The initiation dinner is a mix of new, recent, and longtime members, sitting eight to a table, with thin paper placemats emblazoned with a proud and fully racked elks. The steak’s especially good this week, according to Lois, because Felix is using a demi-glace. “I’m going back to the kitchen to get a piece of foil for my leftovers,” she tells me, “and I’m gonna tell Felix that was the worst damn steak.”

The head of scholarship, Karl Johan Uri, made a béarnaise sauce at home, and a small Tupperware of it is circulating at a corner table, where Ellen, in her early thirties, waits for her husband to arrive. “Isn’t this fun?” she asks no one in particular. “This is so fun.” Beside them, there’s a clean-cut guy in the Seattle-standard rolled-up Oxford who, after some questioning, admits he works for Amazon. “But I’m not a transplant!” he says. “I’ve been here 10 years!”

Across the table, John — somewhere in his forties, with a sprawling smile — brings up his initiation, back in 2012. “The guy who did the interview, Bronco, he told us, 'Do not join anything. Go to events, see what we do, and find one that appeals to you — or create one. We’re getting a lot of new blood, but we have to sustain it.’” John and his partner, Jake, chose bingo, helping run the Memorial Day events and eating monthly steak.

Jake has the round Norwegian face you see all over Ballard, and he first joined the Elks “a lifetime ago.” When he moved to Alaska, he became an “Elk in Bad Standing,” but when he started attending bingo with John, he paid a simple $25 fee and returned to the fold. The couple recently sold their sprawling home in the suburbs and downsized to a condo on the waterfront, where they walk to work and compete for the most steps on their Fitbits.

Before initiation starts and I’m ushered from the room, Jake asks, in a slightly tremulous voice, whether, during my two weeks with the Elks, I’d been able to stay past 11 p.m. “That’s when we remember all our forgotten brothers and sisters,” he said. “Any Elks club in the world, when the clock strikes 11, we recite the toast.”

The toast is ostensibly about the Elks, but it also ritualizes the broad and primal hunger to know that your presence has been, in some way, indelible — a dream that “joining,” and its attendant commitment, of labor, of capital, of care, guarantees. You can watch dozens of versions of it on YouTube, in various degrees of formality and intoxication, the words sticky in throats and scratchy on old gramophones. It’s been modified slightly over the years, but has remained substantively the same since the late 19th century, arriving, after a slightly weepy preamble, at its real heart:

“It is the golden hour of recollection, the homecoming of those who wander, the mystic roll call of those who will come no more. Living or dead, an Elk is never forgotten, never forsaken.” •