A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Bears browsed through barns and peeped into kitchen windows, burly bundles of ursine meat watching ambulatory hominine meat cooking juicy chunks of ovine meat.

The settlers hated bears with the sizzling, white-hot hatred that comes from living in constant fear. But there was something they hated even more—taxes.

The foot-dragging on the tax-paying caused much hand-wringing among the government-running.

The building of utopias is limited by the rarity of visionaries with deep pockets. Building a new community from scratch requires millions or billions of dollars to create an infrastructure and overcome the challenges preventing people from living there in the first place.

In a country known for fussy states with streaks of independence, New Hampshire is among the fussiest and the streakiest. It’s one of only five states with no sales tax, one of two states that limit the governor to two-year terms, and the only state in New England that still allows the death penalty. (No one has been executed since 1939, but they like to keep their options open.)

At the same time the Free Towners set themselves to shaping the community to their liking, the town’s bears were working to create their own utopia.

If escaping a bear’s notice is unlikely, so is escaping the bear itself. Humans can dive into water to flee cougars, climb trees to evade raging rhinoceri, and outrun alligators. But the average black bear swims speedily and climbs quickly. It could spot Usain Bolt 25 meters in his world-record-setting 100-meter dash and still pounce on the world’s fastest man well before the finish line.

Each day Grafton seemed to grow fuller. More full of bears. More full of libertarians. More full of guns. And more full of people who loved bears, libertarianism, guns, or some combination of the three—and who were increasingly prepared to fight for what they loved. Oh and doughnuts. The doughnuts were on the rise too.

On the spectrum of human communication, his personal speaking style often hovered within the narrow range between somewhat shouty and very shouty.

Speaking to another reporter, Juneau drew on all the blamelessness that passive sentence construction could provide. “The bear reacted in a panicked manner and unfortunately,” he said, “she sustained some injuries.”

Mink once sat beneath a zip line at Hanover High School, watching the kids pass above her head like a sumo wrestler keeping a close eye on a sushi conveyor belt.