5 Forgotten Corners of America Where You Can Disappear Forever

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]It's 3:00 in the morning. You're lying awake doing the math on your mortgage for the fourth time tonight, listening to your neighbor's dog file its grievances [music] with the moon, and a single dangerous thought drift across your mind like a tumbleweed. What if I just left? Packed the truck, sold the lawnmower, and vanished into the great American nowhere. Well, friend, I've got good news, and I've [music] got news. There are five corners of this country where land is dirt cheap, the neighbors are scarce, and a man can disappear with his dignity and his savings intact. The bad news is that each one is [music] trying to kill you in its own special charming way. Now, in the proud tradition of small-town America, let me ask a favor the neighborly way. Tap that like button. Around these parts, [music] that's just good manners. And maybe subscribe if you're feeling generous.

[00:00:49]So, you want to [music] start over.

[00:00:51]You've taken a long, hard look at your life. The mortgage that's outlived two presidents, the neighbor who fires up his leaf blower at 7:00 in the morning like he's personally avenging something, the HOA that sent you a sternly worded letter about your mailbox being the wrong shade of beige, and you've thought, quietly, like a man planning a heist, there has to be somewhere else.

[00:01:12]There is.

[00:01:13]It's called West Virginia, and it is the only state in the Union founded entirely out of spite. I'm not exaggerating for effect.

[00:01:21]Back in 1861, when the rest of Virginia decided to secede from the Union, the folks out west looked at that decision the way you'd look at a brother-in-law announcing he's quitting his job to get into crypto. They said, [music] "Absolutely not. We're keeping our mountains, and frankly, we're keeping our dignity." And they drew themselves a brand new border and walked off.

[00:01:40]That is the founding myth of an entire state, [music] a divorce.

[00:01:45]You're not relocating to West Virginia.

[00:01:48]You're joining a support group that became a commonwealth.

[00:01:50]>> [music] >> Now, let's talk money, because we both know that's why you're really still reading.

[00:01:55]The median home price [music] in West Virginia is a number so low that a man in Los Angeles, upon hearing it, will need to sit down and possibly be fanned with a magazine. We're talking about places where $150,000 buys you an actual house, an actual yard, and at no extra charge, a deer that wanders through the property each morning with the entitled confidence of a house guest who's [music] overstayed but pays no rent.

[00:02:19]Meanwhile, in San Francisco, that same 150 grand gets you a parking space, not a car, the space.

[00:02:25]>> [music] >> The rectangle of pavement where, in a kinder universe, a car might one day rest. Now, I need to be honest with you about the internet, because if I'm not, you'll find out the hard way and you'll come looking for me.

[00:02:38]West Virginia's broadband [music] situation is what an optimist would call developing, and what your grandkids will call the reason they refuse to visit.

[00:02:46]There are entire valleys here, the locals call them hollers, and you'd best start practicing, where the Wi-Fi performs roughly as well as a screen door on a submarine.

[00:02:55]You will become reacquainted with the spinning loading wheel, that little hypnotist pocket watch of the digital age. You will, on at least one occasion, drive to the top of a ridge in your bathrobe to send a single text message, standing there holding your phone aloft like Moses receiving slightly delayed commandments. City people call this a deal breaker. The folks who move here on purpose call it unplugging, and they say it with the serene smugness of a man who has never [music] once waited 90 seconds for a weather report. But here's the part that'll get you.

[00:03:25]The state is gorgeous [music] to the point of being almost rude about it. The Appalachian Mountains here are among the oldest mountains on the entire planet, older than bones, older than trees, older than the rings of Saturn, which means that when these hills were already old and tired and complaining about their knees, Saturn was still putting itself together. Stand in the New River Gorge and you're looking at something so ancient it makes the pyramids look like a craft project somebody knocked out over a long weekend.

