I grew up in a house at the dead end of a 5-mile-long dirt road, on the edge of BLM land (Bureau of Land Management, the agency that owned “wilderness”) in New Mexico. For mail, we had a route and box number for years, and then one year the State actually gave our road a number. We went from “Route 1” to “County Road 113”. Neat! But if you wanted to eat out or see a movie, it’d be about a half-hour drive. Definitely no pizza delivery.
Our house sat on five acres, which was enough space to have a good smattering of animals. Over the years, we had a horse, a mule, loads of chickens and turkeys, rabbits, geese, goats, and toward the end, peacocks and an emu. We sold chicken eggs to the neighbors, not for money, but to get rid of the eggs (they made more than we could possibly use). The downside of the wide open space was, sometimes we’d end up with cows and such wandering onto our land, getting into the vacant horse pen, and nibbling the vegetables. See, our house was a few miles from the local dairy, and while there was a cattle guard, it was there to keep them from going out to the main road, not in toward where we lived. So, we got cows as occasional pests.
Our water came from a well. Since our house was built in the 1970s, the pump was, shall we say, problematic. Every so often, some major overhauling had to be done to get everything working again. We did have electricity, but it went out a lot, and without power to run the pump, we had no water, either.
In the winter, our primary source of heat was a woodstove. Most summers, my whole family would drive out in the old green Silverado four-door pickup, which was a tank held together by rust and pure toughness, up into the mountains for wood. Dad chainsawed everything into manageable logs, and the rest of us carted them to the truck and loaded them up. That was our winter heat. I got mighty good at building a wicked fire, too; if you could actually open the door and look at the fire, it wasn’t one of mine. heh. One fun thing about the woodstove was that I could use it to roast hot dogs in wintertime; I’d put a towel over my hand to shield me from the heat, put a dog on a skewer, open the woodstove door, and sear to perfection.
Beyond the dead end, in the BLM land, there were lots of hills and rocks and such to climb. You could also walk out there and be pretty well guaranteed to find shards of Indian pottery by the bagful, too ordinary to be of any historical interest, but still pretty neat.
Wild animals. Well, there were always coyotes around, and by the time we were getting ready to move away, they were getting pretty bold. They’d stroll around the perimeter of our property in broad daylight. Once, I’ll never forget, one just sauntered up in the middle of the day and started sniffing in our strawberry patch. Dad grabbed his shotgun and headed for the front door (to sneak around the side so as not to spook it). Ol’ Dad nailed the coyote, and it went down, but it got back up and limped away. And here comes Dad, running back into the house, because in his haste he’d only taken one shell out with him. Dad had to follow the blood trail for about 2 miles to put it out of its misery.
Besides those varmints, there were occasional mountain lions. I never saw an actual in-the-flesh animal, but there were tracks, and we’ve lost pets that I feel sure were taken by the mountain lions. And on a cooler note, we sometimes had golden eagles nest in the mountains near where we lived, and we were close enough to watch them with binoculars.
Oh, on the subject of the dump: like the OP, we had to take our own trash to the local dump (trivia: the movie City Slickers was filmed pretty close to our old garbage dump. Welcome to the dream factory.), and it was there that I found my first dog when I was three years old. Someone had abandoned this puppy at the dump, and I picked her up and named her what she was: “Shabby.” She was a mighty fine dog.