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.”