[00:03:53]And speaking of the New River, it's called the New River, which is geology's longest-running practical joke because it is, in fact, one of the oldest rivers on Earth. Some fella named it New a few centuries [music] back and simply never got around to correcting the paperwork.

[00:04:07]Honestly, most relatable thing a river's ever done.

[00:04:10]>> [music] >> Here's a fun fact to deploy at your next dinner party, right when the conversation hits a lull.

[00:04:16]West Virginia is home to Green Bank, which sits inside a federally enforced national radio quiet zone.

[00:04:23]Across 13,000 square miles, cell phones, Wi-Fi, and, I cannot stress this enough, microwave ovens are heavily restricted because there's a giant radio telescope out there straining to hear the actual whispers of the universe, and your reheated meatloaf throws it off. People with electromagnetic sensitivities have packed up and moved there specifically to escape the modern world, and they are, by all accounts, delighted. [music] So, the next time your internet stalls out, take comfort. Somewhere down the road, an entire town has banned the stuff on purpose, and they're having the time of their lives. Your problem is their amenity. The people, though, the people are the real estate.

[00:05:01]West Virginians possess a brand of neighborliness so sincere [music] it short-circuits anyone raised in a major metro area. You will wave at strangers, they will [music] wave back. This is not a trap. A man you've never met in your life will materialize [music] to help you move a couch, refuse all payment, and then look mildly wounded that you didn't insult him by offering.

[00:05:21]Your car breaks down on a back road, within 10 minutes, three pickup trucks will stop, and at least one will contain a gentleman named Bobby or Junior, possibly both, possibly a Bobby Junior, who can fix your engine with a wrench, a length of baling wire, and a firmly held opinion about how you've been neglecting your transmission, which, frankly, he's not wrong about. The overall cost of living sits about 20% [music] below the national average, which means your retirement nest egg, your savings, your sock full of carefully hoarded 20s, whatever it is you've scraped together, stretches farther here than nearly anywhere else in America.

[00:05:56]>> [music] >> Groceries cost less. The property taxes are so gentle compared to New Jersey that you'll [music] keep rereading the bill convinced you've misplaced a decimal. You could sell one unremarkable condo back east and purchase what amounts to a small dignified kingdom out [music] here. A creek, a barn, a porch built for sitting, and the deep glowing faintly insufferable satisfaction of a man who figured out something the rest [music] of the country missed. Is it for everyone?

[00:06:23]Lord, no. If you require sushi delivered at midnight, >> [music] >> if you start sweating when there's no Trader Joe's within arms reach, if the sentence "The nearest hospital is 45 minutes away, >> [music] >> 50 if the deer are out." tightens something in your chest, then this, my friend, is probably not your fresh start and there's no shame in that.

[00:06:43]But if you've spent 30 years grinding away in the rat race, and you're finally ready to swap the noise for something older, quieter, and roughly half the price, the mountains are right here waiting.

[00:06:53]They've been holding your spot for about 300 million years. They can hold it a little longer while you make up your mind.

[00:07:00]Here's a little game. Picture North Dakota in your mind. Go ahead, I'll wait.

[00:07:06]You can't, can you? Don't feel bad.

[00:07:08]Nobody can.

[00:07:10]North Dakota [music] exists in that special category of American places that you're vaguely certain are real, but couldn't draw on a map if your pension depended on it. It's up there, near Canada, above the regular Dakota.

[00:07:22]That's about as specific as most folks get, and the people of North Dakota have made a kind of peace [music] with this.

[00:07:28]When you're the least visited state in the entire country, and they are by a comfortable [music] margin, you stop expecting people to know where you are and start appreciating the ones who bother to find out. And that, friend, is precisely why it belongs in this video.

[00:07:42]Let's get the headline out of the way because it's a good one.

[00:07:45]North Dakota wanted people so badly that it started handing out free land. Not in the 1800s, I mean recently.

[00:07:52]A town called Hazelton ran a program where they'd give you a building lot for essentially nothing if you just please, for the love of all that's holy, come build a house and exist in it.

