4 THE CAMPFIRE CLASH

“A deplorably constituted creature, that rugged person,” he said, as he walked along the street; “he is an atrocity that carries its own punishment along with it—a bear that gnaws himself.”

—Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, 1841

Once they’d declared Grafton a Free Town, the libertarian activists began flexing their muscles in an ongoing game of resistance against town authorities.

John Connell was doing his part by refusing to pay taxes. Jeremy Olson, Tom Ploszaj, John Babiarz, and Bob Hull were all doing their part by suing the town over things like planning board elections and law enforcement over marijuana.

But often the opportunity to defend freedom came serendipitously, on the street. That was the method preferred by Mike Barskey, a man in his late thirties who came to Grafton from California around 2009. Barskey’s rapid-fire speech and boundless bravado fit right into the Free Towner community—his new Grafton friends saw him as a habitual and polished defender of freedoms. He even carried three recording devices on him at all times to document the various little injustices that always seemed to erupt around him.

Barskey was also partial to the type of ambitious theorizing that underpinned so much of the Free Town Project’s frenetic energy. Soon after arriving in Grafton, in a nod to Rand’s fictional utopia, he unveiled a plan to construct a building called the “Grafton Gulch.” It would be owned by Barskey but used as a private clubhouse where libertarians could engage in unrestricted commerce with one another. The libertarians seized upon the idea, and Hull, who by then lived with a group of Free Towners on Grafton’s Liberty Lane, sold Barskey a suitable property along Route 4 in Grafton Center. Located about a mile north of Connell’s Peaceful Assembly Church, the three-acre tract, vacant save for a shed and some materials left over from a previously aborted development plan, sloped down from Route 4 and toward the old railroad line.

In late May of 2010, Barskey, Connell, and a handful of Free Towners assembled beneath blue skies and bright sunshine to help clear brush from the site and break ground on Grafton Gulch. Around noon, the work crew lit a small cooking fire in a rock-lined fire pit so that they could roast hot dogs for lunch.

That’s when a deputy fire warden from the neighboring town of Enfield pulled over on Route 4 and told Barskey that the unpermitted fire could accidentally ignite either the nearby shed or a pile of wood chips. 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 warden left, but he contacted Grafton’s gray-haired police chief, Merle Kenyon, who arrived on the scene and also told Barskey to put the fire out. Barskey once again refused. After a testy exchange in which Barskey accused the police chief of being more interested in controlling innocent citizens than public safety, and the police chief accused Barskey and his friends of being pathetic, Chief Kenyon contacted the Grafton Volunteer Fire Department to come put the fire out. With the Grafton fire station only a few miles away, the response should have been lightning-quick, but the station had no paid staff, and the only available volunteers were not trained to drive the fire truck. And so a call went out to Babiarz; as he headed toward Grafton from out of town, Barskey was already embroiled in an acrimonious defense of freedom against Chief Kenyon.

With Barskey’s recorder rolling, the two squared off in a contest of composure. They leaned against the car of one of the work crew members, talking with performative, insincere civility, each waiting for the other to slip up.

“So, Merle,” Barskey said, faux-causally. “Did you get permission to lean against this car?”

“No, I didn’t,” Chief Kenyon answered, his hands folded casually over his gut. Though bigger than Barskey, he was not generally an intimidating presence, with his earnest hooded eyes set over a watermelon slice of a nose. His tone was folksy, low-key.

“I did,” said Barskey, who evidently preferred very specific one-upmanship to low-key folksiness.

“Hey, that’s nice,” said Chief Kenyon, patronizingly.

Barskey, the consummate freedom fighter, needed to provoke without being provocative. He sought to frame the exchange as a defense of his friend’s vehicle against the tyranny of being leaned on.

“So, uh, you going to scratch it up with your gun or your utility belt or anything?” asked Barskey.

“I’m not planning on it,” Chief Kenyon replied. “I’m really not planning on hassling anybody.”

Barskey pivoted. Chief Kenyon’s own vehicle was parked nearby, on the roadside.

“So,” Barskey asked Chief Kenyon, “can I go lean up against yours?”

Chief Kenyon refused to take the bait.

“If you have to,” he said, with that same mild, “knock yerself out” placidity.

Over many years of freedom fighting, Barskey had honed a strategy for arguing with people who weren’t arguing back. He deployed it.

“No,” he said weightily. “Not if I have to.”

He quickly followed up with the next provocation. “Are you going to threaten or arrest me, or take me away to jail if I do?”

The question put Chief Kenyon in a difficult position. He couldn’t very well promise not to take action, with Barskey so clearly looking for a line to cross. But Chief Kenyon also didn’t want to open himself to an accusation of hypocrisy. He settled on vague.

