Essentially a “suburbanite house that smells like cow shit”

This has lately become one of my favorite phrases to mock the ever so common home for sale posting I see on Zillow and other sites – buy this rural house with a long commute on one acre of land!

You might ask where I came up with such a phrase, but it really go back to my days in my youth as a Boy Scout in Clarksville, that small hamlet in the Town of New Scotland off NY 443. We met at Clarksville Church, and during times in spring and the fall when either Meadow Brook Dairy’s Van Wie or Tommell Cattle where spreading, it could definately be pungent at times from the dairy-air. I just remember the look at that farm kid whose dad picked them up, after quite apparently working with silage and not showering after. Now pungent!  As boy scouts, and young people we made a lot of jokes, mostly very mean spirited about farm folks and smell of cattle.

Clarksville is very much a small town, hamlet. It smells like cow shit at times, and it is quite small and walkable, though there are few businesses one can actually walk to as general store is long gone and they’ve struggled to even keep a pizza place open. But truth is there is probably some appeal to living in a small town, like you probably know your neighbors and there aren’t the issues of big cities like homeless and drug addicted people. Not that you see much of them outside of downtown. But also so many of those houses, especially in the hamlet, are so close together. Rural living but not without a lot of land.

Rural hamlets reminds me a lot of campgrounds. I guess it’s camping to sleep in a tent or a camper on a driveway packed right in next to another camper. I mean, I guess camping in a campground in strictest sense is camping, it’s not the same as sitting in a house or an apartment downtown, though many of the tow-behind campers are essential miniature homes on wheels. And in many cases, people who build their own homes, or need inexpensive living in a rural location live in those RVs.

But at least in my mind, that’s not camping. It’s certainly not the kind of camping I enjoy, where in most cases the nearest campsite is a 1/4 mile or farther away, per the requirements of the Adirondack State Land Master Plan, or just the general terrain of the back country. Places where I can shoot guns, listen to music, have a roaring fire and even burn a plastic trash or smoke some grass without anybody caring one way or the other. I have to say all my time camping in remote back country, far away from people kind of informs how I want to live, and even 5 acres, much less 3 or less acres, just seems much too close to live to anybody else. Yet, it’s hard to find places like that – just like it’s hard to find places that I like camp at that are less then hour, and often as much as two hours away from home.

The thing is so many even rural houses, are essentially suburban these days with high-speed internet, large televisions, propane or oil climate control, curbside weekly garbage pick-up and of course essentially unlimited grid-powered electriciiy. If a rural house is not actively homesteading or farming, it is almost completely divorced from landscape, except maybe when they step out their door and take a deep breathe of the dairy air in spring time. And much like camping in a crowded campground, with RVs and tents back to back, what do you get with such living, besides a long commute, quickly tired and junked automobiles and large gas bills for your 4×4 pickup driven to city every day?