[00:08:02]Other towns followed. [music] The whole state has spent decades in a quiet panic about its population, the way the rest of us panic about a noise the car is making. They paid people to show up. Read that again and let it warm you.

[00:08:15]You have spent your entire adult life being charged extra for everything.

[00:08:20]Checked bags, legroom, the privilege of speaking to a human being on the phone.

[00:08:25]And here is a place that will pay [music] you to simply be present.

[00:08:28]It's the most flattering thing a state has ever done.

[00:08:31]Now, why is it so empty? Two reasons, and I'll give them to you straight.

[00:08:36]Reason one is the weather, and I'm not going to insult your intelligence by softening [music] it.

[00:08:41]North Dakota winters are not chilly.

[00:08:43]They are not brisk. They are the kind of cold that has opinions about you personally.

[00:08:48]We are talking temperatures that regularly drop to 30 below, and that's before the wind gets involved, and the wind always gets involved because reason two, [music] there is absolutely nothing out there to stop it.

[00:09:01]>> [music] >> North Dakota is flat, gloriously, defiantly flat. The kind of flat where you can watch your dog run away for 3 full days.

[00:09:09]The kind of flat where the locals joke, you can see the back of your own head if you squint.

[00:09:14]There are no mountains, no hills, barely a respectable bump, just a horizon that goes on with the patience of a man who's got nowhere to be.

[00:09:22]The wind comes screaming down out of Canada with nothing to slow it but the occasional grain silo and your own personal regret. But, and stay with me here, >> [music] >> that emptiness is the entire point.

[00:09:33]Because while the rest of America is fighting over parking spots and bidding 200,000 over asking on a townhouse with [music] paper walls, North Dakota is sitting on more open space per person than almost anywhere in the lower 48.

[00:09:46]You want quiet?

[00:09:48]This is the platonic ideal of quiet.

[00:09:51]This is quiet so complete you can hear your own pulse and start wondering if it's always been that loud. Here's a fun fact that genuinely surprises people.

[00:10:00]North Dakota [music] has, at various points in recent years, posted the lowest unemployment rate in the entire occasionally dipping near 2%, which economists will tell you is basically a statistical impossibility under EU law.

[00:10:14]That's not an economy, [music] that's a help wanted sign with a flag on it.

[00:10:18]There was an oil boom out in the western part of the state around a town called Williston, where the work was so plentiful and the workers so scarce [music] that fast food joints were offering signing bonuses and hourly wages that made white collar folks back east quietly question every decision they'd ever made. People drove out there from all over the country, slept in their trucks, and made more money flipping burgers than they had in offices with their names on the door.

[00:10:43]North Dakota, come for the desperation, stay for the surprisingly robust paycheck. And here's the one that'll really get you.

[00:10:51]Right in the dead center of the continent, actually just about the geographic center of all of North America, sits a town called Rugby, >> [music] >> North Dakota, which proudly claims that exact title.

[00:11:02]They built a stone monument to it.

[00:11:05]People drive hundreds of miles to stand at the precise middle of the continent and take a photograph of themselves next to a pile of rocks. And honestly, in a place this empty, that's a Tuesday.

[00:11:16]When your big tourist [music] draw is, you're now equidistant from all oceans, you have fully embraced who you are, and there's a strange [music] dignity in that. The people, as you'd expect from anybody hardy enough to choose this, are the salt of the earth, and I mean that almost literally given the winters.

[00:11:32]They are descended largely from Norwegians and Germans who took one look at this brutal, frozen, beautiful nothing and said, "Yes, this reminds me pleasantly of the old country where things were also trying to kill us."

