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

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Babiarz called the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. For an awful, awkward moment, two worldviews of bear management collided. The man who answered the phone sounded doubtful. “It’s been a century since we’ve had a bear attack on a person,” he said. But the quantitative statistics the man was citing did not match the qualitative experience unfolding in Grafton. So Babiarz shouted at him too. “I’m HERE!” he said. “I see the BLOOD!”

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.

There is the single smug crack of the expert marksman, and the awful, misery-laden silence spanning two shots (the second one a mercy).

There’s only one year on record in which there were no bear complaints from Grafton—2013, the year after the posse’s ursine genocide campaign.

libertarians are by definition on the political fringe and hold positions that have rarely been tempered by the burden of leadership.

Neighboring Vermont, which has roughly the same number of bears and acres of land as New Hampshire, has about half the number of bear complaints.

It’s not so much that state officials or the freedom community are wrong in their approach to the question of bear management. It’s just that the two approaches are totally incompatible, and neither side is in a position to effect change on the other side of the divide.

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.

As the outrage cycle built, people looked down their noses from horses so high that they could barely be seen by the mere mortals crawling upon the surface of the earth.

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.

“There’s nothing explosive, a big boomerang coming out and chopping you, or anything like that,” he said, in the tone of a man who has made certain compromises.