“I don’t plan on it,” he repeated, his vocal cords now weighted with just a tiny hint of strain.

“You don’t plan on it?” Barskey parroted. He switched to a new tactic, issuing an order and daring the chief to disobey.

“Tell you what,” said Barskey. “How about if you don’t lean against his car, please.”

At this point, Chief Kenyon could have simply shifted upright, thereby taking the whole issue of car-leaning off the table, but instead his eyebrows snapped downward, his irritation finally bubbling to the surface. He thought Barskey had finally overreached.

“Whose car is it?” he asked.

“It’s one of those people,” Barskey answered, indicating his work crew, “who I asked for permission.”

One could see the chain of thoughts flit across the chief’s face. If he refused, he’d have to keep leaning against the car like an ass, until the owner invariably asked him to move, all with Barskey’s recorder rolling. So Chief Kenyon took the only face-saving measure he could. He pushed himself away from the hood of the car, holding out one hand toward Barskey in a palm-down gesture that was both placating and derisive.

“Whatever you say,” he said.

“No, not whatever I say,” repeated Barskey, evidently rediscovering his arguing trick. “I asked you. I didn’t say anything.”

“I mean,” said Chief Kenyon, his face contorted into a taut parody of accommodation, “I wouldn’t want to—”

“Scratch the car, which isn’t yours,” Barskey interjected, finishing Chief Kenyon’s sentence with his own, likely unrelated, thought.

The police chief went on to finish his sentence in his own words, but those words are lost to history because Barskey edited the rest of the exchange out of the video. In the judgment of the libertarians, the video documented a great success in the struggle to defend freedom. Or, if not that, then at least a fine example of Barskey getting Chief Kenyon’s goat.

Scenes like this were playing out constantly in Grafton, with infinitely variable details coursing through the same wearying dynamic. Every time a Free Towner was pulled over for a traffic infraction, or came to the town office, or appeared before a judge, or was sent a formal letter, they took the opportunity to vigorously defend their freedoms, typically sapping already strained public resources in the process.

The disagreement over the campfire took a critical turn with the arrival of Babiarz. As the libertarian fire chief parked the fire truck, partially blocking the traffic on Route 4, Barskey and his work crew perked up. Barskey and Babiarz had been at a libertarian potluck together just the week before, and now the would-be governor was in a position to denounce what Barskey saw as blatant state meddling.

Babiarz dragged one end of a fire hose over to the weenie roast, walking past Barskey without making eye contact.

“Hi, John,” said Barskey. “How come you don’t want to say hi?”

In the background, one of Barskey’s friends, another libertarian named Russell Kanning, said, “You know, Mike, I don’t know if you even want to keep talking to that guy.”

As Kanning spoke, Babiarz stopped and smiled quizzically at Barskey, trying to suss out whether the words from his fellow libertarians were in jest or in earnest. Somewhat awkwardly, Babiarz explained that he intended to extinguish the cooking fire.

“This is a Class 2 fire danger day. It’s kind of dry here,” Babiarz said. He gestured toward the nearby shed. “And the law says this has to be at least fifty feet away from the building if it’s a campfire.”

“It’s not a campfire,” offered Kanning.

“What is it?” asked Babiarz.

“I am burning debris,” replied Kanning, who at that very moment was roasting a hot dog over the flames.

Babiarz left the hose, flaccid, on the ground and walked back toward the truck. Kanning and Barskey expressed surprise that Babiarz didn’t seem to be defending their freedom.

“So Babiarz didn’t just offer a permit. Hmm,” said Barskey.

Babiarz returned with a soaking attachment for the nozzle and, with Chief Kenyon helping to steady the now-pressurized hose, was soon thoroughly drowning both the flames and the hot coals in a mix of water and fire-retardant foam, while the libertarian work crew watched.

“In case anybody is wondering,” said Kanning, though almost certainly nobody was, “this is unwelcome intrusion into our lives.”

ONCE THE VIDEO was posted online, news of the extinguished campfire spread. Connell started a discussion thread on the libertarian freedom forums about the Enfield fire warden who’d touched off the enforcement action. The warden, Connell wrote, “was simply on a huge power trip and he wanted desperately to introduce GUNS… into the situation!”

But most people weren’t focused on the warden. They were focused on Babiarz. The libertarian-themed website “New Hampshire Free Press” carried an article (written by Kanning’s wife) that said Babiarz had “shown that elected libertarians will, in a pinch, act just like every other bureaucrat in order to keep their positions of power.”

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.)

But for Babiarz, who had no intention of apologizing, the whole incident had crossed the line from all-in-good-fun freedom-fighting to something more sinister.

