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

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Grafton officials told voters that adopting the exemption would have a negligible impact on the town’s tax rolls, because Grafton was home to only one blind person, who lived on a fixed income and paid very little in taxes anyway. Libertarians didn’t directly object to that resident getting a tax break—a position too blatantly heartless—but they regretfully opposed the measure anyway on the grounds that, when word got out, scores of blind millionaires might flock to Grafton to take advantage of the loophole. (The measure narrowly passed over these objections, and over the following eight years Grafton’s population of blind millionaires remained relatively static, at zero.)

The post unlocked a flood of criticism of Babiarz, who was in the midst of his third campaign for governor. Former libertarian supporters savaged him as a petty, corrupt, jackboot-wearing, authoritarian, control-freak thug, with a hard-on for paper permits. (Libertarians reserve a special disdain for pieces of paper that hold power over their actions.)

Though he was publicly stalwart, the dispute with Barskey put Babiarz in an odd position. For years, his nonlibertarian Grafton neighbors had castigated him for his role in the launch of the Free Town Project, so he had grown used to being criticized from the left. But now the libertarians were describing him in the same terms they used to describe their worst left-wing enemies.

“They don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” said Rosalie Babiarz. “They don’t want anybody to impose anything on them, but they want to impose their ideas on everyone else.”

A few libertarians began to question whether the Free Town Project was indeed a worthwhile endeavor after all. “It’s too late for some,” wrote one jaded libertarian, “but if anyone is out there thinking of moving to Grafton because they also are under the illusion that it is some kind of libertarian utopia, try to grasp some reality.”

Libertarians believe that a landowner like Doughnut Lady owns any natural resources on that property—oil deposits, trees, and even wandering wildlife, like bears or endangered species. In Grafton, I was told, four or five families were intentionally feeding the bears, and the libertarian community saw this as their absolute right.

When I heard about Doughnut Lady’s experiences, I was a little envious. As a lifelong animal lover, I could easily imagine the sheer joy of seeing bear cubs tumbling around while their mother watched, relaxing in the sunshine. But I would eventually learn that Doughnut Lady’s story was less like a Disney movie and more like The Odd Couple. It’s the story of one old woman thoughtlessly leaving bears all over another old woman’s lawn and front porch.

Out here what seems nutty is that people spend the workweek doing things they hate in exchange for white pieces of paper that represent green pieces of paper that used to represent yellow metal but now represent only a collective delusion of value. Out here it’s easier to be seduced by the apocalyptic survivalist notion that, instead of nature being inevitably steamrolled by the tide of progress, the natural world will bleed back into our lives, outlast our frail constructs, and carpet the world in moss and bramble.

The survivalists, beginning to get uneasy, decided to respond. First they posted a sign by the trash bins that read NO BEARS ALLOWED. It seemed unlikely that the bears could read, but you never knew, right?

Not until later did I realize that Adam and Doughnut Lady, who lived relatively close to each other, had both tried to communicate with what were almost certainly the same exact bears using the same exact words—“Go away! Go away!” But while Adam intended for the bears he shouted at to retreat, Doughnut Lady intended for them to simply be patient for an imminent snack time. This underscored just how confusing Grafton’s people must have seemed to its problem-solving bears. Every house was a potential source of calories, but the people who inhabited them might flee, or sic a llama on them, or offer food, or throw firecrackers at their head. It was a lot to sort out.

The primary thrust of the campaign is to help people manage their garbage and bird feeders in ways that are less likely to attract bears. These are valuable lessons, but also convenient for the state, because they deflect bear complaints back onto the complainant, or the complainant’s neighbors, rather than on the state policies that have effectively stocked the woods with bears. Telling people to change their behavior is far cheaper than investing in an effective trapping and relocation process (for the bears, not the owners).

Over the next few years, Soule continued to struggle with the same problems—declining health, the aching cold of winter, failing heating systems, and battles with the VA that never seemed to resolve anything. Her feelings of isolation intensified. After the libertarians stepped up the pressure on the town budget, she said, her road was no longer certain to be plowed, especially during late-winter storms, when the annual winter maintenance budget ran out. “They would literally stop plowing,” she said.

While we chatted, Soule used a phrase that struck me as odd: “before the bears came.” “I used to let my cats outdoors, but that was before the bears came.” It was my first sign that something unusual was happening in Grafton, that something fundamental had changed. Soule explained that, for her, the eating of Bungtown’s cats was the moment bear-human relations had irrevocably broken down.

“You know,” she wailed, “I’ve already been through a lot.” She didn’t mean the events of the night. She meant the events of her life in Grafton. The breast cancer, the sweltering greenhouse, the pay-by-the-minute cell phone that wouldn’t work in her house, the coyotes dogging her steps when she went for a walk. “And now I’ve had a fuckin’ bear attack!” Tracey sobbed. “I can’t believe it.”

