It is not, as I would have thought, the natural beauty. (It's hard to beat mountains and a beach.) No, it's buying my iced teas at a gas station. In Seattle, this takes 20 seconds, tops.
Not so in Cooterville. Even if the guy in front of you isn't buying a pack of smokes and a lottery ticket, there's still the inevitable small-talk with the cashier about their children. Although they've clearly never met before, they are instant, time-stopping intimates. This happens to me every single day, and I'm starting to spend this free time calculating how much of my remaining life-expectancy they're burning through. Sometimes I dearly miss Seattleites, who would never, ever dream of asking someone beneath their caste about themselves.