I live in NYC, but I grew up in the Florida panhandle, a mile down a road from the main highway, at the beginning of which had no houses in sight, and passed ab

I live in NYC, but I grew up in the Florida panhandle, a mile down a road from the main highway, at the beginning of which had no houses in sight, and passed about 5 visible houses on the way home. There was one house visible from our ranch-style house. To the side and back was swamp. To the front was all woods. I walked in the woods, stepped on ant hills and got bitten, and found rattle snakes, cotton mouths, mocassins, and garter snakes. Mosquitos, yellow flies, biting gnats, and horse flies combined to ensure that I would always have a few red splotches and bumps on my body when I came in. We even found gators once in a while. We made long-time friends with a family a mile away by road, but I could get there in a quarter of a mile or so by woods and swamp. The trick to walking through the swamp was to try to step on clumps of grass sticking out of the muck. I would come across rotting tree trunks and knock them over to watch the termites. Sometimes our outdoors cats would join me and follow from a distance. My dad drove 30 minutes to work, about 25 miles away, where he struggled to run a discount auto-parts distributorship employing too many people to be profitable. My mom stayed at home with me and my little brother. My friends loved coming over. If we walked far enough past the swamp, we would be on the bay, which smelled kind of funky for being fresh-water, too far from the sea water to be even brackish though. It was just us, and maybe our neighbors who mostly stayed indoors. We didn't worry about break-ins. We left our door open a lot. I currently pay a lot of money for a doorman for that kind of sense of security in NYC. As for being able to walk in the woods by myself, that's just about impossible, and you can't put a price tag on it. Unless I'm home alone, there's almost always someone in my field of view. I'm kind-of used to it, but a lot of people have a visceral distaste for it. Seems like I can't even get to work without getting into a subway car that smells like something died in it. An economist might not have a direct way to measure the value we created for ourselves, but you might say we created a lot of value for ourselves by living where we did.