Dear Auntie Mac,

One of the things I was grateful for after moving here was that I could walk safely in preserves and on roads during the pandemic. I walk all seasons and all times, dawn, dusk, and midnight, so I was very disturbed by a Facebook post on a Hampton public forum complaining that late night walks on Main Street are bizarre and suspicious and that no one has a reason, or the right, to walk on Main Street late at night! There were suggestions of calling the police, or worse fates for the walker.  Dozens of residents wrote of their own night walks, and the supposed “culprit” (a neighbor who’s lived here for decades and works nights in a local hospital) replied with a friendly explanation.  Instead of relief, the complainer’s response was defensive! I don’t want to get shot, arrested, or publicly chastised for walking at night in this town. Should I invite this person on a midnight stroll? To help them appreciate another advantage of living in a town like Hampton?

A Night Walker, not a Night Stalker

My Dear Neighbor:

We live in unprecedented times, do we not? Even if we grew up in larger towns than Hampton, most of us remember being able to prowl our neighborhoods at any hour, whether out for a stargazing stroll, tending to the nocturnal needs of a Schnauzer, or slinking across the lawn hopefully unnoticed to crawl back through one’s bedroom window…but I digress. A degree of criminal behavior has shown itself recently in town, it is true. Your question asks us to weigh community safety against assumed liberties, with both of these concepts being mercurial in their ability to be defined the same way by any two people. One can, for example, imagine any number of scenarios in which the very citizen who believed that no good can come from being out after midnight might find him or herself. A lost cat. A martini-fueled party in which prudence dictated that the car stay put. An urgent call from a neighbor. And what of the dawn hours, haunted by pre-work joggers and the aforementioned Schnauzer?

The truth is, my fellow residents, day or night, no one is ever completely safe. One could be happily clipping roses in the sunny garden and be felled by a random shard of jet fuselage. We do what we can, then, to ensure our own well-being, extending our individual protections as far as our comfort dictates. But these limits are personal and subjective.

Our impulse to protect others is noble. However, to raise alarms because we see someone where we believe they “should” not be, at an hour we deem inappropriate, is to invite into a community a creeping paranoia and soulless fortress mentality that is at best unhealthy and at worst spiritually draining. We Hamptonites, however new to the area, are intuitive and perceptive enough to differentiate the wayward criminal from the after-hours stargazer. I urge you, dear, to protect yourself and your home to the extent that you feel comfortable, and respond to each subsequent neighborhood anomaly thoughtfully. Auntie Mac understands the temptation to leap on the “Terror Strikes Tiny Hamlet!” bandwagon. Do not allow an artificially-induced hysteria to cloud your own rational observations.

You have made an excellent suggestion: to graciously invite the concerned neighbor on an evening walk with you to see that evenings are for many people the ideal times to enjoy our lovely town. Footpads and scallywags roam the nightly byways, to be sure, but they are far outnumbered by the level-headed citizens who can identify and dispatch them with alacrity. Please try to enjoy the rest of this wonderful season with as few worries as possible—goodness knows, we all deserve that.

Auntie Mac