It was but a step on either hand to the grim, untrodden wilderness, whose tangled labyrinth of living, fallen, and decaying trees only the deer and moose, the bear and wolf, can easily penetrate.
—Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods, 1864
Adam Franz leads me through the trees to the survivalist camp that he once dreamed of, now made real. Up above us, along the height of the dirt road, scarecrows stand sentinel duty in a ragged row, wearing anarchic Guy Fawkes masks and holding empty beer cans to ward off both order and sobriety.
Adam says the survivalists achieved critical mass only after a few false starts with different groups of friends. Eventually, his permanently parked camper was joined in the woods by a few tents, and then a few more. Sometimes a Free Towner would come by asking for a place to live. Adam always said yes.
“This,” he says, “is Tent City.”
He waves toward a clump of tents, lawn chairs, barbecue grills, plastic containers, tarps, and assorted campground detritus sitting on a relatively flat stretch of leaf-carpeted soil. “Sometimes, depending on how many people, we get more tents. The weekends here, it can get kind of crazy.”
I find that, when one walks toward Tent City, one also walks away from civilization. The shared assumptions that underpin society—television ratings and the Dow Jones Industrial Average and presidential polls and, yes, even taxes—fade away, replaced by the tangible objects within the immediate viewshed. Here, a cast-iron pot for cooking; there, a gnarled root for stepping over; in the air, patterns of light for making the drab leaf litter mesmerizing, the whole ground rippling like water every time the breeze shifts the treetops.
Out here I am not in society but in the world. Though some part of me is fully aware that I’m within fifteen miles of a Subway eatery, when I stand in the woods with Adam, survivalism sounds much less nutty than it did when I woke up that morning. Out here what seems nutty is that people spend the workweek doing things they hate in exchange for white pieces of paper that represent green pieces of paper that used to represent yellow metal but now represent only a collective delusion of value. Out here it’s easier to be seduced by the apocalyptic survivalist notion that, instead of nature being inevitably steamrolled by the tide of progress, the natural world will bleed back into our lives, outlast our frail constructs, and carpet the world in moss and bramble.
Grafton is more than halfway there already, and the more time Adam spends in Tent City, the more his strategic response to the postcollapse world mimics the bears of the woods. There’s no garden in Tent City because a garden, or any storehouse of food, would have to be protected. Adam says he isn’t looking to re-create the agricultural revolution; he wants to go full paleolithic.
“Why put the effort in if you can just go pick it off the tree? There’s a lot of land back here on this property, and there’s plenty of blueberries and raspberries and blackberries. I think there’s even strawberries out there, not to mention all the mushrooms, all the other edible plants, plenty of beech trees and things like that.”
The art of living primitively has not come easily for Adam and his companions. The best they can achieve so far is a kind of semi-ferality, because they keep running into logistical difficulties. For example, it would be logistically difficult for Adam to give up his car.
“We live in the real world still. I still need fuel to get to where I’m going and stuff,” Adam says. To pay for such things, most residents of Tent City still have some sort of job, though Adam would prefer that they meet their nagging financial needs by turning the natural resources of the property into something that could be sold, like rustic log furniture. Though lots of Graftonites tend patches of marijuana, he’s refrained, because growing pot carries the risk of having the property taken from him under drug seizure laws.
Another logistical difficulty facing the survivalists is that most or all of them lack most or all of the survival skills they would need to get most or all of their food from the forest.
“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.”
In fact, the more I see of Tent City, the more apparent it is that, outside of burning wood for heat, the hard work of survivalism is mostly a theoretical discussion point that occupies the airspace over campfires during bouts of partying.
Adam leads me beyond the tents, and I become aware that a constant low-pitched whine in the background is growing into a dull roar. It’s a gas-powered generator, hidden somewhere amid a vaguely circular arrangement of wooden cabins the size of garden sheds, no two alike in design. One has a worn bearskin tacked to the outer wall. Another is decorated with a tattered and fading Confederate flag.