[00:11:44]They are unfailingly [music] polite, allergic to complaint, and possessed of a stoicism so deep that a North Dakotan describing a blizzard that trapped [music] him in his truck for 2 days will summarize the experience as a little inconvenient. If you move here and your pipes freeze, a neighbor will fix them, decline thanks, and then never mention it again. Partly out of modesty and partly because [music] mentioning it would involve more words than he's comfortable using before noon. The cost of living is reasonable, the housing [music] is genuinely affordable, and the property taxes won't have you reaching for the heart medication.

[00:12:17]Your retirement dollar goes a long, long way out here, mostly because there is very little to spend it on, which is either a feature or a bug, depending entirely on your personality. There's no traffic, there's no crowd, there's no line at the pharmacy because there are 11 people in town, and four of them are at the pharmacy already, and they're all related. Is it for everyone? It is emphatically not.

[00:12:38]If you need ocean breezes, palm trees, or the ability to leave the house in January without dressing like you're summiting Everest, this is not your fresh start.

[00:12:47]If a flat horizon makes you existentially uneasy, and it does that to some people, that endless openness like the sky is just a little too in charge, then point your moving truck elsewhere.

[00:12:59]But if you've got a tough hide, a warm coat, and a deep and abiding desire to live somewhere that is genuinely glad you came, North Dakota is up there waiting.

[00:13:09]>> [music] >> Quietly, patiently, with the heat on and a casserole that a neighbor will inexplicably [music] already be carrying toward your door before you finish unpacking.

[00:13:19]All right. Take a breath, pour yourself something cold, and let's head down south because we need to talk about Mississippi, the state [music] that is, dollar for dollar, the cheapest place to plant your flag in the entire United States of America. And before [music] you say anything, yes, yes, there's a catch. There's always a catch. But we'll get to the catch, because the catch is part of the charm, the way the dent in a good used truck is part of the charm.

[00:13:43]Let's start with the part that'll make your wallet do a little happy dance.

[00:13:47]Mississippi is, by nearly every measure that matters to a man trying to stretch a fixed income, the most affordable state in the country.

[00:13:55]The cost of living here sits well below the national average. We're talking the kind of low that doesn't seem real until you're standing in it.

[00:14:03]The median home price is a figure that, when read aloud to a homeowner in Boston, will cause them to clutch their chest and ask you to repeat it.

[00:14:11]We are talking about places where, for the price of a modest down payment up north, you can own your home outright, free and clear, with money left over for a boat [music] you'll use twice, and then keep forever out of principle. Land down here is so cheap it's practically a rounding error. You want acreage? You want to stand on your own porch and not see another human structure in any direction? You want to holler off your back step purely to enjoy the silence that answers?

[00:14:36]Mississippi will sell you that dream for less than the cost of a used sedan in most of the country.

[00:14:41]People retire here, buy a few acres, and become accidental landed gentry overnight. Lords of a domain they could never have afforded anywhere else, surveying their kingdom from a folding chair. Now, here's a fun fact that genuinely catches people [music] off guard.

[00:14:56]Mississippi is the birthplace of American music as you know it. Not an exaggeration, not regional pride talking. The blues was born here, in the Delta, in the flat fertile crescent along the river. And from the blues came rock and roll, >> [music] >> and from rock and roll came basically everything you've ever tapped your foot to.

[00:15:14]Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in a two-room shotgun house his daddy built for about $200.

[00:15:20]B.B. King came up out of the cotton fields here. There is a crossroads in Clarksdale where legend insists a bluesman named Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the ability to play guitar, and people still make the pilgrimage [music] to stand at that intersection, which tells you everything about how seriously this state takes its music [music] and its mythology. You're moving to the place where the soundtrack of the 20th century was written. Let that sink in next time somebody sniffs at the zip code. Another one for you.

[00:15:48]Mississippi has more square miles of it than you'd believe of genuinely beautiful country.

[00:15:53]People picture it as one big [music] humid flatland, but you've got the rolling pine hills, the Gulf Coast with its warm beaches and its [music] casinos and its shrimp boats, and the great Mississippi River itself rolling along the western edge like a brown lazy god.

