Boo-Boo (The Hook!)
A “lone-wolf” garden gnome making his way in the world
Back-story:
Martin started off his life as a cheesy garden gnome charged with guarding a small chunk of our backyard
in Lake Clear, New York. He did his job well enough but always had a temper. One day he started talking trash
to my son, Ben. One thing led to another and Martin lost his right hand, thus becoming Boo-Boo. My son
insisted we “fix” Boo-Boo, but the gnome no longer had an interest in sitting out back watching the grass
grow. He was never the same after that backyard brawl, and we had to let him go. He went from bad to
worse, getting in trouble with the law and the gnome community in our area. He bottomed out after a
gnome fight at “The Back Door” in nearby Saranac Lake. He came to us frightened, ashamed and looking for
a place to hide while the statute of limitations ran out. My son appealed to me to help Boo-Boo out so I
hid our impish friend in a cache in the woods behind our house, knowing that the geocaching community
would befriend and help this luckless product of social pressures, circumstances and child-labor
sweat-shop ceramics.
His Story as a TB:
Boo-Boo has
traveled through five states and nearly 2000 miles (in logged miles; he’s covered a lot of ground off the
books) in his 14 months as a TB. He’s met some great people and beasts of varying size and ferocity,
seen sights he would never have been exposed to as our garden gnome, and managed to stay clear of the
“Ceramic Mafia” thus far. He’s climbed mountains, attended barbeques, enjoyed a music festival, visited a
cheese factory, ridden a horse, driven endlessly back and forth across the Midwest, visited the sandhills of
Nebraska, seen the gravestones of Boothill in Ogallala and even hid out in a couple of caches along the way.
The people who have spent time with him seem to enjoy schlepping him to fun places and involving him in
their adventures. I have enjoyed living vicariously through Boo-Boo through his first year as a TB, and
hope to follow his exploits for years to come. If you come across him in a geocache, please help him out and take him along with you on your next adventure. He’ll have your back as only a 4-inch gnome with a missing
hand can.
My other TBs have met with much less success than Boo-Boo has to date, and I have to attribute his success
and longevity to a couple of factors:
1. He’s not cute enough for a geocacher to place on their mantel (cute =stolen).
2. He’s the right size to move along (not too big to carry in one hand, not small enough to fit in your pocket and forget).
3. His mission is simple and the story interesting (if I do say so myself).