Adam says the flag is a sign of the diversity of political opinion here on the fringe of society. Though he himself is staunchly anticapitalist, some of the people who live here are libertarians; others identify primarily as gun rights activists.
“So this is probably the only place in the world that has a Confederate flag and a Bernie sign,” he says, referring to the socialist governor of Vermont (and would-be US president).
Tent City’s crowning architectural achievement is “the Orb,” a Quonset hut of a structure that, thanks to the generator, is wired and therefore has a functioning television, DVD player, electric cooking range, and lights. 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.
Suddenly, the roar of the generator ceases, leaving a moment of odd silence before birdsong fills the void. A dark-haired woman appears in the doorway of the Orb.
“That the last of the gas, Annie?” Adam asks her. Annie lives here with her boyfriend Mark and her teenage daughter.
“Yeah. I got five bucks to go down to get some more,” she says.
“I’ll go down in a little while,” says Adam. In keeping with his communist leanings, no one owns the perks that come with the Orb’s electrical resources—the structure is available to each according to their need, and the gas that fuels its luxuries comes from each according to their ability.
All things considered, Annie likes living beneath Tent City’s protective canopy. She enjoys the camaraderie and the sense of distance from the world’s headaches.
She does have one concern, though.
“It’s just the fact that I’ve never been that close to an animal like that,” she says, almost apologetically. “And they’re big.”
She is referring, of course, to bears. For the survivalists, eating the fauna may be mostly theoretical, but being eaten by the fauna is a real and present danger. Bears have always been a nighttime presence in Tent City, knocking over a grill, cracking open a sealed container of corn, raiding the garbage, or taking a big dump in the middle of camp. One pile of bear scat looked particularly unhealthy to Adam, whose time in the woods has given him an eye for such things. It reminded him of when his mother-in-law’s dog ate a bag of Adderall.
“That dog did not have a fun time,” he says.
For most of Tent City’s existence, the bears were easy to shrug off because they were experienced as occasional hairy shadows that quickly fled into the eventide woods. But this summer the shadows became corporeal, and less flight-prone. When a survivalist drove into the camp, the bears in the trash area lacked the common decency to scatter in the headlights. Instead, they sat stubbornly, daring the humans to escalate things.
Around the Fourth of July, Adam says, there was an unusually bear-free week. He eventually figured out why.
“I have some five-gallon containers of fry grease. Because my car runs off fry grease, you know. And we found two or three containers that they had drug off into the woods.”
“Drank it,” Annie says, stepping on his punch line. Though, to be fair, she has probably relived this moment several times already.
“Bit into and drank every last fuckin’ drop of fry grease,” Adam says, as if he hadn’t heard her. “Can you imagine? And it had been sitting for a couple of years.”
Next, the bears started showing up in the daytime. They could be glimpsed prowling around Tent City’s margins, checking in as if they were fur traders walking a trapline. Annie began to get the feeling that one of the bears was paying her special attention. When she came out of her cabin in the morning, she often felt his eyes on her before she spotted him in the woods.
“He’s usually just sitting down there, looking at me,” she says.
The survivalists, beginning to get uneasy, decided to respond. First they posted a sign by the trash bins that read NO BEARS ALLOWED. It seemed unlikely that the bears could read, but you never knew, right? Bears had recently torn down and broken a man’s tree-mounted game cameras four times, as if they were convenience store burglars disabling the security camera system. So maybe a three-word sign wasn’t beyond their capabilities. Anyway, the sign boosted morale and solidarity among Tent City’s humans by reminding them that the bears, not the survivalists, were the interlopers here.
The more realistic line of defense was Adam’s “bear gun,” the Taurus Judge, which he began wearing most of the time. Annie and the others were comforted by the sight of Adam charging around camp with the oversized .410 in his hand. But though Adam often threatened to shoot the bears, he never actually pulled the trigger. His reluctance stemmed in part from being sympathetic to the bears, and in part from knowing that dead bears could draw unwelcome official attention. The survivalists, like most Graftonites, prioritized staying under the radar of state authorities.
