My daughter recently finished a two-week stint at a music day camp near my hometown of Santa Cruz. For16 years, the camp has been hosted at Boomeria, the eccentric home of a local high school science teacher. As a friend of mine commented, the grounds of this modest home under the redwoods is an insurance agent’s nightmare and a personal injury lawyer’s wet dream. With 120 meters of underground tunnels, a miniature castle with a portcullis, a working guillotine, guard towers armed with aqueous machine guns, and a munitions bunker (aka swimming pool) the site offers plenty of opportunity for fun and mayhem.

I thought some readers might enjoy a tour of Boomeria and an introduction to the history of this unique kingdom:

You see, it all began when the Boom, like Peter Pan, refused to grow up (after all, if he grew up, he’d have to like green salad!). Having been thoroughly indoctrinated into the world of Oz through reading and rereading the 40 Oz books as a child, he had a pretty good idea of what the real world SHOULD be like. And when he could do what he wanted without Mommy saying “NO!”, there was no stopping him…

Le Boom, some of his students, and his two sons Alex and Laurence have built a monument to anachronistic fun. Several Decades of benign dementia and a mysterious ability to extract hard labor from other people’s teenagers has allowed P Q LeBoom to construct an amazing fantasy world. While this inner world remains unmappable, the physical manifestation of it is called Boomeria.

You can see more of the work and play of Mr. Boomer here. The Boom just completed his 52nd year of teaching physics and chemistry, and has no plans to retire. “When they find the corpse on the demonstration table, that’s when they’ll have to get somebody else, ” he says. If only more kids could have a science teacher like Mr. Boomer!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Whimsy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.