One branch of the famous Boggle family emigrated to the United States to avoid the draft and established itself in the tiny bucolic community of Parson's Notch, where they remained undiscovered for many generations. The Boggles kept to themselves and maintained many quaint customs from the Old World, such as practising alchemy and the brewing of controlled substances in their kitchen for resale to city folk.

Pieter Boggle VIII revived the old art of etching in the Flemish style when he was looking for a way to safely dispose of a few dozen carboys of muriatic acid. They were left over from the processing of a batch of "uppers" his relatives had cooked up to meet the needs of the long-distance trucker market. Fascinated by the etching process, and inspired no doubt by inbreeding which brought dormant 16th-century artistic genes into play, young Pieter began recording the activities of Parson's Notch at every opportunity.

Here he shows in splendid detail a charming cottage scene, where his parents and grandmother cook up a batch of methamphetamines using the old-fashioned slow-cook method, rather than the more rapid "Nazi" recipe, which tends to have impurities. Note the extraordinary attention paid to minutiae: one can almost read the writing on the packets of Sudafed® on the bench in the foreground.

Boggle inadvertently includes a bit of social commentary in this work. Seen through the window in the background are several deformed children being sold to the manager of a local sideshow. The presence of powerful chemicals in the household led to unusually high rates of birth defects. As Bible-believing Dunkers, the Boggles shunned abortion, preferring to wait until the children were of an age where they could be sold to circuses or for medical experimentation.

Boggle is believed to have died along with the rest of his relatives during an FBI raid, in the course of which an air-to-ground missile inadvertently destroyed the family compound and most of unincorporated Parson's Notch.

 

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