Henrietta Hay's Column

It's amazing what one will do in the name of friendship. Here I was in the wilderness at 10:00 at night, half frozen, watching a bunch of sticky little kids trying to make s'mores over a campfire. This is a confection, which was mercifully unknown to me until this weekend.

My good friend Terry invited me on this journey because she thought I needed to get out of town. She thought that it and would give me material for a column and promised to help me write it. Curious soul that I am even at this advanced age, I agreed. As usual, she was right.

This was no ordinary camping trip. For one thing, it is, quite inaccurate to call a weekend at the X Lazy F ranch on Black Mesa camping out. It is a most wonderful place, but more about that later. For another, it was a tradition. A group of adoptive families in this area has been camping out together each Father's Day weekend for seven years now.

As each family drove up, the kids scattered to the winds. By the time I was able to see the parents and children together, I realized that here was no easy way to figure out which kid belonged with which parent. Matching a white, blonde mother with her Korean or black child required more than superficial observation. I spent the weekend trying to figure out who matched up with whom, not that it mattered. They knew.

Most of the children who were there were born in Korea, but one had mixed parentage, black and American Indian, one was from Russia and several were what the mothers called "domestic". Some of the families had traveled to the children's' native lands to get them. I've heard of parents going to extremes for their kids, but one family seemed to be stretching it. They went clear to Siberia to get their little blonde daughter.

The kids were everywhere. They hung on the fence around the corral. They played on the teeter-totter. They hiked. They played ball and one little guy is headed for the majors. The horses were especially popular.

A Daily Sentinel photographer (who shall be nameless) accompanied his son on one trail ride. It looked like rain, so he left his beloved camera in the cabin. After all, kids don't rust; cameras do. Sure enough -- they came across a bear. Trail horses don't move very fast, so by the time he returned to the ranch, retrieved his camera, leapt on his trusty steed and galloped back at a fast walk, the bear was half way to Gunnison. Let him explain that to his editor.

For all the vigorous activity of the kids, the only serious accident this year didn't happen to one of them. The black timely dog-named Seiko met the wrong end of a porcupine. Fortunately one of the fathers in the group is a dentist and knows how to pull things. Seiko is fine and enjoyed all the sympathetic attention he got.

These parents are perhaps a bit more earnest than most. They have built their families through a lot of hard work and sometimes a lot of heartbreak. The mothers tended to sit on the porch and talk about how to raise kids. Some have children who came to them only through adoption and some have both adopted and biological children. It is important for them to compare and observe and talk about how to honor their children's' racial and ethnic heritage. They do what Terry calls a reality check each year.

While the kids played and the mothers talked, most of the fathers disappeared to fish, but after dinner it was the dads who were up to their elbows in soapy water in the kitchen. .

Before the star studded bonfire, we sat on the porch with our feet up and watched the sun set and listened as one of the fathers played classical music on the piano. It doesn't get much better than that.

Tolstoi opens his novel Anna Karinina with this line. "Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This weekend the families all looked alike.