The American Dream, for many, has meant earning enough to buy property in the suburbs--but staying connected to that earning power through a sometimes-lengthy commute into the city. For writer Christian MilNeil, modern economics have changed the game.

My parents still live in the old farmhouse where I grew up, about two miles south of the village of Steep Falls. It's a pretty wonderful place, especially in the summer, when it's just a short walk through the woods to take a dip in the Saco River, or on a clear winter afternoon, when you can ski snowmobile trails all the way to the village.

But it's not a rural place, and it hasn't been for a long time. Steep Falls and Standish, the town it's a part of, no longer derive their economic livelihoods from farm, fields and forestry as a true rural community would. Instead, the town's residents almost exclusively rely on long commutes to cities like Portland. Steep Falls is a suburb.

My parents bought their house in the late 1970s, when it was the only house on a long unpaved road. Ever since then, my dad has driven roughly 50 miles a day to work in Portland. His commute has taken him a distance equivalent to over 14 trips around the circumference of the planet, and required two and a half years of his conscious life to be spent behind a steering wheel.

As grateful as I am to have grown up there, these seem like incredibly high prices to pay. But for my dad, it's worth it. For a longtime, a lot of others thought it was worth it as well. Hundreds of new houses have gone up along my parents' now-paved road.

In recent years, Standish was one of the fastest-growing towns in the state. Thanks to cheap gasoline and cheap real estate financing my parents' generation was able to go back to the land, to live, by driving to the city every day, to work.

In a recent essay published in Design Observer, environmental writer James Barilla notes that "living off the grid in the woods and driving a car to work are compatible fantasies. Both offer illusions of independence and self-sufficiency. Cars allow us to get away from other people, to live according to our own schedule, to retreat to a small hill town on the western frontier."

Ultimately, though, the independence is only an illusion, obscuring the reality of how much our lifestyles really rely on Houston oil refineries, and container shipments from China, and the complex financial instruments that own our mortgages.

In 2008, the price of gasoline spiked rapidly while home values collapsed. Suddenly, long-distance commuters were facing the choice between paying for their cars, or for their mortgages. The foreclosure crisis, which has disproportionately affected small bedroom communities like Standish throughout New England, has brutally broken the suburban illusion of independence.

Like many of my own generation, I've moved to the city, where I don't need to spend much of my time or money taking care of an automobile. I still love Steep Falls, and sometimes I imagine living a truly independent life there, the way people lived in Steep Falls 80 years ago. I imagine hard work, chopping wood and growing food, listening to the peepers in April and coyotes in winter.

But there would also be worries not so different from those that haunt modern-day suburbanites: anxieties about providing for my family, uncertainty about the future. And the loneliness of living apart. Like the solitude of a long, long drive home.

Writer Christian MilNeil blogs at vigorousnorth.com, and lives in Portland.