“They thought it was a joke,” he said, recalling the incident years later. Babiarz has a fun, even goofy, side to him, but when it comes to fires, his tone is always somber. “No, it was serious. It was a high danger day. They were burning too close to a building.”

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.

“The word of a petty little Statist like him is worth… what, exactly?” Joseph Brown, a particularly argumentative Free Towner, wrote in the freedom forums.

Babiarz tried not to take that kind of sentiment seriously.

“If you think I’m a statist,” he said, “you have no idea of the guy who’s going to replace me.”

The fallout from the campfire incident may have had an effect on the upcoming gubernatorial election. Babiarz hoped to hit 4 percent in the vote, enough to guarantee the party ballot access for future elections. He’d come close the last time he ran, in 2002, when he’d gotten 2.9 percent, or thirteen thousand votes. But after the campfire incident, he lost ground, netting only ten thousand votes (2.2 percent).

Though Babiarz felt that his core principles hadn’t changed, there seemed to be a growing gap between himself and a certain subset of Free Towners. Did the cause of freedom really boil down to knock-down debates over campfires? He later talked to me about “flamethrowers” within the movement, the ideological descendants of Larry Pendarvis, whose destructive advocacy undermined the very causes they sought to uphold and professed loyalty to.

Babiarz saw himself differently. He increasingly described his political goals as defensive rather than offensive. He wanted to prevent America from sliding into Nazi-like authoritarianism, while holding the line on taxes and government encroachment.

Too many of the Free Towners that he and his wife had invited to Grafton seemed to be creating more problems than they solved. But the Babiarzes could only stand and watch helplessly as the gap between them grew.

“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.” Many libertarians felt that the root cause of Babiarz’s “corruption” was that the fire department was funded through taxes, which they considered blood money. 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?

It was difficult for the logic-bound debaters to navigate the very tricky business of referring to a semi-compulsory fee as something other than a tax, but the discussion was happily aborted when one poster announced that donations could be sent to Hull’s alleged private fire department, which was equipped with a forestry fire truck.

Connell, who was friends with Babiarz, declined to join in on the general bashing, but he did suggest that the choice between a tax-funded fire department and a privately run fire department was a false dichotomy.

“Maybe a 3rd option,” he wrote, “is to put out the fire oneself?”

The highly visible conflict between Barskey and Babiarz signaled a trend emerging among the Free Towners. Several months after the campfire incident, Babiarz was at Bob Hull’s compound when Barskey came over to dispute ownership of some concrete forms that had been taken from his Grafton Gulch property. (It turned out that the concrete forms had already been returned.) A muscular volunteer firefighter named Jay Boucher ordered him to leave and then got physical, shoving Barskey violently multiple times in an effort to drive him from the property. Barskey, who of course had his recorders handy, posted another video of this incident, and finger-pointing camps emerged on both sides of the issue. Free Towner Joe Brown (the same man who had accused Babiarz of being a statist) accused both Barskey and Boucher of allowing the situation to escalate unnecessarily before they got all the facts. “Figure it out, before you confront someone,” he said.

But the Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person. Bickering was breaking out. Whenever a couple within the community split up, people took sides, framing the actions of the nonfavored spouse as statist. When a young man staying at a Free Towner’s home was found in questionable circumstances with a preteen, he was asked to leave in an impolite manner involving a very visibly wielded baseball bat. Even John Connell drew fire after someone accused him of inappropriate behavior that would likely be libelous to repeat in print. 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.

In late 2010, Barskey completed construction of Grafton Gulch and opened its doors in what was meant to be a watershed moment in the movement. Visiting libertarians could drive past the old shipping container sitting alongside the driveway, park near a large camper, and enter the structure, which had concrete walls topped by wood. Once they came inside, Barskey, who now lived on the property, served them breakfast burritos, burgers, and ice cream, all flavored with the sweet taste of freedom. But the free enterprise proved to be short-lived. Within months a woman from the food protection section of the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services came by and told Barskey that he needed to conform to the same licensing and health requirements as anywhere else that served prepared food. In the spring of 2011, less than a year after opening the Gulch, Barskey announced that he was closing it, permanently. The shuttering of the Gulch left Connell’s Peaceful Assembly Church as the only large-scale community project serving the libertarians. It wasn’t exactly commerce, but it did manage to pull off some successful programming, including a Sunday service that drew anywhere from one to eight people a week.

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.”

But to the substantial number of Free Towners who kept the faith, infighting was not the main problem. The main problem, they maintained, was that taxes were too high, rules too suffocating, statism too overbearing, and authority too abundantly wielded. Though daily life was getting more difficult, they were, at heart, idealists and romantics.

Things would improve, they insisted. They just needed more freedom.