According to stories collected from Yurok elders in the early 1900s by anthropologist T.T. Waterman, the Yurok believe that at one time supernatural beings--"the immortals"--lived throughout their land. But when the people, the Yurok, arrived, the immortals departed, except from one place, Sumeg, which today is cawlled Patrick's Point. "This region is the abode of the last immortals," Waterman wrote in his book Yurok Geography.

And so our stories begin at this North Coast headland.

Axel Lindgren III kneels by a pile of freshly split redwood planks, which glow pinkish red. It's late afternoon here at Sumeg Village, a Yurok demonstration village at Patrick's Point State Park, 30 miles south of the mouth of the Klamath River. All around Lindgren stand examples of traditional houses, with their small rounded doors and shallow-peaked roofs, weathered to a gray-brown. Near one house is a canoe carved from a redwood log. Lindgren, who works at the park, helped build the village some 16 years ago. Today he's already shown dozens of tourists how his people had, for thousands of years, split huge trees into planks, cut the planks to size using fire, and tied them together with strips from hazel saplings.

Lindgren comes mostly from people who lived in Tsurai, a Yurok village several miles south of Patrick's Point, where the coastal town called Trinidad now stands. His great-grandmother, Eliza Lindgren, was the last Tsurai medicine woman. Along with the rest of her people, she was pushed from the village in 1916. Lindgren also has ties to Weitchpec, a Yurok village up the Klamath River a ways. As for the name Lindgren, he says that long ago a stranded Swedish sailor, left behind by his ship because he was too ill to travel, married into his Tsurai family. "There's a rock south of Tsurai, on dry sand, that they call 'Charlie Lindgren Rock,' because he would go out and stand on that rock to see if he could see his ship go by." Down at what is now called Luffenholtz Beach there's another rock, where the Lindgren family fished. "It was primarily our rock," he says. After catching surf fish, "they would lay the fish over this rock to sun-dry."

And there are prayer places. "Along the coast to the west of the village of Tsurai is where girls practiced their brush dance. And there's a cave in front of Trinidad Head--I've been in there--where if you go in, and if one drop of water falls on your head, you could become a rich man. If two drops hit you, you could be trapped in there. One man did become trapped, but he was so strong, spiritually, he got out."

When he was 12, Lindgren explored the cave with another Yurok boy. They motored their boat in, the tide began to rise, and it was slower going trying to back the boat out. They made it--and no drops fell on their heads. "I'm still working for a living," Lindgren says, wryly.

All his stories seem to involve the ocean. "The ocean, to me, would signify life. The ocean provides not only food, but regalia--mussels, mussel shells, abalone shells--for myself, my brother, my family. We still go out and get the salmon. We get the bottom fish, we get the surf fish--both the day fish and the night fish."

Another story: Abalone Girl met Canada Goose Man. They married and had many children. But things started to unravel. Canada Goose Man would go out and hunt up all sorts of treats for Abalone Girl to eat, which she rejected. She didn't like that goose food. She ate seaweed and only wanted seaweed. So they split up, and Canada Goose Man moved south. And every fall, the kids all go south to visit him--which explains all that honking in the air.

"Also, the ocean can provide a redwood log that washes in." It might become a canoe, or skewers for roasting salmon steaks, or planks for a house.

Up until 150 years ago, just before the main influx of European Americans--seeking gold, otters, and more--had begun on the North Coast, the Yurok and other northwestern California tribes were among the richest of societies. Among other things, the Yurok thrived on salmon and other fish from the Klamath River and the ocean--although when they fished from the sea they usually kept close to the river's mouth or ventured not far from the shore in their dugout canoes.

Today the Yurok Tribe is the largest in California, with almost 5,000 members. It is also among the poorest. More than 70 percent of the Yurok population lives without telephones or electricity, and more than 80 percent lives below the poverty line. But the Yurok culture never died. Today the tribe employs 200 people in its substantial government, many of them in the fisheries department. Many tribal members still fish for a subsistence living, down at the mouth and up along the river.

