I was amused by the story in the NY Times about people who left NYC for the “country” (which I’d just call semi-rural upstate NY and not real isolation from having been in or near some of the places named) and quickly found they hated it. They Fled for Greener Pastures, and There Were Weeds https://nyti.ms/3ssbaSR
This is at least as true in the city, but there is typically someone else doing it.
100%
It makes me sad though. I’m 61 years old. We get between 20 and 30 feet of snow through a long winter. In ten years, it’s going to get hard to keep up. Not to mention that any EMS that we might need will be sketchy depending on time of year.
My Wife and I are trying to figure out where the heck we are going to go. We are fine with snow and like four seasons, but don’t want to go much further north than, say, Denver in latitude. Would like a couple of acres. We also want to stay out of real red states.
Oddly we have toyed with North Carolina. Which is mostly red, but the climate and prices look ok.
We are just starting to kick this around. A lot can change in a few years.
The Times has long had a fascination with stories depicting rural America as economically downtrodden, riddled with drug problems and politically backward and naive.
There was a feature recently in the Wall St. Journal about retirees who move to rural or semi-rural areas and build custom dream homes on acreage at great expense, only to realize the local amenities don’t suit them and move again, sometimes more than once. One of these couples bought a place near Asheville, N.C. but concluded it was just too “isolated”.
Or the Chicagoans who buy that getaway house in Wisconsin, then expect the township to do something about all that smelly cow shit.
Aside from adding my name to the list of people who don’t ‘appreciate’ the title …
One’s experience of rural America – particularly as an inhabitant – varies dramatically by one’s resources and access (sounds like US health care !).
Analogy: it’s incomparable to live a ‘simple life’ because you’re poor vs. to choose a ‘simple life’ because your company went public, you have several million dollars in the bank, and you find parts of rural life ‘charming.’
But you can access everything and anything you find wanting, including travel to the largest metropolitan areas (or foreign countries) to get your unmet needs met.
There are certain ‘poverties’ in rural living (I don’t mean to make a value judgment; many view those as the upside), but if they never have to affect you, then you probably don’t give them much thought.
I met my wife in Central New York, while having dinner at a friend’s white linen restaurant. The weather up there (I think ThornyLocust could back me up) can be brutal in the winter.
But the cohort I met there “lived for their two or three tropical vacations” that they took every winter. They could minimize the effect of one of the major drawbacks to their homes.
Life is always better when you can buy down the misery – urban, suburban, exurban, or rural 
Good point. But it also helps if you can bring some homeowner skills with you. Jack of all trades works well. It can be difficult to get help no matter how much money you have. If you don’t know how, you will learn how to cook. Some people can’t seem to do it, which is sort of confusing to me.
Also, if you have a partner, you had best be compatible. My Wife and I don’t have ‘duties’ we just do. Sure we fall into patterns. I prefer to cook, my Wife does more of the cleaning. If it needs done, one or both of us will do it. I think the word is symbiotic.
While rural living does give many opportunities to go for a walk. You’re not going to walk to a Starbucks (never been in one myself).
For some, rural living may be boring, I suppose. It never is for me. I have to be careful when I walk the dogs because the Moose population has exploded.
Rural living isn’t easy. But city living isn’t easy either (been there done that).
Whatever floats your boat or trips your trigger.
And those tractors and grain dryers making noise at inconvenient times.
New York State had to institute right-to-farm laws. And the local municipalities try to make sure purchasers are informed of those; though you can’t make everybody read stuff, or listen to it.
I’d a whole lot rather live through a winter here than in Florida.
We do have snowbirds. But there are plenty of local people who could afford to be snowbirds but don’t want to be.
There are also plenty of local people who couldn’t afford it; some of them would indeed like to be, but a lot of us wouldn’t. I like winter. I’m not the only one.
Most of the time, it’s not “semi-rural”. Unless they left the state altogether, a lot of New Yorkers just left to go live in Westchester County, NY or Fairfield County CT.
We have one couple we are friends with who moved to 30 acres somewhere in North Carolina. They love New York (at least the wife does) but they also have family down in NC and the husband loves hunting and all that outdoor stuff. So it’s not as “Holy shit! There’s no decent udon here!” for them.
We actually bought a second home in the neighborhood I mentioned earlier. It’s not Montana, but it’s still pretty rural by East Coast standards. “Semi rural” as you describe it, I suppose.
I can’t say I “love it”. It’s kind of something my wife just did. There are a couple of plusses like having a big yard and lots of rooms. And our neighbors seem nice. We get to see a lot of bear and deer and fox and whatnot.
