And you thought New Yorkers were tough. Show ‘em a squirrel prowling their rural getaways and they pee down their legs and run like rabbits. Hey, The New York Times says so, and The Times is never wrong, right?

Photographer Jeremy Wolff sneers at the locals in Pawling, N.Y., sniffing, “I feel I’m more of an intellectual artist and they’re kind of machine people.” Good luck cozying up with the volunteer fire department and the search-and-rescue boys with that kind of ‘tude, Jeremy old boy. Good thing you married your shrink so you can work out those issues for free.

Perhaps most typical of the urban sophisticates who can sleep through an ax murder beneath their Manhattan windows but live in terror of deer and antelope at play is “Running With Scissors” author Augusten Burroughs, who has a country house outside Amherst, Mass., Says Burroughs: “I thought I loved nature. I was wrong. I love escalators.”

Patrick O’Grady and Hal Walter are longtime journalists, former co-workers and ex-neighbors who share a fondness for the written word but insist upon inhabiting very different environments in the diminishing American West. Patrick lives in scenic metropolitan Bibleburg, while Hal dwells upon a 35-acre ranch outside Weirdcliffe. These are their stories. And commercial-free, too. Until we figure out a way to bill you, that is.