Founders' Message

An Excerpt from Hummingbird Man by Kinky Friedman

“Childhood at best,” my father said, “is a fleeting golden moment in the race of time.”

My mother and father, or Aunt Min and Uncle Tom as the children often called them, spent sixty years helping to create those moments at Echo Hill Ranch.
Now on cold, bright mornings, I stand in front of the old lodge, squinting into the brittle Hill Country sunlight, hoping I suppose, for an impossible glimpse of a hummingbird or of my mother and father. They’ve all migrated far away, and the conventional wisdom is that only the hummingbirds are ever coming back. Yet I still see my mother hanging up that first feeder.

The juniper tree blew down in a storm two years ago, but the hummers have found other places to nest. One of them is in my heart. And I still see my dad sitting under the juniper tree, only the tree doesn’t seem dead and neither does he.

It takes a big man to sit there with a little hummingbird book,
taking the time to talk to a group of small boys. He is telling them there are more than three hundred species of hummingbirds. They are the smallest of the birds and also the fastest. They’re also, he tells them, the only birds that can fly backward. The little boys seem very excited about the notion of flying backward. They’d like to try that themselves they say. So would I.

Thus it was that my sister Marcie and I decided to bring the old camp back and introduce boys and girls from Gold Star families to the magic of Echo Hill.