But I also kind of feel trapped in our big house with our big yard here. There aren’t a lot of places to go or things to do. At least none that don’t require a 30 minute drive. And finding activities for the kids is a challenge.
Not like cities are perfect, but I like having that constant buzz of activity around. Even if I’m not really doing anything.
Absolutely: unless you’re a multimillionaire, you need to be able to take on lots of different tasks in a rural area.
My sister-in-law has lived in Singapore for 30 years. She visited us not long ago. Rural Ohio was a culture shock to her. “There’s nothing to do.” So we took her for a one-day visit to Cincinnati. And then a one-day visit to Columbus. She was underwhelmed; there was still, “…not enough to do.” I got the feeling that only NYC would make her content. It’s like she needed the constant visual and auditory stimulation that only a concrete jungle can provide.
That’s a very interesting observation.
City residents sometimes have a very different idea of rural than other people and sometimes it’s even different from people who live in other parts of the city. My husband had a friend who moved from a co-op in very densely populated Jackson Heights, Queens to much less densely populated Sullivan County. For a period of time, he owned both ( Jackson Heights during the week , upstate on weekends) He invited us to a BBQ at his “country house” - we got there and thought " He thinks this is country?". The rest of the county might be rural, but the development he lived in was not. His property was maybe 60ft x 200ft which is about a quarter acre - that strikes me as suburban more than rural.
What’s good about the country is that it exists. The country is the living breathing sentient fabric of the planet, whereas cities are just piles of human noise and concrete and poison.
Just saying, there are differing points of view. Many folks out here share my general views if not my passionate convictions, and avoid cities as much as possible.
I think that really is the issue; or, at least, a huge part of it. Some people do need that constant buzz of specifically human activity. (You want literal buzz, try a healthy field.) Others can’t stand it for more than a few days.
And it’s also a matter of what you find interesting. I can find hordes of things to do in an open field or woodlot – including, for that matter, a lot of visual and auditory stimulation. There’s a great deal both to see and to listen to; but you have to have learned or to be willing to learn to see it and to hear it.
I took a road trip out to visit some family members a few years ago. They thought I should fly instead; they thought the driving route was utterly boring. It was full of farms of various sizes, old houses, small towns, woods, some prairie, some water, a couple of windmill farms which were unusual at the time. I was fascinated. I get bored to fury in airports.
Exactly. People vary.
LOL - think I’m Joe Pesci in the relationship. IIRC wasn’t there a scene where all the animal sounds were keeping him up at night?
Stumbled across that while looking for the above.
Which is why I said semi-rural for some of the areas mentioned in that article. I’m guilty as anyone of not having a good idea of what rural is, but I also grew up in the sprawl of Albuquerque, where nothing is really well defined inside city limits but then it’s miles and miles of empty desert until the next city. To me, semi-rural is where the surrounding area might have a large town or small city, but most of the land is large plots with lots of land being devoted to some sort of agriculture. I’m thinking of some parts of central Pennsylvania I’ve spent lots of time in, for example.
First off, I agree the thread has a bad title and I didn’t read anything before the bump.
I know you always get pissed about these kinds of threads, and I understand, but you and your wife are not the kind of rural people that are being talked about.
You both have office jobs, now work from home jobs. I don’t think you raise any crops and your cooking list shows you have access to a city of some size to shop in. Your house and land on top of a mountain are hardly typical. Your wife trains and runs in triathlons around the country, and you go with her. You have satellite internet and television. None of that stuff is part of a typical rural lifestyle. What you have is a exceptional rural life supported by a good city job.
It’s like Crafter_Man describing his house as a log cabin. I’m sure it is, but I’m willing to bet it’s a well crafted log cabin and has all the modern conveniences in it. It’s not one he has to re-caulk every fall, nor is it a single room ramshackle cabin with an old potbelly stove that his family has to stand around all winter just to stay warm. Heck, his barn/garage looks cleaner than my kitchen and has a lift in it so he can work underneath his cars. I believe he’s an engineer, so I’m guessing he makes ok money in a city/town job also.
White collar workers are all over the rural landscape, living in places the locals can’t afford. There is not a single local owner on the lake where we have a vacation cabin. Some, like us, are from way out of state.
It’s like if I complained when people talked about all the crappy stuff about NYC that comes up in threads. It doesn’t apply to me so I feel no need to defend it with saying how I live means there aren’t bad things also.
You are imagining that most people who don’t live in cities and suburbs in the US must perforce live in unmitigated squalor and destitution. You are misinformed. Very misinformed.