what happened in abandoned spaces like the old Hutton Brickyard. Sure, there might have been some kind of sign, looking like it hadn’t been replaced since the Hoover administration, telling you to keep out or some rusty old fence, but nobody really cared. Those places were for many of us wonderlands of discovery, sacred groves of worship, places of connection to a barely remembered yet tantalizing past. “Your great-grandfather used to make bricks there,” said your dad, on his way out the door to look for another job after he just got laid off from IBM.

Now, we’re at a point where there’s hardly a hectare of Kingston that’s not being eyed for something, or on the market and asking — and getting — crazy money. The New York Times, crunching data from the USPS, found that Kingston was the second-most popular place to move to in the last year in the entire country, second only to Hudson. (That city’s had a strange odyssey from a center of whaling and prostitution to a center of city-people art galleries and antiquing. Or maybe that’s not that far of a journey at all.) When people care about land that much, that’s when the fences get fixed, the signs replaced and made larger, and security cameras installed.

A sense of restricting access to the Hutton Brickyards, now owned by city people who’re trying a number of things to monetize it, from rock concerts to glamping (look it up; we can’t even), stirred some controversy recently, with residents sticking up for as much access to the waterfront as we can get. We’ll see how things go moving forward — it’s possible that some kind of amenable compromise can be worked out for the brickyards where locals can still hang out there and be, if necessary, cordoned off from the glampers. It’s also a plus that the old AVR site up there will be a Scenic Hudson park.

But maybe we need to flip the script on this and look at our land and our rights to access it with an assumption opposite to the one we’ve always had — i.e., that a property owner can legally bar, in most cases, people from entering. Some countries have the concept of “freedom to roam” or “everyman’s right” — i.e., people have a legal right to hike or even camp on anybody’s land. In Sweden, it’s even in the constitution: the Allemansrätten allows folks to walk, cycle, ride, ski, and camp on any land that’s not actively being farmed or is too close to someone’s house.

That concept would be hard to do here, where so much of our behavior is dictated by the terms of our liability insurance policies, and it would take a cultural shift where respect for our collective space in terms of leaving little trace of our passages is elevated a few more levels from where it now sits.

In terms of what we can do now, let us all advocate to keep land as open as possible, and urge lawmakers and planning board members to continue to prioritize these issues when they’re considering a new zoning code and evaluating site plan applications.

Kingston’s getting richer — that started before the pandemic and that’s not going to change after the pandemic is through. But hopefully, with constant interest and effort, we can avoid becoming a city of little gated communities within bigger gated communities which leave no place for bodies and minds to wander.