Towns with under 50,000, in rural areas, have more contact with life's basics and can reorganize their populations if necessary. So a small town in a rural area is your best bet, not the boonies. A patch of land and a modest home just outside a village gives the greatest security. It will not cost you an arm and a leg and you will get away from the image of the leather-clad, root grubbing savage some survivalists would have you emulate.
You may want to get a few acres and live cut off from everyone. This is fine if you are well armed and a professional woodcrafter already. However, this is too great a change for most people. The inexperienced dreamer simply cannot survive alone. Regardless of your choice, town, commune or small farm, you must choose an area about 100 miles from any major population center. It must also be several miles off any major highway. Refugees streaming out of New York or Los Angeles or Dallas or wherever will clog the main highways and strip every home for miles each side of their route like plagues of locusts.
No matter how you might think you can steel yourself against pitiful refugees, you must plan to live as far off their prospective routes as possible, and you should find yourself a small community to band together with for defense, law/order, etc, and because you will not have every skill and will need to barter. Being an island seems a stupid idea for this. This is not as hard as you might think. More people are clogging the cities and only the intelligent ones are moving back to the land.