According to one local weatherman, it feels like 1 degree below unbearable outside, but Harry Loranger, a glib white-haired bus driver, sees no point in paying someone else to do what he can reasonably do himself.

Along with hundreds of other residents here, Mr. Loranger has driven deep into the woods to carry his trash to the town dump. Born and bred in Merrimack, Loranger joined a majority of residents last year in voting against a town plan for curbside trash pickup.

"It would have cost me a fortune," he says. The monthly levy proposed by the town: $8. "Fifty years ago," he adds, "I could have done it for free and just dug a hole in my yard."

Merrimack's defiance of such modern convenience is not singular in New Hampshire, a state in which residents often equate parsimony with patriotism.

It's an ethic that is being tested, as more out-of-staters arrive, and the current character of the "Live free, or die" state will help shape tuesday's closely watched vote in the Democratic presidential primary.

A rare sort of moral reckoning hangs over the most mundane acts here, as though each individual's freedom hinges on daily forgoing dessert and a second cup of coffee. Efforts to take citizens' trash away from them have been beaten back in dozens of towns across the state. In Lincoln, about 50 miles north, residents have recently defended their right not to have their snow plowed.

On the eve of the Democratic primary here, evidence of Yankee individualism is as plain as these residents' plaid shirts.

But "lifers" here are feeling the pressure to relax their granite-strong resistance to change just a bit. A huge influx of residents from Massachusetts and New York has brought a new spirit of progressivism here. These emigrants are pressuring small towns to modernize, and even to consider raising taxes.

"People have a pristine lifestyle here, but they're realizing now that they're going to have to change for the very same reason," says Jim Walsh, a historian at New England College in Henniker.

Many of the state's cultural quirks are represented by the trash collection station here, a blue-roofed edifice that, like the topography of the state itself, seems to have been designed to maximize hardship. Once residents pull up in their cars, they must hurl the trash over a three-foot high cement wall, which serves no apparent purpose other than to burden, says resident Chip Underhill, who voted in favor of curbside pickup. Rather than load the trash directly into containers or a truck, as he did in New Jersey, Mr. Underhill has been told to throw bags onto a concrete floor, where they sit until a loader scoops them up.

"The way we do it here is insane," says Underhill. "Yankees in general are resistant to new ideas."

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