In this thread, ivylass asked for a thread on Ask the Doper who lives out in the boonies. So here it is. Other inhabitants, or former inhabitants, of the boonies, feel free to chime in. I didn’t live nearly as far out as some of you. For example, I never required an airplane to get to the doctor and snow was never an issue.
My first response was BWA HAHAHAHA! Garbage pickup? HAHAHAHA! Ahem. Garbage pickup would be the pickup you put your garbage in to take to the dump. Seriously though, Going to the Dump was an annual or biannual undertaking. Most people have a compost pile (or a hillside or small canyon, if you are waaayyy out in the boonies), chickens or other livestock to toss their organic materials in or to. Then you have the burn barrel pile, where you stack all the flammable items (woe to the one who forgets and puts the hairspray can in the bathroom trash. Make big boom! Complete with shrapnel!) and wait for a suitable burn day. Or night, if you are desperate, and you live too close to the Dept of Forestry firehouse. There’s nothing quite like the aroma of burning feminine sanitary products wafting over from the neighbor on an evening breeze. <gag> Then you have your recyclables: paper (you only burn the stuff that’s too nasty to recycle, like bathroom trash), bottles, cans (aluminum cans make excellent target practice, but they can’t be recycled after they’ve been shot up, they have to go to the dump), plastics, etc. Then your Goodwill/Salvation Army stuff that was too good to toss, but you didn’t want anymore. My mom made a Goodwill run about every 5 years. Everything else goes to the dump. Just about everyone has a trailer to use to take garbage to the dump and if you have extra space, you call around and see if anybody else wants to use your extra space. Dump fees are cheaper that way. People who don’t have garbage pickup get reduced fees at the dump, so long as they only show up twice a year. Where did people store all their garbage until dump day or burn day? That’s what barns are for.
As far as power went, I had an enormous propane tank that would last the winter, assuming I remembered to get them to come out before the rains started. The water heater, stove and refrigerator all ran on propane. For lighting, I used white gas Coleman laterns. I was too broke to afford to run a generator, but my neighbors all had them, along with various sizes of solar cells. You have not lived until you have defrosted a 50 year old propane refrigerator. The process takes roughly 16 hours, at which point defrosting stops and it starts freezing again. The upside is that it is solid metal, and can be attacked with whatever sharp objects you feel necessary (my neighbor and I both agreed that napalm would not be excessive and probably wouldn’t even leave a mark. Or finish defrosting it, either.) Unlike when I lived on the grid in the mountains, the power being out for days or weeks at a time had no effect on me. 
I had neighbors with cisterns and handle water pumps in the kitchen, but I had running water from a well. I had an outhouse, but it was my half bath. 
I did have indoor plumbing, with a toilet and everything. The biggest problem out there was if your gasoline provider mixed up your gas tank with your cistern. Yes, we had gasoline delivered, too, but I think they put a stop to that a while ago, with certain exceptions. It is, after all 25 miles from the nearest gas station south and 40 miles north and we had lots of tourists coming through.
Getting phone service, and then private phone service - no more party line! was quite exciting. Ooh, and then came the day when households could have multiple lines. Wow! That was, let’s see, 1996. Over the past couple of years, they started installing cell phone towers, but there are still plenty of dead zones out there, and cell phone providers in that area make that perfectly clear. Actually, that’s one of the ways they get leases for their towers. In fact, my grandfather had one installed in his back yard.
I can replace a Coleman lantern wick in the dark, a skill I am grateful that I no longer have any use for. I can dig a car out of axle deep mud using firewood and my bare hands. I know what rain on a tin roof sounds like, as well as the comfortable clanking of a propane water heater hard at work. I’ve lived in a real log cabin, built by my great-grandfather. I know that the best place to build your closet in the mountains is around the water heater, otherwise your shoes and clothes will all have a lovely patina of mildew come spring. And finally, when I was growing up, our lawn mower looked like this.
I remember very well the envy of driving home through the campgrounds, past luxury RVs complete with satellite TVs, and those same people later strolling past my house to gawk at me. That’s the downside to living in what is essentially a private park. The tourists seem to think that your home is there for their amusement. It’s even worse when they decide to take a shit in your front yard. Yes, that happened. More than once. More times than I can count, actually.
FTR, I’ve lived in the Big City for almost 8 years now, but I still sometimes sort trash as if I didn’t have have weekly garbage pickup, think it’s incredibly cool to flip a switch and have the lights come on, figure out which appliances are plugged in by sound alone, and often can’t be bothered to turn the lights on at night. If you live without electricity for long enough you, too, can become annoyed by the humming of the powerlines and exasperated by all of the needless light pollution your neighbors put out.
Camping? I don’t do camping. I’ve done my share already. Roughing it does not amuse me. I slept in a sleeping bag from 7th grade until I was a junior in high school. I have discovered fungi the size of salad plates growing in my bathroom and have thrilled to the sound of woodrats in the walls, not mention finding a woodrat hindquarter, tail still attached, in the kitchen, a gift from one of my cats. Woodrats are big and their tails are scaly. :shudder:
Anything I’ve forgotten?
They’re not deranged that way, they’re not even particularly religious, unless you count the Family as a religion.
Didn’t they like the vines coming in through the crack? Saves on house plants.
That’s the only thing I miss about that house. The plumbing was probably circa 1950, and the sinks and such were heavy porcelain with seperate water faucets for hot and cold. Like the joke says, we had cold water in December and hot in July, except it never did get hot in July where I lived. We did have a phone and electricity and a well that we shared with the neighbors, the ones who’ve lived there for over 50 years. We had to pay them $7/month, cash, for the use of the well. Sometimes we paid them in $6 and a dozen eggs.