the boonies

At the first group dinner, she sits meekly in the boonies of the banquet room alongside a couple dozen of Moretti’s acolytes waiting for the head table to pass down a shared bread roll for everyone to take a bite.

Gauging by the skull flag prominently displayed in Grady’s basement, the boonies of the Pacific Northwest are populated solely by unsocialized, militia-affiliated wild men.

Fowler: “She made it comfortable to grow as a human. I was from the boonies of Arkansas, trying to figure out who I was in terms of coming out as gay, pursuing a PhD from a family where I was already the first generation of college students, and this was a person who was so secure in who she was and kind and generous.”

We’re in the boonies of 18th-century Austria, a land of tall, lonely forests and craggy hillsides.

I’m not talking about a motel in the boonies of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or a drafty log cabin on a lake in Maine or Minnesota.