My work takes me to properties all over as many as seven Western Washington counties. In all that land there are many properties that, while technically considered suburban for assessor and census purposes, are by all practical function rural. A regular site are long dirt/gravel roads beyond the maintenance of any government agency. These roads and neighborhoods have conditions that run across the full spectrum of American society, but by and large as an outsider they fall into two general categories:
1) The communities that cling so desperately to the idea of individualism and self-sufficiency that the roads they live on, sometimes miles long, are left sporadically maintained.