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

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

One day in early summer, he headed out to his pasture and first saw the immense bear about seven car lengths away (a measure that would have perplexed Eleazer, as cars had not yet been invented).

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

After a fretful night, a search party followed a short and grisly trail to the boy’s carcass, his throat torn out and one thigh eaten. The bear emerged from the undergrowth and tried to drive the humans away, but they brought it down in a volley of gunfire, burning the corpse as if it were a demon that could otherwise rise again.

Ordering people to kill bears would smack of monarchism. And funding a costly, state-run bear hit squad would require imposing unpopular taxes.

Long after it was no longer practically necessary, killing bears remained popular. Boys grew up eager to shoot a bear as a rite of passage; middle-aged men shot them as an assertion of manliness; old men prowled the woods with guns at the ready to show that, for now at least, they still had the ineffable “it” that could otherwise be expressed only by dropping one’s trousers, ruler at the ready.

In neighboring Vermont in 1815, Governor Jonas Galusha, seeking reelection, proudly announced that he would hunt a particularly notorious bear known as “Old Slipperyskin” with a hitherto-unknown hunting method. Galusha slathered himself with female bear scent and strode off into the woods, only to return to his entourage at a full sprint, the bear behind him. (He lost the gubernatorial campaign.)

Grafton’s settlers, very much on board with the anti-tax, anti-law sentiment, named their community after the Duke of Grafton, a notoriously lusty British nobleman who’d earned the honor by suggesting that the Crown impose fewer taxes on the American colonists.

Grafton’s petitions were in fact part of a simple, two-step plan. Step 1: Ask not to pay taxes. Step 2: Just don’t pay them.

But, coding aside, Babiarz belonged to a group of people who outdo even traders in their fidelity to logic: libertarians.

But when they went to check it out, someone told them that the town was about to adopt zoning regulations—building codes designed to keep structures habitable and safe from fire. That was an absolute deal-breaker.

It was June 19, 2004, just four months after Grafton was chosen as the site of the Free Town Project, and it was already shaping up to be an unmitigated disaster.

Pendarvis also vowed to force Grafton to withdraw from the school district and to legalize organ trafficking, cannibalism, and duels, among other things.

Like many Free Towners, Babiarz implied that it was grossly unfair for people to judge the Free Town Project by the views expressed on the Free Town Project website.

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.

The Panamanian Golden Frog, which cannot make itself heard above the roaring waterfalls of Panama, attracts mates through the use of semaphore. New England’s Eastern Gray Tree Frog, on the other hand, can survive being frozen nearly solid; all winter its organs sit like tiny hunks of beef jerky in an icy slurry of body fluids.

One elderly Graftonite posted the ultimate do-it-yourself dentistry video: while friends laughed raucously, he used a pair of pliers to wrench out one of his teeth (or, put another way, half of his teeth).

Pendarvis advocated loudly for the rights of women, though he never seemed to get beyond a very narrow zone of empowerment that largely concerned itself with the right to go without bras and underwear and the right to sell sex.

Though the settler days were long gone, Grafton was clinging to those notions of personal freedom that would, one hundred years later, prove so appealing to a new generation of libertarians. They’d built a town with few taxes and little state involvement, where a man was free to build an epic, towering pulpit that, once scaled, rendered one nearly inaudible.

Contrary to the libertarians’ expectations, however, real life in the Free Town seemed to be almost the reverse of Rand’s fictional vision

Meanwhile, the constant bloodletting was turning the once-vibrant town government into a symbol of societal decay. On the town’s few miles of paved roads, untended blacktop cracks first blossomed into fissures, then bloomed into grassy potholes. After voters rejected a funding request for $40,000 to purchase asphalt and other supplies, embattled town officials warned that Grafton was in serious danger of losing the roads altogether. The town was also put on notice by the state that two small bridges were in danger of collapse, due to neglect.

Other indicators also seemed to be moving in the wrong direction. Recycling rates dropped from 60 percent to 40 percent. The number of annual sex offender registrations reported by police increased steadily, from eight in 2006 to twenty-two in 2010—one in sixty residents.

Not every service was being cut. Indeed, certain expense categories were expanding. Before the Free Town Project began, the town’s legal expenses were usually less than $1,000 per year—they totaled $275 in 2004. But after the Free Town Project began, a more litigious mind-set emerged in Grafton and the town’s legal bills began to mount, reaching $9,400 in 2011.

But Grafton had low taxes. Or, to be more accurate, taxes that were low in theory.

In other words, Grafton taxpayers have traded away all of the advantages enjoyed by Canaan residents to keep about 70 cents a day in their pockets.

But there is one caveat. Public spending is associated with happiness, but it might not actually cause happiness, said the study authors. It’s also plausible that happy people of all income levels are simply more willing to spend tax money. If that’s true, it would suggest that Grafton’s miserly approach to public spending didn’t necessarily cause unhappiness among its residents. Rather, the low tax rate may have been a predictable outcome for a town that had, over the years, become a haven for miserable people.

