A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear

(by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling)

I hadn’t heard of the Free Town Project before I started reading this book for nonfiction book club, and I also didn’t know a lot about bears in New Hampshire before reading this (though when I was a kid and my mom and I were somewhere near Mount Washington one summer, another guest at the place we were staying warned us in a very thick Boston accent to watch out for bears—we didn’t see any, though). This book was a very entertaining introduction to both. The book is about Grafton, New Hampshire, a tiny town that was chosen in 2004 by a group of libertarians to be the site of an experiment they’d been wanting to conduct (the experiment being whether they could move into an existing town and turn it libertarian); it’s also about Grafton’s ursine residents and their encounters with the human ones. Over the course of the book, Hongoltz-Hetling introduces us to Graftonites new and old, including a woman who moved there decades ago to be the caretaker for a property owned by the Unification Church, a firefighter and his wife who fled Connecticut’s high taxes, a woman known in the book as Doughnut Lady (because of what she feeds the bears), several Free Town Project folks, and others. But the action is not just from the time of the Free Town Project and more recent years: I like how the book goes back to the colonial era to talk about the fact that neither bears nor a strong “anti-tax, anti-law sentiment” are anything new for Grafton. I also very much liked the book’s writing style, which is often very funny. I mean, how could I not enjoy sentences like this, about the firefighter and his wife talking to the Free Town Project guys about whether Grafton could be a good spot for them: “It’s not clear whether, at this point, the Babiarzes fully understood that the libertarians were operating under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be rescinded.” Or this: “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.”