The Yuroks' ancestral territory included Sumeg and extended south to Little River, just below Trinidad, and north to Wilson Creek (where Tolowa territory begins and heads north) in what is now Del Norte County. Today, the Yurok reservation's 65,035 acres is contained within a roughly two-mile-wide and 44-mile-long stretch of the Klamath River, from where the river meets the sea at Requa inland to Weitchpec, where the Trinity River converges with the Klamath. Some members also live on rancherias up and down the coast; some live in towns. The tribe's headquarters are in Klamath, not far from the mouth of the river.

These days, Sumeg is left generally to the immortals and tourists--except on ceremonial occasions, when Yurok tribal members re-enact their dances and demonstrate their way of cooking, building, and worshiping.

On this particular afternoon in late summer, after the Sumeg Village Day at Patrick's Point, while Lindgren wanders the grounds, several other Yurok citizens linger near the picnic area, talking.

Mel Stokes, with graying dark hair and a mischievous grin, wears a fine, rust-colored felt hat and sits, at this moment, on a picnic table at Sumeg Village. He is a Yurok from the Pecwan and Swregon villages on the lower Klamath River, reached by a road that dead-ends at a place called Johnsons. "They call it a highway, but I call it Indian Road 1, or Yurok 1," says Stokes. "I've been reading those Tony Hillerman books, and the Navajo, they've got the 'Navajo Road'."

His heart is still in those places, Pecwan and Swregon. But, he says, he "sleeps in Eureka." Stokes has subsistence fished at Moore Rock all of his life. Moore was his grandmother's maiden name. "It's two miles up from Pecwan Creek, way up [on the Klamath River]. I used to go down there and set my net and catch salmon. And I'd go to the mouth of the river for eel, and also dip for candle fish. Each fish that comes in from the ocean comes in at different times. January and February it's the eels. The salmon, there's three seasons: spring, summer, and the hookbills [King salmon, in the fall]. We have a name for salmon: nepuy. But that's like the generic term; each kind has its own name, too."

Stokes' daughter Stella--long sandy hair in braids, pale blue eyes--sits quietly on the picnic table next to him, listening to him talk to the stranger. She seems a little bored, a little too cool for all this--but patient. She just finished performing, with a number of other young Yurok women and men, some slow, hypnotic traditional dances, the women in white hide dresses stitched with white shells that tinkled as they moved.

Now she's changed back into teenager clothes, and she wants to talk about Harry Potter. She's obsessed with Harry Potter. She has a button bearing his visage on her purse, and a button that says "UK." Because of Harry, she's obsessed with punk rock. She wants to live in the UK (because of Harry)--or San Francisco, having gotten hooked on the place on a recent Girl Scout trip where she "bridged" from one scout level to the next by walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, far above the ocean.

But Stella has been doing the traditional Yurok dances and dress walks since she was eight years old. Even so, she says, until today the last time she did a dance was probably last year.

"Now I'm not being as active in my culture as much," she says. "Maybe it's because I'm busier, or lazy. Now I have school and friends. And Harry Potter. But now that I'm growing up, I'm going to see if I can balance that better."

The question of the ocean elicits a shrug from her. She shares a conundrum: "Even though I'm aquaphobic--I'm afraid of being in water--the ocean is where I am, who I am," she says. "I've lived here all my life, so I'm sort of adapted to it."

It's true the younger generation has more distractions, more things to pull them in away from their culture. At the same time, there's significant activity within the tribe, including language and culture lessons in the schools, to help them maintain their ties to home. And the older generation is helping with that.

Dale Ann Frye Sherman is a border daughter--half Yurok (from the Klamath River) and half Tolowa (from the Smith River, some 70-plus miles upcoast). For her, the ocean is "identity."

"It's our boundary to our Yurok world. And it's place. It tells us where we are in the world.

