The refuge is covered in a thick fog, and no ceremony seems about to ensue at the plankhouse.  So I walk on the trail in the thick fog for some time.  I know these trails well; Jane and I brought our son up here several times in his first year.  We picked acorns, and like the Indians who lived among these oaks, we dried them and offered them to our guests.

My phone rings, Troy says he won't be joining me. It's the gallstones, he says.  He gives me the names of a few people I could meet.

A few hours later, I can smell a fire burning, and chatter too.  When I return to the plankhouse, the foggy pondside hilltop is aglow with movement; tribes from as far away as Neah Bay have come for this gathering.

You enter the plankhouse through a round hole at its base – I enter into a world of which, without Troy, I am immediately compleletly lost.  Families, relatives, old inter-tribal friends.