I grew up in the middle of nowhere's nowhere. My family's house was about two miles from an unincorporated hamlet in one direction and five miles from an incorporated village in the other. We were in the township and school district with the same name as the village.
It was farming country, but in the 1950s and ’60s, heading into the ’70s, farming in rural New York was on a downturn. My family was part of what was then an influx of middle-class tech workers from IBM. New houses were built on former farm land.
Our house was part of a very small, informal development with three houses along a driveway: first our house at the main road, then two other houses farther back from the road along a driveway that was almost a small private road. There was also a pond and a hill behind our house, off the left side of the driveway, which we owned. 
When I was a kid, the pond was treated as a neighborhood amenity. Everyone swam in it and people fished in it, despite the fact that it mostly held only bony pickerel. Kids went sledding on the hill behind it, sometimes sliding out onto the ice, and of course they and their parents went ice skating on it.
When my parents sold the house and the land behind it around 2005, the family that owned the third house, the one at the end of the driveway, bought the pond and the land beyond it. The man in this family had grown up not far down the road from us and was in Daughter Number Two's high school class. He and his wife had been cordial neighbors with my parents, raising young kids who trick-or-treated at my parents' door and doing all the other rural things that happen when you're near each other out in the middle of nowhere, sharing a private driveway.
When I visited my parents after they had moved to the nearby incorporated village, I drove past the old house. I noticed that the neighbors had rebuilt the dock on the opposite side of the pond so that it was closer to their house and made some other improvements that seemed to privatize the space, but I didn't think that much about it.
About 10 years after my parents had sold the house, they moved on to assisted living. While I was out there helping them with that move, I stopped by the original neighborhood. I parked my rental car along the main road and walked down the driveway, then over to the pond. As I was walking around it, the owner of the third house came walking over and asked me who I was and what I was doing on his land.
Remember, this is a person who I know, in some sense, or used to. I went to high school with him (one grade apart), rode the same school bus for 12 years or so. He was my parents' immediate neighbor for close to 20 years.
And yes, that mattered when I told him my name. He was mollified. It was okay that I was there. But still, he said to me, "Next time you want to look around, come up to the house first."
Reader, I confess I was shocked, given how the pond had been used the entire time I had lived there. What was he afraid I was going to do to his pond? Note that there are no signs saying the land is posted. (That's the local terminology for No Trespassing.)
And now, today, after the recent news of people being shot after ringing a doorbell, trying to get into the wrong car, and going up the wrong driveway (in rural New York!), I wonder if my visit to the pond would be even more shocking now.
What is the paranoia that leads to this behavior, and who does building that paranoia serve? Obviously, racism is part of it, but not all of it.
These circumstances make me think back to Pete Hautman's post about why he got rid of his handgun. As in all of the recent shootings of innocent people confronted by armed paranoids, "fear, human error, and unpredictable sets of circumstances are unavoidable, but there are things we can do to reduce the chances that an unfortunate situation might turn deadly."
As Hautman did, the most obvious thing a person can do is get rid of their gun. Or for society to make it so that people don't have them in the first place.
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After my father's funeral in March 2019, my entire remaining family — all four daughters, our spouses, and our kids — went back to the pond. We tried to go up to "the house," as the neighbor had insisted, to ask permission, but no one was home.
We went for a walk around the pond anyway.
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