"In Yurok, all the rocks were named. The rocks up the river, up trails, and off the coast. So we always knew where we were in the world. And the ocean is one of our boundaries. And it's a source of life.

"I curate at the Clark Historical Museum [in Eureka] and teach at Humboldt State University--Native American cultures and history. And I also teach a female warriors class. I talk about balance in the world. Women have a place and roles in the world. We move in and out of these roles--sometimes we're warriors, and sometimes we're not. I encourage people to be aware of what's around them. It's so easy to walk through life and not see what's around you.

"Humboldt County, Del Norte--this was a paradise before Euro-Americans. We Yurok and Tolowa people don't believe that we're separate from the environment. We're part of the environment. We're here to be stewards. And we're not able to do that with the coming of the Euro-Americans.

These days it's hard to call the ocean clean, or the rivers pristine. It has affected the Yuroks' way of life, and their diet. Dams upriver on the Klamath have severely impacted river flows and quality. In good years the Yurok were able to not only subsistence fish for their daily food, but could supplement their incomes by commercial fishing. But there hasn't been a good year in a while--a massive die-off of adult Chinook salmon in 2002, and major losses of juvenile fish in other years, have led to low runs and restricted fishing in the river and the ocean. The Yurok have suffered along with non-native fishing communities, and have placed their own restrictions on themselves to allow the river species to recover. They haven't fished commercially in a couple of years, and their subsistence quotas have been drastically reduced.

Even so, during the different seasons you'll find a number of tribal members down at Requa, launching their boats to head to the spit and toss out their nets. And there are always a few guys hanging around the dock.

Nonnie Lee, of Seletz and Yurok descent, and Pride Painter--half Athabaskan, half Yurok--sit on the dock at Requa, a glance away from the mouth of the Klamath River, looking at the water. It's afternoon; the fog has lifted. Out on the leg of sand that barricades most of the river from the ocean, you can see a handful of fishermen and women trailing nets in the water near where the river has broken through to the ocean, letting them run with the current. Watching, one can imagine nets full of flopping fish being hauled in.

Lee and Painter are taking it easy at the moment. This, to them, is life very nearly at its best.

"My family grew up on this river," says Lee.

"I grew up in Eureka," says Painter, "but I come up here every weekend, especially when the fish are running."

The ocean, says Lee, means food: "mussels, clams, sea anemones--cut 'em in rounds, scrape the green slime off, bread 'em, fry 'em--eel, sturgeon, salmon."

"We're salmon people," says Painter. "We harvest 'em to feed our families, our elders--like my aunties, I bring them little gifts of salmon."

Painter opens a big cooler to show off the seven salmon he caught in his net. Three days ago, he got out of prison--several months at Pelican Bay, his second stint there. And right after that he went out on the spit and fished and camped for two nights. It was--he doesn't have words to express it, just opens his arms wide and smiles. "I live in Eureka, but this is like my home," he says, sweeping his hand over it all--river, mountains, trees, spit, ocean. "This is my family roots. It's our heritage. If we don't get the salmon, we can't keep our smokehouses full."

"It's sacred, it's our culture, it's our pride," adds Lee.

Painter says too many tourists go out onto the spit these days--they just walk right out there from the river bank, from where his people traditionally used to hold ceremonial dances.

The two men watch the river, talk to each other, laugh. Return to talking to a visitor about the ocean, food, and life.

"We have food gatherings," says Painter. And other ceremonies.

"Brush Dance, that was last month," says Lee. "Jump Dance, that's in September."

Two more young guys walk over, say their whassups, walk on. A few yards down the dock, two young employees--a man and a woman--of the Yurok fisheries department, who have been out counting fish catches, haul their boat from the water onto a trailer and drive off.

Lee lights a cigarette, and he and Painter pose for some pictures. They sit back on the dock and look out at the river, which swirls deeply.

"The big run hasn't come in yet," says Painter.