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March 3 - March 9, 2021
Soule’s village, centered on Wild Meadow Road, is called Bungtown, named for one or more barrel bungs that once popped out during a carriage transport and spilled a remarkable amount of alcohol onto the roadway.
When first my father settled here, ’Twas then the frontier line: The panther’s scream, filled night with fear And bears preyed on the swine. —Abraham Lincoln, “The Bear Hunt,” 1847
Scrabbling a bullet out of his pocket, Eleazer fired with pinpoint accuracy—a direct hit to the head. The bear fell heavily. But as Eleazer ran to the corpse, it rose up in a decidedly uncorpse-like manner and bolted, bleeding, into the woods.
And just as bear-killing fueled one’s manhood, lack of such prowess did the opposite. 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.)
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. Grafton’s founders had not braved the throat of this godforsaken wilderness to pay taxes. In fact, they demonstrated very little appetite for law of any kind.
Britain ordered New Hampshire’s foresters to reserve the colony’s towering white pines for use as naval ship masts. This decree sparked the Pine Tree Riots, in which Grafton-area townspeople disarmed a royalist sheriff and his deputies, beat them with tree switches, and sent them home on horses that, in an unfortunate example of misplaced anger, had been shaved and de-eared.
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.
Bartleby the Scribner
Sir, I beg leave to return you my thanks for the Bow and arrows you were so kind as to send me, as also for the two Grisly bears which I have since recieved & now have here in good health. —Thomas Jefferson, 1807 letter on grizzlies that briefly lived on the White House lawn (and were subsequently given by Jefferson to a man who, after failing to domesticate them, shot them dead)
AFTER A STINT in Vermont, the Babiarzes quickly realized that New Hampshire was a better bet for those who wanted to “Live Free or Die”—a state motto so beloved that, in the 1970s, when a Jehovah’s Witness covered up the words “or Die” on his license plate because they offended his religious sensibilities, the state jailed him.
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.
bear attacks are very rare. From a statistical standpoint, you’re more likely to suffocate in a giant vat of corn than be injured by a bear.
“Government isn’t ruining capitalism. Capitalism is ruining government. I think that’s kind of obvious,” he says. “If you take capitalism out of government you get simple public representation. If you take government out of capitalism, you get slavery.”
“What’s the endgame of capitalism, if not a big fat white man sitting on top of a pile of bloody bones with no one around him, crying because nobody’s around to make him a sandwich?”
“I said, ‘I will resist you by every means at my disposal,’” Goat Man told Goat World magazine. “If the sheriff comes, you’ll have to shoot me.”
“The libertarian movement is more cerebral, if you will,” he said. “They lack the ability to deal with people at the human level.”
And in 1909, not long after it first declined to fund a fire department, Grafton stymied a plan to build a $150 police station, leaving a chain of police chiefs no choice but to work, conduct interviews, and store criminal records in their own homes for the next eighty-two years.
Early humans also eliminated North America’s two-ton armadillos, twenty-foot-tall sloths, six-hundred-pound saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves, and bear-sized rodents.
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 he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys. —2 Kings 2:23–24
He liked the way a hiking trail that followed the old railroad tracks running behind the church piped people right past his back door. Connell collected brush and whacked weeds to keep that stretch of the trail looking nice, and he often waylaid walkers with sculptures or face-to-face messages of peace and love. (That year the state of New Hampshire, which had a different definition of “looking nice,” told Connell to remove his art from the public right-of-way along the trail.)
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.
“I’m back bitches,” said Mink (according to a Twitter account in her name). “Where the donuts at?”