But just waiting around for disaster to strike also seemed imprudent, given the several well-documented cases of American campers being dragged from their tents and killed in the middle of the night by black bears.
As they cast around for ideas about how to defend Tent City, the survivalists got advice from the town’s other armed camps, each of which repelled bears in its own way. As Adam ticks down the list—cayenne pepper, electrified fencing, motion sensors, booby traps, and radios that constantly blasted out disembodied voices—I wonder what subtle forces work behind human perceptions to make an entire encampment of people develop such a high tolerance for bears and for bear protection devices. In Tent City, the residents finally came up with a unique, high-risk, middling-reward strategy. Adam went shopping for a secret weapon.
It didn’t take long for said secret weapon to be deployed. It started one morning when Adam, sleeping in the decaying camper, heard Annie calling from clear across Tent City. He rocked himself off the bed and shouted out of the camper’s tiny screen window.
“Annie, is that you? You need help?”
It sounded like Annie did need help. He didn’t have time to dress, but he grabbed his new bear deterrent and burst out of the camper in his underwear.
“And there’s a bear. He’s right there, past that dying tree there,” Adam tells me, pointing to a spot in the woods about twenty feet away from the center of camp. “Sitting on the ground. Just kind of looking at us.”
Adam picked up a cowbell, which he says the survivalists ring only for “emergencies,” and started tolling it to drive the bear away. The bell roused the bear to its feet, but instead of leaving, it walked directly toward Adam, as if he were ringing a dinner bell.
Adam, unnerved, started shouting.
“Go away!” said Adam, taking a step backward and scolding the bear like he would a dog. He shook the bell more vigorously.
“Go away, go away!”
When the bear remained undeterred, Adam flicked open a lighter and touched the flame to the fuse of his new weapon: a packet of firecrackers. When the first firecracker in the line exploded with a sharp report, the bear started violently, momentarily confused. As more explosions filled the air, the bear ran—thankfully, away from Adam.
“He run like twenty feet and he stopped,” Adam says. “Because the firecrackers stopped. And he kind of sat up there thirty, thirty-five feet away, and he started watching us.” Finally, the bear reluctantly wandered off. The survivalists, heartened by the win, made immediate plans to expand their arsenal.
“I also think we should get bottle rockets,” Adam says, “so we can send them his way so he feels like he’s under attack.”
Annie, meanwhile, worked to overcome her natural fears. When the bears were not physically present, it was easier for her to see their boldness as mere friendliness. She worried that the too-chummy bears were going to make them easy targets for hunters. So she too began throwing firecrackers at them. Adam is proud of her progress.
“Now that she’s been within twenty feet of the bears several times, I think she’s getting more used to—she realizes this isn’t some wild animal rearing up aggressive, ready to kill her,” he says. I have my doubts about this framing. 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.
Not until later did I realize that Adam and Doughnut Lady, who lived relatively close to each other, had both tried to communicate with what were almost certainly the same exact bears using the same exact words—“Go away! Go away!” But while Adam intended for the bears he shouted at to retreat, Doughnut Lady intended for them to simply be patient for an imminent snack time.
This underscored just how confusing Grafton’s people must have seemed to its problem-solving bears. Every house was a potential source of calories, but the people who inhabited them might flee, or sic a llama on them, or offer food, or throw firecrackers at their head. It was a lot to sort out.
Before I leave Tent City, I ask Adam whether a better resolution might be to call the state Fish and Game Department to come address their bear woes.
“I would never cut my own throat by calling Fish and Game,” Adam says. With Grafton as thick with bears as it is, he seems a bit mystified that wardens haven’t shown up of their own accord.
“The fact that I’m not seeing them,” he says, “makes me think they’re understaffed.”
On this point, Adam was right.