[00:16:07]The magnolias bloom, the catfish are plentiful, and the food Lord, the food. If you move to Mississippi and don't gain 11 lb in your first 6 months, you are doing it wrong and somebody should stage an intervention.

[00:16:20]The fried chicken alone is a reason to relocate. The barbecue will make you weep.

[00:16:25]There is a tamale tradition in the Delta that nobody can fully explain and everybody is grateful for. Now, the catch.

[00:16:33]I promised you [music] existential dread, and I'm a man of my word. Here it is, served plain.

[00:16:40]Mississippi consistently ranks [music] at or near the bottom of a great many lists you'd prefer your home state ranked higher on. Health outcomes, poverty rates, educational funding, the general statistical scaffolding of a comfortable life. The summers are a humid assault that makes you feel like you're breathing through a warm, wet towel >> [music] >> that someone is also pressing gently against your face.

[00:17:01]The heat index in July is not a number, it's a threat.

[00:17:04]And the state's [music] history is heavy, genuinely, weightily heavy in ways that hang in the air alongside the humidity. And any honest accounting of the place has to sit with that rather than wave it off. So, why is it in this video? Because for the right person, the trade is worth making.

[00:17:20]Because what Mississippi lacks in glossy statistics, it makes up for in a quality that's gotten rare and expensive everywhere else. A way of life that hasn't been entirely paved over and optimized and turned [music] into an app. People here still sit on porches.

[00:17:34]They still go to church on Sunday and to somebody's house for dinner afterward.

[00:17:38]They still say hello, still mean it, still bring you a pie when you move in even though they've never laid eyes on you. Operating on the ancient logic that a new neighbor is a person who has not yet been fed. Southern hospitality is not a marketing slogan down here. It's a load-bearing wall of the entire culture.

[00:17:53]The cost of living means a modest retirement check lives like a much larger one. Your money buys you time, space, and a slower clock.

[00:18:01]Property taxes [music] are low. The winters are mild and merciful. While North Dakota is hitting 30 below, you'll be in a light jacket complaining about how nippy it got. Which, after a lifetime up north, will feel like a personal victory [music] over the universe. Is it for everyone? It is not.

[00:18:18]If you need world-class hospitals 5 minutes away, if you wilt in heat, if you want your home state to top the rankings rather than anchor them, then this is not your fresh start, and I'd be doing you a disservice to pretend otherwise. [music] But if you've got a tolerance for humidity, an appreciation for good food and slow afternoons, and a budget that needs to do the heavy lifting of your golden years, Mississippi will give you more house, more land, and more genuine warmth, both the kind on the thermometer and the kind on the front porch, than just about anywhere [music] in America.

[00:18:49]Just buy a good fan. Buy two. Trust me on the fans.

[00:18:53]Now we go north.

[00:18:55]Way north. [music] So far north that the next stop is Canada, and the one after that is a polar bear who'd like a word.

[00:19:02]>> [music] >> Welcome to Maine, the rugged, rocky, lobster-haunted northeastern corner of the country, where the air is clean, the coast is stunning, and the locals have been quietly perfecting [music] the art of telling you you'll never truly belong here in the most polite way imaginable.

[00:19:17]Let's start with the [music] lobsters because we have to. Because they run the place. Maine pulls something like a hundred million pounds of lobster out of the cold Atlantic in a good year. A hundred million pounds of lobster.

[00:19:31]That is a quantity of clawed sea [music] bugs so vast that laid end to end they would form a line you absolutely should not stand near.

[00:19:40]The lobster is to Maine what oil is to Texas [music] and what spite is to West Virginia. The founding resource, the economic engine, the thing the whole identity is built [music] on.

[00:19:49]There are towns up the coast where lobster isn't an industry so much as a way of life passed down through families like a surname. [music] Where children learn to band claws before they learn long division. And where a man's standing in the community is measured in traps. You will eat lobster here. You will eat lobster until the novelty wears off, which is a sentence I never thought I'd write. And then you'll eat a little more.