IN THE WEEKS and months that followed, Grafton was awash in a sweaty, boiling anger that was stupid in its willingness to cast blame indiscriminately and pardon no one for their faults. Everyone, it seemed, wrestled endless demons of fur and heat: John Connell, still waiting to hear whether God wanted him to sell his church for zero dollars, got into an argument with the police chief over whether enforcement of victimless crimes was harassment; Jessica Soule rolled down her wheelchair ramp, a garbage bag in one hand and a gun in the other; Tracey Colburn lay awake on sweat-soaked sheets, listening to the bear outside her house. Burglary rates were up, drug crimes were up, and two different groups of people began talking seriously about how to address the area’s bear surplus: state officials discussed a ten-year population reduction plan, while a group of Graftonites discussed blowing the heads off of every bear in town. Throughout it all, Doughnut Lady and a handful of libertarians continued to feed the bears, which needed the food more than ever—after all, it was a drought year.

Outside of these state-sanctioned hunting practices, the first rule for killing a bear is pretty much the same as the first rule for killing a human: it can only be done in defense (though when it comes to killing a bear, defense of one’s dogs or chickens counts). And yet, I hear whispers that, behind this veneer of sensible rules, an ugly, clandestine bear killing has taken place. One man tells me, with palpable anger, that he found a wounded bear in his backyard out of season, its jaw shattered so badly by a bullet that it couldn’t eat. And so every time I pull my notebook from my pocket for an impromptu interview, an illegal bear hunt is one of the topics I try to broach. Has one happened? Who did it? And why?

When I bring up the subject with Tom Ploszaj, he gives me a staple of Grafton’s small-talk playbook: Friendly Advice. When Ploszaj first came to the community, he says, he got Friendly Advice of his own when he started asking too many questions about how things worked and who had done what to whom. “There’s a lot of places around here where they’ll never put a shovel into the dirt,” he tells me now, his tone mild. “You don’t want to find one of those places.” When I don’t respond, he clarifies, holding my eyes with his. “If you ask too many questions, you might be in a hole in the woods and no one’s going to find you.”

Friendly Advice took many forms in Grafton. Sometimes a phrase like “I’m a proud gun owner” was slipped innocuously between a description of one’s pets and an observation on the weather. Sometimes it took the trappings of gossip, as in, “That guy knows not to break into my home because he knows I have guns,” presumably implying that I too should now know not to break into that home, for the same reason. Or somebody like Ploszaj’s friend, the free-wheeling John Redman, would sometimes just slap a gun clip down on your car console. In all cases, the common denominator was someone taking special pains to communicate to me that there were guns in an easily accessible, but undisclosed, location, and that those guns could be employed against me. You know, if it came to that.

As I exit the store, a drink in hand, I strike up a conversation about bears with a pair of older men on the wooden front porch. They tell me that, in the recent past, a posse of Grafton men hunted and killed thirteen bears in one day. At first, they sound happy about it, in a those-damn-bears-had-it-coming kind of way, but to me the news is an absolute bombshell, and my reaction must have shown on my face. When I pull out my notebook and press for details, the men exchange a look and stop talking.

But who were the shooters? The more questions I asked, the more I realized how well hidden the poachers were. It wasn’t the dense tangle of leafy forest scrub or the crumbling rock walls that hid them—it was a thicket of social relations and a stony culture of resistance to outsiders. Sometimes, when I talked to a Grafton man, I got the feeling that his face was a mask, that a bear killer was peering out at me through the eyeholes. But I could never be sure. What seemed clear was this: in a town that refused to allow the government to protect it from bears, vigilantism seemed the only option. Just as the libertarians wanted, it was every man, woman, and bear for themselves.

In addition to failing to capture the bear, Fish and Game also failed to defend Tracey in the court of public opinion; instead, within hours of the attack, officials told media organizations across New England that the bear was attracted to the pot roast Tracey had been cooking at the time. That narrative shifted the blame away from the bear and also away from the state policies that led to a record-high number of drought-desperate bears in the woods of an increasingly lawless Grafton.

I wrote to Andrew Timmins, the state’s leading bear biologist, with a request for copies of all paperwork related to the attack. But Timmins responded that there was no paperwork—no narrative of events, no analysis of the bear’s actions, no correspondence among officials. The only formal record of the whole incident was a single check mark among many check marks in the tally of bear encounters associated with the presence of human food. This is the end result—and the ultimate failing—of the quantitative approach: Tracey’s potentially fatal experience was treated on paper no differently than a garbage can raid.

EVEN AFTER TALKING to the woman, it was hard for me to picture poachers killing a hibernating bear, an act that is grossly unethical by the standards of both the state and respectable hunting organizations. Because the practice is so widely and passionately condemned, it has taken place only in secret, without the public ever seeing footage of what it’s really like.

And anyway, their vigilantism hasn’t helped, not really. It put a brief dent in the local bear population, but nothing more. With Fish and Game administrators still too overworked to step in, the woods soon teemed with more bears. Graftonites may have thought they had a bear problem, but you could equally say it was a problem caused by the retreat of their sworn enemy: taxes.

While Doughnut Lady was immersing herself in a Disney-tinged world of semi-tame bears, Beretta was trapped in a suspense film in which she was forever forestalling the final bloody scene (as heroines so often are). “I don’t want to get mauled by a bear,” Beretta insists. “I really, truly don’t.”

