When Daniel Boone could see his neighbors' fire smoke, he moved. Daniel hated neighbors. I think most Mainers have a lot of Danny Boone in their genes. It's not that they dislike their neighbors, they just don't seem to like living so close to them.

Up here on the frozen lip of America, central Maine residents, like others who live in rural states, seem to have fallen in love with long distance. No 27-floor towering kennels for them. And as their incomes rise, they move farther and farther from the center of town.

My friend Tommy who grew up here in the relative urbanity of Waterville, bought a house far out on the edge, and then when, maybe, he saw his neighbor's smoke, bought another even farther from the madding crowd. I haven't seen Tommy lately. Maybe he's in Alaska.

This seems to be endemic in the younger and Boomer Mainers. My friend Cheryl, who grooms my dog, Jack, lives on a bucolic country road surrounded by rolling fields of grass, horses and cows. This city boy drives the lane there with mouth agape. Horses and cows? Only minutes from the sweaty teeming excess of Wal-Mart and tech-age smell of Starbucks?

Can Snow White be far?

Cheryl not only lives far from the rest of us, but her house, like most around her, is set so far back from the road you need a GPS to find it. Helloooooo, Daniel. Can you smell me?

I'm sorry, but I also don't want to live cheek by jowl with my neighbors in those tiny kennels. Neither do I long to chew a blade of straw and stroll among the horse flies.

Yes. I'm phobic. I have long been diagnosed as an urban obsessive compulsive. I see poison ivy and dengue fever everywhere. As a pilgrim here in the wild. I keep up my tetanus shots.

Where Cheryl and her brethren see tranquility and peace, I see ticks waiting to bite me. I eschew horse flies, chiggers, rabid skunks and opossums.

I know Lyme disease and avian flu are very likely nesting in those bird droppings that smear my Prius.

Waterville and the teeming boulevards of Augusta are rural enough for me, thank you very much.

When others, scanning a new house, think about quiet evenings and cricket love songs, I see things differently: I wonder how long it will take the ambulance to get there when I have a stroke or heart attack. You have to think, how fast can the volunteer fire departments get there?

We hear about so many of these house and barn fires lately that it scares me to death. They always say, "By the time the firefighters got there, the house was engulfed." Engulfed? Where were they?

I will always pick a house the way I picked my current abode -- by its proximity to these essential spots: the fire and police stations, the supermarket, the movie theaters, a good wine shop and hospital, newspaper stands and my doctor. He lives right around the corner.

He doesn't know I know that yet. I'm saving it for a surprise.

If I should have, God forbid, a fire, my brave firefighters will be here before even I know it. I can walk to my wine shop when thirsty and crawl, if necessary, to a good hospital at the first pain in the left arm.

I hope to be walking to the wine shop when I'm 95. But if the Great Dark should fall upon me en route, I want to be able to hear the wail of the ambulance over the choirs of angels.

J.P. Devine is a freelance writer living in Waterville.