11 Things New Hampshirites Do That Would Horrify the Rest of America

New Hampshire is the state that fits the entire American personality crisis into 9,000 square miles and somehow makes it work — a place of libertarian independence, granite stubbornness, and a relationship with government so minimal it has become the state’s entire identity and primary export. The Granite State lives free or dies, puts that sentiment on its license plates, means every word of it, and has been meaning every word of it since 1775 in ways that have occasionally alarmed its neighbors and consistently fascinated the rest of the country. New Hampshire does not want your regulations, your income tax, your sales tax, or your opinion about how it should be running things. It has a primary to run, a mountain to climb, and a leaf to watch turn. Get out of the way.

1. Take the First in the Nation primary with a civic seriousness that makes Iowa look casual

New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary status is not merely a scheduling arrangement — it is a constitutional identity, a civic religion, and the primary reason the state has resisted every attempt by larger states to claim the spot with the territorial ferocity of people defending something sacred. New Hampshirites attend town halls, interrogate candidates face to face, ask follow-up questions, and reserve judgment until they’ve seen the candidate twice and read the position papers and talked it over at the diner. “I’ve met him three times but I’m still deciding” is said in New Hampshire by ordinary voters about presidential candidates and is completely sincere.

2. Live free or die — and mean it as a daily operating principle, not a bumper sticker

New Hampshire has no income tax, no sales tax, no mandatory seat belt law for adults, no helmet law for motorcyclists, and a general regulatory environment that reflects the sincere belief that the government’s role in an adult’s life should be minimal and clearly justified. “Live Free or Die” — the state motto, taken from a toast by Revolutionary War General John Stark — is not ironic, not decorative, not a lifestyle brand. It is the operating system. Visitors who make jokes about the motto are received with the polite patience of people who have heard the joke and did not find it funny the first time.

3. Treat the Old Man of the Mountain with a grief that has not fully resolved in twenty years

The Old Man of the Mountain — a rock formation on Cannon Mountain that naturally resembled a man’s profile when viewed from the right angle, the symbol of New Hampshire, on the state quarter, on the highway signs, in the hearts of everyone who grew up here — collapsed on May 3, 2003, and New Hampshire has not entirely gotten over it. The grief is real. The highway signs still show the silhouette. The quarter still shows the profile. The mountain is still there. The face is gone. New Hampshirites discuss this with a quiet sadness that twenty years has not fully resolved, which is either touching or slightly excessive depending on your relationship with geological features.

4. Swim in lakes so cold they should require a medical waiver

New Hampshire’s lakes — Winnipesaukee, Squam, Newfound, Sunapee — are glacially formed, spring-fed, and cold in a way that the word “refreshing” technically covers but somehow undersells. Locals swim in them without visible hesitation, emerging from water that would convince most Americans they were hypothermic with the cheerful ease of people who have been doing this since childhood and regard the temperature as normal. “The lake” is a New Hampshire institution visited on weekends, on summer evenings, on any day warm enough to justify the drive, and the cold is not a deterrent. The cold is the point.

5. Navigate entirely by town meeting decisions rather than any higher authority

New Hampshire’s town meeting tradition — an annual direct democracy event where registered voters gather to debate and vote on the town’s budget, bylaws, and local ordinances in real time — is the oldest form of American self-government still in regular operation, and New Hampshirites participate in it with the focused seriousness of people who understand that this is actual governance and that what is decided in this gymnasium tonight will affect real things in their actual lives. Town meeting can run for hours. People speak. People argue. People vote. The state does not step in. This is the system, and it works, and New Hampshire would like it to be noted that it has been working for four hundred years.

6. Tap maple trees every February in weather that would shut down most of America

New Hampshire produces approximately 90,000 gallons of maple syrup annually, and the sugaring season happens in February and March — when nighttime temperatures drop below freezing and daytime temperatures rise above it, causing sap to run in the maple trees — which means the harvest happens in conditions that the rest of America is using as reasons to stay inside. Sugarmakers are out in the woodlot checking tubing, collecting sap, and running the evaporator for hours, turning 40 gallons of sap into one gallon of syrup, in February, in New Hampshire, without complaint, because this is when it happens and the maple doesn’t care about the temperature.

7. Eat a red hot dog and defend it against all comers

The New Hampshire red hot dog — a natural casing frank made with a distinctive red dye that gives it its characteristic color, snapped and slightly smoky, sold at diners, ballparks, and roadside stands across the state — is a regional specialty that New Hampshirites defend with the low-key intensity of people who know what they have and are not looking for outside validation. The red color is not natural. Nobody cares. The flavor and the snap are what matter, and they are correct, and a ballpark frank from anywhere else is a structural substitute but not an emotional one.

8. Consider “up north” the answer to every problem, regardless of the specific problem

“Up north” in New Hampshire — the White Mountains, the North Country, the stretch of the state above the notches where the roads thin out and the cell signal follows — is the solution New Hampshirites reach for when the problem is stress, burnout, bad weather psychology, relationship strain, or the general accumulation of too much civilization. “We need to get up north” is said by New Hampshirites the way others say “we need a vacation,” except it is also said about a place they can reach in two hours, which makes the solution more accessible than most and no less restorative for the proximity.

9. Ski Tuckerman Ravine in April and call it a responsible outdoor activity

Tuckerman Ravine — a glacial cirque on the southeast face of Mount Washington that accumulates enough snow to offer some of the finest backcountry skiing in the East, accessible only by a three-mile hike with your gear, no lifts, no ski patrol in the traditional sense, and no guarantee that the snow is in anything other than whatever condition it happens to be in — is skied every spring by New Hampshirites with an enthusiasm that the absence of safety infrastructure does nothing to dampen. The hike in is the price of admission. The ski out is the reward. The avalanche risk is assessed by each individual and managed accordingly. New Hampshire finds this system appropriate.

10. Defend the lack of sales tax with a vigilance usually reserved for constitutional rights

New Hampshire’s absence of a sales tax is not a policy position — it is an identity. People drive from Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine to shop in New Hampshire specifically because of this, and New Hampshirites receive these visitors with the quiet satisfaction of people whose principled fiscal position has also turned out to be economically convenient. Every attempt to introduce a sales tax in New Hampshire is met with a political response so immediate and so disproportionate to the legislative proposal that it communicates, clearly, that this is not a tax debate. It is an existential one.

11. Refer to Massachusetts as “Massholes” with a familiarity that suggests it’s a technical term

New Hampshire’s relationship with Massachusetts is the relationship between a fiercely independent older sibling and a larger, wealthier, more populous younger one that keeps telling everyone how things should be done. Massachusetts residents buy vacation homes in New Hampshire’s lakes region, ski New Hampshire’s mountains, and occasionally move to New Hampshire for the tax environment before voting for the same policies they left Massachusetts to escape. New Hampshirites watch this pattern with the weary recognition of people who have seen it before and a word for the people who do it that is not quite an insult and not quite a compliment and communicates everything precisely.

New Hampshire will not be softening its edges, warming up its lakes, extending its sugaring season, or reconsidering the motto. It will keep running the first primary with the civic seriousness of a state that believes it has a constitutional obligation to take this seriously, keep tapping the maples in February, keep skiing Tuckerman in April, keep holding town meetings in elementary school gymnasiums where actual decisions get made by actual people, and keep living as free as it possibly can on 9,000 square miles of granite and stubbornness in the far northeastern corner of a country it helped invent. The foliage in October is genuinely staggering. The tax environment is genuinely liberating. The red hot dogs are genuinely excellent. And the state motto is genuinely not a joke, which is the most New Hampshire thing about it.