The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten, have disappeared; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the mink is less common than formerly.
—Henry David Thoreau, Excursions, 1863
As I wrapped up my time in Grafton, I could see that the wheel would still turn, bringing players and conflicts that, though new, would run along the same fault lines as in generations past. Human-wildlife conflicts will continue to happen. Parasites will continue to drive the action. People wrapped in different realities will try to bend each other into compliance.
As the Free Town Project gave way to the Free State Project, the signs were everywhere. In 2017, eighteen miles from the spot where Tracey Colburn was attacked, a bobcat jumped onto the back of an eighty-year-old woman who was tending the roses in her garden, mauling her. The following year, another bobcat attacked two women in the nearby town of Hartford, Vermont. In both cases, the bobcats were being controlled by rabies parasites.
Doughnut Lady told me that she thought it would be legal to plant sunflowers, and blueberries, and other things bears like to eat. And sometimes bears eat plants before they have a chance to sprout.
“I could just put them on the ground,” said Doughnut Lady. “And they’re planted.”
Tracey Colburn still froze her food scraps, to prevent bears from smelling them. And she considered buying a gun. Not because of bears, she said. Because of Grafton.
“Everybody else has got one,” she told me. “I feel like I’m the only one.”
When Hurricane the llama took ill, Dianne Burrington stitched together a harness and hooked it up to a tractor bucket, so that she could keep him on his legs, but it didn’t help. The vet told her it was brainworm, a parasite that can make its host walk in circles, go blind, or lose its fear of humans. Hurricane’s replacement, Eddie, wasn’t a very good guard llama, she said. He wouldn’t even stand in the rain.
Despite many calls for amity in the wake of John Connell’s death, the libertarians and the town continued to fight over the tax bill associated with the Peaceful Assembly Church. They eventually crafted an agreement that offered tax forgiveness, on the condition that the libertarians seal the building envelope, so that it would not be degraded by the elements. Three years later, a structural engineer declared that the church was in danger of collapsing, and the parties resumed their legal battle.
And the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department concluded that there were too many bears in the Grafton area. In 2015, they set a goal to reduce the population by 34 percent from 2013 levels. It could take ten years to achieve that goal.
Babiarz told me that he was not sure how much longer Grafton’s fire department can last, relying as it does on a shrinking group of volunteers to massage a few more months of service out of each vehicle and piece of equipment. If there’s a fire during the day, when the volunteers are off working their day jobs (in towns with day jobs to offer), the community largely relies on mutual aid from other towns. Until it arrives, Babiarz said, “I can fight it by myself and basically put the fire in check.”
The last time I saw him, he stepped out of his cluttered office in the fire station and told me why he helped start the Free Town Project in the first place.
“My goal was to hold what we have and not lose any more ground,” he said. “I’ve seen the trends. More and more regulations, until you can’t do anything on your own property. And if people come in demanding more services, Grafton would no longer be an affordable place to live.”
But the Free Town Project was over. Babiarz said that the long-term effects of the social experiment will be ephemeral—“a blip on the radar”—like a June snowstorm melting away in the sunshine.
I have no doubt that Grafton will make news again, in some wild, unpredictable way. The soil there may be rocky, but it’s fertile ground for dreams, and humans will always be drawn to places where they can slip off the radar of communal oversight and nurture their own private worlds.
That was the very quality that Babiarz believed was overlooked in every discussion of the Free Town. The combative libertarian colonizers didn’t get it. The overly regulatory state government didn’t get it. And the myopic media certainly didn’t get it.
“They don’t recognize,” he said, “that the town was already free.”