[00:20:11]There was a time by the way, and this is true, when lobster was considered trash food fed to prisoners and servants so abundant and so lowly that there were laws limiting how often you could feed it to inmates because it was deemed cruel.

[00:20:25]Now it's $40 a plate in Boston.

[00:20:27]The lobster [music] has had the greatest public relations turnaround in the history of food and it knows it and that is exactly why I don't trust them.

[00:20:35]Here's a fun fact that genuinely reframes the whole state. Maine is enormous and almost [music] completely empty up top. Everybody pictures the postcard coast, the lighthouses, the harbors, the little towns with their white churches. But that's a thin ribbon along the bottom edge.

[00:20:52]The vast interior, the great north woods, is millions of acres of forest, lake, and moose with barely a soul in it. Maine is the most heavily forested state in the entire country by percentage. Close to 90% trees. You could get lost up there in a way that's almost spiritual. The moose, I should mention, are the size of a delivery van and possess the road sense of a [music] toddler.

[00:21:14]So, if you move here, you will learn to drive at dusk with the alert focus of a fighter pilot because hitting a moose is less a car accident and more a geological event. Now, the cost.

[00:21:24]Maine is the funny one in this book because it is not, strictly speaking, cheap. The coastal towns have been discovered and prices [music] reflect it.

[00:21:32]But inland, away from the harbors and the tourists and the people from Massachusetts buying second homes, the deals are still very real. You can find a sturdy old farmhouse on a generous parcel of land for a fraction of what that same place would cost three states south.

[00:21:47]The interior of Maine is one of the last genuinely affordable corners of the northeast. A region otherwise dedicated to charging you $11 for a coffee.

[00:21:56]Property up there is reasonable, the pace is slow, and the only thing keeping prices down is that most people don't realize how beautiful [music] it is or they're scared of the winter, which fair. Because yes, the winter. I'd be lying to you the way I'd be lying about the lobsters if I didn't mention it.

[00:22:12]Maine winters are long, dark, and serious. The kind of winter that arrives in October, gets comfortable, and doesn't leave until it's good and ready, sometime around May.

[00:22:22]You will learn about something called mud season, which is the brief glorious interval between the snow melting and the ground deciding to be solid again, during which the entire state turns into a swamp and everyone simply accepts it.

[00:22:34][music] Mainers handle winter the way North Dakotans do, with a flinty stoicism and a deep arsenal of flannel.

[00:22:40]But they handle the darkness, too. The short days where the sun clocks out around 4:00 in the afternoon, and that part takes a certain temperament. Some people find it cozy. Some people find it the long dark night of the soul.

[00:22:53]Know which one you are before you sign anything. But here's what you get in exchange, [music] and it's a lot.

[00:22:59]You get a state of staggering, almost showing-off natural beauty. The rocky coast where the waves explode against the granite, the lighthouses that look like they were placed there specifically for calendars, Acadia National Park where the mountains run right down into the sea, and a sky at night so dark and clear you'll see stars you forgot existed.

[00:23:18]You get four real seasons, including a fall so spectacular that people drive from all over the world just to look at the leaves, which is a thing you'll soon take for granted out your own kitchen window. You get fresh air, clean water, [music] low crime, and a slowness that the rest of the frantic Northeast traded away decades ago. And you get the people, who deserve a word.

[00:23:39]Mainers are reserved. They are not unfriendly, that's a crucial distinction, but they are not going to fuss over you.

[00:23:46]They will help you in a heartbeat if your truck's in a ditch, >> [music] >> and they will not say much while doing it, and they will not expect thanks.

[00:23:52]There's a famous bit of Maine humor about a fellow who lived in town for 40 years and was still called from away because he wasn't born there, and his children were maybe, possibly, on a good day, starting to be considered local.

