When troubled teen Willoughby Baxter moves to the small Oregon logging community of Spirit Falls he finds nothing but disappointment and emotional strife as he struggles living in the larger-than-life shadow of his deceased father. Bullied, misunderstood, and failing to live up to anyone’s expectations he turns to the only person who seems to understand any part of what he is going through—a towering and formidable man named Jake Thompson. A Klamath Indian and reformed alcoholic, it is Jake’s stories of his ancestor’s sacred and spiritual ties with the land around the Baxter farm and Spirit Falls that compel Willoughby to visit the waterfall and unintentionally change his destiny.
What starts as a story about a slight teen-age boy trying to come to terms with the past and find a place to fit into the present transforms into a tale of struggle for survival in a harsh reality where nothing is as it once was.