On Edge of Va. Sprawl, Labels Crumble, New Lives Thrive

"I like working in the yard and staying busy," he said, shoveling dirt from his pickup on a clear and cool afternoon. "Once you know your needs, you locate in an area to have your needs met."

A few miles away, Nakia Graves, a government contractor, and husband Wesley Graves, an insurance adjustor, said they moved from Prince George's to their new beigey subdivision for better schools for their daughter, among other reasons.

"I'm a Southern person by nature," said Wesley Graves, hosing off his driveway one Friday after work. "I like to be isolated."

His wife commutes an hour on less-traveled roads across the Potomac River through Maryland to the District and said she loves it. Others who've ventured south drive to Fredericksburg or to the Dahlgren naval center or deep into Northern Virginia.

For a while, they zip along uncrowded roads and feel "free," said Rob Meyerson, or "peaceful," Nakia Graves said. They listen to satellite radio or a taped sermon from the church they left in Mississippi; they talk on the phone because it's easier when you're alone or watch the seasons change through their windshields, tracing new geography that Lang and others are trying to define.

"I see deer on the way home," said Meyerson, who moved with his wife and daughter from a house in Woodbridge to a house he was amazed he could afford. "I get to see the sun rise every day and the sun set. It's beautiful."

He works in Alexandria as an elevator repairman and considers himself conservative. Behind other new doors in both counties are a self-described hippie liberal and a home-schooling conservative preacher, a young lawyer, a teacher, a real estate agent, a software configuration manager.

Although President Bush won the vast majority of the nation's fastest-growing counties in the 2004 election, Lang noted, Democrat John F. Kerry won 51.6 percent of the popular vote in the 10 megapolitans.

Whatever their political affiliations, though, people moving to King George and Caroline counties tend to share one fundamental quality: They don't see themselves so much escaping from the world as seeking out some better version of it, or even creating their own.

"I never considered moving here as trying to retreat," said Gail Heppner, addressing a common criticism. "But I do try to look at it as I'm going somewhere where I'll find people with the values that are important to me: consideration, friendliness, safety. . . . I look at it as a proactive choice to go and find what we want, instead of just complaining."

She likes that she has neighbors who will call the Caroline County sheriff if an unfamiliar car lingers too long. She likes that she can open her living room window and practically touch the house next door. She likes that one Friday, the woman who lives there opened her window and called her and Brent over for margaritas.

She likes the newness of it all, being part of a place -- a suburb, an exurb, a town, a megapolitan or whatever it's called -- where she believes she can exert some control over a world that, in her view, has degenerated since her childhood in Cincinnati.

And another thing: "We love our floor plan -- love, love, love," Heppner said.

Perhaps what she calls "the ick in the world" will catch up. "Reality is what it is," she said.

For the time being, though, her life off Exit 110 seems, to her, to approximate something better.