[00:24:05]This is not a slight, it's just the math.

[00:24:08]You move to Maine knowing you're joining a place older and more set in its ways than you are, and there's a deep comfort in that for the right soul.

[00:24:15]The comfort of being somewhere that isn't trying to change, isn't trying to sell you anything, and frankly isn't trying very hard to impress you at all.

[00:24:23]Is it for everyone?

[00:24:25]No. If you hate the cold, if the [music] dark gets into your bones, if you need a bustling social scene and a year-round farmers market and a sense that the community is reaching out to embrace you on day one, then Maine will be a tougher fit, and you should go in clear-eyed.

[00:24:40]But if you want clean, quiet, gorgeous, and genuinely affordable once you get away from the water, and if you can make peace with the winter and the lobster cartel, there is no more beautiful place in America to disappear into the trees and start over. Just keep an eye on those lobsters. 100 million pounds a year, and they keep coming. That's not a fishery.

[00:24:59]That's a standing army.

[00:25:01]And so we arrive at the finale, the big empty crown jewel, the last great wide open nothing of the lower 48 Wyoming. If you've made it this far in the book and you're still hungry for elbow room, if North Dakota didn't feel quite empty enough for you, you magnificent hermit, then pull up a chair because Wyoming's about to make all the other states look downright crowded. Here is the single most important fact about Wyoming, and once you absorb [music] it, everything else makes sense.

[00:25:28]Wyoming is the least populated state in the entire country.

[00:25:32]Fewer people live in the whole of Wyoming, an area larger than the United Kingdom, than live in a single mid-sized American city.

[00:25:39]We're talking somewhere south of 600,000 souls scattered across nearly 100,000 square miles.

[00:25:45]Do the math and it works out to about six people per square mile, and that average is doing a lot of heavy lifting because most of those six [music] are clustered in the handful of towns, which means out in the rest of it, the actual population density is best described as you and whatever the wind blew in. I told you in the chapter title [music] that the population is you, a great deal of wind, and roughly 47 other guys, and I want to be clear that I was joking, but only barely.

[00:26:10]Because the wind part is no joke at all.

[00:26:13]Wyoming is one of the windiest states in America, and there are stretches of highway where the gusts are strong enough to flip a tractor trailer clean over, which is why you'll see signs that [music] don't say "High winds possible", but rather give you the wind speed like a weather report for whether you'll survive the drive. The locals don't even flinch. A Wyoming native will describe a 50-mph crosswind [music] that nearly peeled the doors off his truck as a little breezy.

[00:26:40]The wind here has a personality, a grudge, and apparently nothing better to do. But oh, what the wind is blowing across is the fun fact that ought to be illegal to keep this quiet. [music] Wyoming is jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful, and it contains some of the most spectacular real estate on the planet.

[00:26:59]This is the state that holds Yellowstone, the very first national park ever established anywhere in the world. A place so full of geysers, [music] hot springs, bison, and bubbling earth that the early explorers who described it were flatly accused of lying, because surely no place like that could be real.

[00:27:17]Old Faithful is here, erupting on schedule like the world's most reliable employee. And just south sits Grand [music] Teton, where the mountains rocket straight up out of the valley floor with no foothills to ease you into it, just sheer audacious [music] granite stabbing at the sky.

[00:27:34]People pay a fortune to vacation here.

[00:27:36]You'd be living down the road. Now, let's talk money, because Wyoming has a secret that the wealthy figured out a while ago and would prefer you didn't dwell on.

[00:27:44]Wyoming has no state income tax, none, zero.

[00:27:48]The state collects [music] its money largely from mineral wealth, all that oil, gas, and coal under the ground, which means it leaves your paycheck and your retirement income gloriously, blessedly alone.

[00:28:00]For somebody living on a fixed income, on a pension or savings or social security, this [music] is enormous.

