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"All of a sudden, everyone's like, 'So-and-so has a house up there,'" says fashion photographer Carter Smith, who recently moved into an 18th-century meeting house at the end of a little dirt road in the no-stoplight town of Durham.

So why are all these city sophisticates migrating to this land of muddy driveways, scary bugs and lousy cellular-phone service? The prices have something to do with it: In the more remote parts of the region, it's still possible to find a five-bedroom farmhouse on 25 acres for $200,000. But the bargains don't tell the whole story, since many of the newcomers could afford to live anywhere in the world. They've chosen this area, they say; mainly for what it lacks: trendy restaurants, celebrity softball tournaments, the Long Island Expressway. The upstaters are 21st-century Thoreaus looking for their own Walden Pond - preferably with a nice little boathouse to match. "It just seems like more and more people need to get away from the city -and even from the Hamptons- in order to stay sane," says Carolyn Murphy, who now lives in Ulster County year-round, having dumped her Crosby Street loft for an old stone house with a 37-acre apple orchard. "Friends come to visit, and they say, 'Oh, my God, it's so beautiful up here.' And they want to get a place, too."

In some ways, this upstate renaissance is just the latest phase in an ongoing boom-and-bust cycle: Parts of the region have been fashionable, on and off, for more than 300 years. Dutchess County was essentially the Hamptons of the 19th century, and the mansions that line the river still offer the same gut-wrenching views that inspired Frederic Church and the painters from the Hudson River School. Beatrice Perry, a sculptor who has lived for decades in a river-front estate north of Rhinebeck, is pleased to see that many of the recent arrivals possess the enlightened spirit of the old days. "So many of the young people moving up here now are artists and creative people," Perry says as she sips wine on her back porch, gazing out over a broad lawn that slopes down to the river. When she mentions some of the valley's newest attractions -a Frank Gehry-designed performance center currently under construction at Bard College; a 300,000-square-foot outpost of Manhattan's Dia Center in Beacon- Perry starts to laugh. "It's getting so damn cultural up here," she says. "No one has any fun anymore."

But culture and sociability aren't the top priorities for most of the recent arrivals, who can usually be found right in their backyards, obsessing over their hydrangeas and rhapsodizing about the wonders of nature. Indeed, many of these ex-urbanites sound like Fresh Air Fund kids who've just seen their first live animal. "It's just so amazing up here, I can't believe it," says Aucoin, who has decided that he will soon move upstate permanently. "Every day we see at least 20 deer and dozens of chipmunks~. And little bunn rabbits and everything!"

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