Canaan’s firefighters had to contend with not only the distance but also Grafton’s infrastructural shortcomings, which included a total lack of fire hydrants. (This deficit was addressed by the federally funded Civilian Conservation Corps, which built a series of strategically located firefighting retention ponds, but Grafton neglected their maintenance until natural sediments filled them in, rendering them worthless.)

a thirty-one-year-old mother of eight,

Though it now operated from a reasonably modern building, Grafton’s fire department never received funding on par with neighboring towns. In 2019, Enfield spent $220,000 on its fire department and ambulance services. Canaan spent $261,000. Grafton spent $29,000.

But the volunteerism that once allowed Grafton to fight fires on the cheap has been waning. These days, when a fire truck first arrives at a fire scene, it is often empty of firefighters, save for its single volunteer driver.

“All I could imagine,” a white-sweatered woman would later recall during a public meeting, “was God looking down and saying, ‘You’ve dressed my church as a whore.’”

Some people felt harangued by Connell, or even intimidated. On the spectrum of human communication, his personal speaking style often hovered within the narrow range between somewhat shouty and very shouty.

Once, when Connell got a speeding ticket, he showed up at his court date in sweatpants and carrying no money because, he said, he was prepared to go to jail, but not to pay a fine.

To get an idea of how broadly the rules define “public charity,” consider that the American public supports, through tax exemption, the National Hockey League, the National Rifle Association, the US Chamber of Commerce, and a rogues’ gallery of fringe hate groups that have taken up the ever-ennobling charitable mission of promoting white supremacy, nazism, and ISIS.

But Connell had just one small problem with clearing the low bar that the town set out. To apply for nonprofit status with the IRS, he would have to first correspond with the IRS. And to correspond with the IRS, he would have to accept that the IRS was a legal authority, which he most emphatically did not.

Barskey declined to snuff the fire, on the theory that the actual danger was very small and their desire to roast hot dogs was very great.

The freedom forums lit up with a debate over how Grafton could privatize its fire services, with some suggesting that a voluntary fee of $7 per month could replace the involuntary $7 in monthly taxes that went toward supporting the existing department. This was objected to on the basis that some people might not voluntarily pay the fee, and then where would they be?

Chief Kenyon’s annually reported call statistics showed that, by 2010, the number of civil issues he responded to more than doubled, and the number of neighbor disputes nearly quadrupled, as compared to the years before the Free Town Project started.

People reject the genetic modification of animals in the laboratory as artificial and unseemly, but in fact there is a much less controlled genetic experiment happening in a continent-sized laboratory: the unintended natural selection of the bears that are trying to survive alongside modern humans.

Civilization is a mighty force; it turned fierce paleolithic hunter-gatherers into a flabby technocracy in which the most-retweeted English-language Twitter post is an appeal for chicken nuggets that reads: “HELP ME PLEASE. A MAN NEEDS HIS NUGGS.”

Unlike their diurnal ancestors, modern bears forage all night, not for the grubs and wild berries of the woods, but for their version of “nuggs”—the kitchen scraps and cornfields that tend to be less well guarded at night. Access to nuggs also explains why all ten of the heaviest bears ever recorded in New Hampshire were spotted (and shot) in 1997 or later. (They each weighed between 493 and 552 pounds.)

“I’m meeting up with a guy who’s going to teach me all about mushrooms,” Adam says. But, he admits, he isn’t confident about picking up the skill. “The problem is, I’m color-blind.”

As Adam leads me toward the Orb, I see that it’s in even worse shape than Adam’s camper. It looks like the kind of thing someone would hammer together out of an old carport and some siding. “We hammered it together out of an old carport and some siding,” says Adam.

Many times I’ve heard that it’s dangerous to let bears get acclimated to people. I’ve never been told what now seems clear to me—that it’s at least equally dangerous to let people get acclimated to bears.

The plan of New Hampshire’s bureaucrats was to stabilize the number at 5,100. But the plan of New Hampshire’s bears was slightly different: to make a thousand more bears.

First, the colonial oppressors subjugate a group of people, typically by limiting their say in political and criminal justice decisions.

Second, the oppressors (according to Butt) wipe out the indigenous culture and replace it with the imposed customs of the colonists.

his third defining feature: the oppressors exploit their wards, such as through the levying of unfair taxes.

It’s the all-important cognitive process that motivates us to move toward desirable and pleasurable outcomes, like hugs and cheesecake, and to move away from dangers, like gunfire and Reddit forums.

Are parasites really bashing Grafton’s humans around like so many sandbox toys? The answer is elusive. Toxoplasmosis researchers have never studied infestation rates among Graftonites, so the evidence is necessarily circumstantial. But if you tried to imagine a community that was particularly susceptible to a T. gondii epidemic, you would come up with something very like Grafton—a territory where people live in nontraditional housing that features substandard sewage and water systems and cats moving freely between gardens, woods, and bedrooms. The culture would include a disregard for expert advice from wildlife and public health agencies and therefore less reinforcement of societal norms like hand-washing and thorough cooking of game meat.

things that contain T. gondii. How does the risk-inducing parasite affect the behavior of a 350-pound bear that can literally smell a candy bar in your pocket from a mile away? No one knows, because most of the science is conducted from a public health standpoint that largely ignores the unhealthiness of being attacked by a bear.