[00:28:06]Every dollar you bring in is a dollar you keep. It's one of the reasons you'll find a surprising number of very rich people quietly establishing residency in Wyoming. [music] They've run the numbers, and the numbers love it here.

[00:28:18]The difference is they live in a compound in Jackson Hole, and you can live perfectly well in one of the honest little towns where land is still cheap, and a house costs what a house ought to cost. And land is the whole point, isn't it?

[00:28:30]In Wyoming, you can still buy real acreage, genuine, sprawling, ride a horse and not reach the fence [music] acreage for prices that would buy you a glorified closet on either coast.

[00:28:40]You can own a piece of the American West, the actual mythologized cowboy West, the one from every Western you watched as a [music] kid.

[00:28:48]Because here's the thing about Wyoming.

[00:28:50]It never stopped being that.

[00:28:51]There are still working cattle ranches the size of small nations. There are still genuine cowboys, not the costume kind, men who do the actual job on actual horses because [music] the terrain demands it.

[00:29:03]The state symbol is a bucking bronco and a rider. And unlike most state symbols, this one is more or less a documentary.

[00:29:10]A fun fact to warm your heart. Wyoming was the very first place in America, the [music] first government anywhere in the country, to grant women the right to vote back in 1869, decades ahead of [music] the rest of the nation.

[00:29:23]They've called it the Equality State ever since, and they're rightly proud of it.

[00:29:28]So, this great empty windswept frontier, for all its rugged cowboy mythology, [music] was actually out ahead of everybody on that one.

[00:29:35]There's a lesson in there about not judging a place by how few people live in it. The people, naturally, are cut from hardy cloth.

[00:29:43]You don't choose to live somewhere this remote and this windy unless you're built for self-reliance. And Wyomingites are self-reliant down to the marrow.

[00:29:50]They're friendly in the unhurried Western way. A wave from a passing truck, a nod at the feed store, a willingness to help that's deep and real, but never fussy. They mind their own business and expect you to mind yours, which for a certain kind of person reading this book is not a drawback, but the entire dream.

[00:30:07]>> [music] >> Nobody's HOA is coming for your beige mailbox out here.

[00:30:11]There's a good chance there is no one within shouting distance to care what color your mailbox is, >> [music] >> or whether you have a mailbox, or whether you wear pants on Tuesdays.

[00:30:19]Freedom in Wyoming is not an abstract political slogan. It's just a practical reality of living somewhere with this much space and this few people to fill it. Is it for everyone?

[00:30:29]It is the least for everyone state in this entire book, and I say that with love. The winters are brutal, and the wind makes them worse.

[00:30:37]The nearest hospital, the nearest grocery store, the nearest anything can be a serious drive, and I'll just run to the store is a phrase that means something very different when the store is 40 miles away through a ground blizzard.

[00:30:49]If you need people around you, if you need bustle and culture and choices, Wyoming will feel less like a fresh start and more like a witness protection program. [music] But if what you're truly after, what you've maybe been after this whole time through all five [music] of these chapters is space and silence and a sky so big and so full of stars it rearranges something inside your chest and the deep clean freedom of a place that will simply leave you alone to live your life, >> [music] >> then there is nowhere on earth quite like it. Wyoming has been standing out there in the wind for a very long time, mostly empty, waiting for the rare sort of person who hears "least populated state in America" and feels their shoulders finally relax. [music] If that's you, and if you've read this far, I suspect it might be, then load [music] up the truck, point it west, and go claim your piece of the big quiet.

[00:31:40]Just hold on [music] to your hat and maybe your truck and possibly the 47 other guys because out here you're going to want to know their names. Now if all five of these places still feel a little too findable for your taste, if you've got people who might come looking and I'm not asking who, then click right here for the next one where we ditch the mainland entirely.

[00:32:01]Five islands where nobody will ever find you. No roads, no neighbors, no forwarding address. It's everything we just talked about except now there's water in the way and the postman has officially given up.