I’m unclear on whether owning three guns makes one feel thrice as safe as one gun, or if gun ownership is, like potato chips and birthdays, subject to diminishing returns.

Free State Project organizers tried to relieve this tension by disassociating themselves from the politically problematic Larry Pendarvises of the world. One such prominent Free Stater was Ian Freeman. On the plus side, Freeman hosted a popular liberty-themed podcast with an international reach that attracted many New Hampshire residents, but on the minus side, he had a long-standing belief that minors could consent to sexual relationships with adults. When a 2010 audio clip of his stating that view was publicized in 2016, the Free State Project canceled a mutual endorsement deal with his podcast and formally disinvited him from Free State Project events (though he remained a prominent figure in libertarian circles).

Though the presidency remains a long shot, the Free Staters have at long last entered the political mainstream in New Hampshire. They have managed to gain power and influence in the state legislature, in many cases running as Democrats or Republicans to make themselves more viable. Though state candidates like Tom Ploszaj, Jeremy Olson, Tim Condon, and Ian Freeman failed in their electoral bids, Bob Hull won a statehouse seat as a Republican, and the Free Staters claimed legislative victories with respect to several issues on which they shared common ground sometimes with the left and sometimes with the right, such as legalizing same-sex marriage, cutting the state budget, and expanding school choice.

Despite their widespread influence, the New Hampshire libertarians, partially cloaked by their mainstream partisan labels, enjoyed an ability to operate largely under the radar. The average visitor to Murphy’s, a Manchester bar, didn’t realize that it was libertarian-owned and home to the world’s first Bitcoin ATM. They didn’t realize that if they walked into a local church service, they could be confronted with a foam sword fight. And they certainly didn’t realize that, soon after the Trigger, Grafton’s bear problems began to go statewide.

Tracey Colburn was faulted for screaming at the bear, possibly causing it to feel attacked. Rogers did the opposite—when she saw the bear, she sat quietly in her wheelchair. “I tried to stay calm,” she would say afterward. She remained calm as the bear approached her, sat down next to her, silent, and then began rocking its head from side to side. She was calm right up until the moment it attacked. “All of a sudden,” she said, “he just let me have it.”

While Rogers was in the hospital for what would prove to be a month of rehab, Fish and Game sprang into action, once again spinning the event in a way that exonerated the bear and the state policy that helped put it there.

As the disconnect spread statewide, wildlife officials continued to push the limits of acceptable numbers of bears, and libertarians continued to promote a culture of civil disobedience and individual rights, including the right to feed or shoot the bears in one’s backyard. The stage seemed set for more conflict, one that would involve more deaths for bears and perhaps human casualties as well.

Mink’s boldness was largely attributed to an elderly realtor who liked to set out large piles of food to watch Mink eat. Eschewing the bargain basement grain and supermarket doughnuts that made do in Grafton, he put out high-quality black-hulled sunflower seeds and maple-glazed crullers purchased from the same diner bakery that fed Dartmouth professors. When her benefactor died in 2016, Mink began plaguing the rest of the town like an indigent widow, now with three young cubs in tow.

It’s unsurprising that no one liked the idea of bear euthanasia, a protocol that evolved in the shadows of wildlife management because of chronic underfunding. But no one had ever rubbed Hanover’s nose in the ethical murk of killing a bear.

The contrast with bear management in Grafton could not be more stark. A bear’s life in Hanover is threatened, and the state moves heaven and earth to find it and treat it in accordance with the wishes of the public. A bear threatens a woman’s life in Grafton, and the state makes a half-hearted effort to capture it before the incident quickly fades from the public imagination.

In Hanover, the saga of Mink was, surprisingly, not over. Her radio collar showed that in 2019 she found her way back to Hanover by a very circuitous route that involved traveling more than a thousand miles and crossing the Connecticut River. The story made national news. “I’m back bitches,” said Mink (according to a Twitter account in her name). “Where the donuts at?”

Mink’s story demonstrates that, in a place with strong civic engagement, aggressive enforcement of best practices with regard to human food attractants, and political will, even a worst-case scenario of human-habituated bears can be resolved in a way that makes everyone happy. The problem is that state and local officials can’t afford to leverage that kind of effort everywhere. And until they do, bears will be effectively managed only on the doorsteps of the elite.

I bumped up a poorly tended dirt road marred by rocks and tree branches, until I got to Tent City, where Adam Franz had expounded on how he thought bears would fare under a libertarian society. “One way or another, it wouldn’t be a good thing,” he had told me. “Whether they hunted them to extinction in the area, or they fuckin’ let people feed them until they overpopulated, I don’t think that would ever balance out.”

Here, I thought, was another irony, in that those who had come to this patch of woods seeking the ultimate freedom were instead barricading themselves into a rudimentary fortress to attain some level of security that was not being provided by the government.

But anytime library supporters mount an effort to build a proper library or increase funding, they’ve run into stone walls and insults, both from libertarians and from tax-conscious town officials. During one town meeting, when Jeremy Olson was told that state law mandates wages for public library workers, he put forth an apparently serious proposal that the library do an end run around the law by paying its staff $1 an hour. Another library antagonist suggested that its free WiFi was opening the town to legal attacks over copyright infringement.