Never turn your back on the sea.

My great-grandfather repeated it to each new generation. Jim lived his entire life within sight of the North Atlantic. Most of it in a cottage on Sráid na hIascairí, the Street of the Fishermen, a village of a single road tucked into the shadow of the Cliffs of Moher. The sea brought fish, even when the harvest was bad, brought friends from the islands, and in previous centuries, brought wine from Spain and rumours of help from France. It spirited away the leaders of failed rebellions. The sea took its share of each generation on emigration visas and famine ships, and it brought back the remittances that kept boots on feet and settled the tab in the local shop once a year.

If you follow the road from Dublin across the country to Galway and turn south, hugging the wind-bitten road that clings to the fringe of rock between the foot of the mountains and the seething edge of the sea, you will find the landscape of water where Jim lived his life. His sea. His daughters’ sea. My mother’s sea. My sea. If you could leave your car here, on this narrow scrap of tarmac, and swing your leg over the dry-stone wall, the lace edge of the water trails along the limestone shore. If the tide is in you could stand with your toes curled around the lip of the rough-shorn, yellow-lichened rock shelf here. Where the land falls away steeply, you could be up to your thighs in water as white fronds of swash bend around you towards the shore. If it was winter, you could track the rain’s advance toward you across Galway Bay. Watch it beating the pewter water to a pebbledash sheet to mark its approach.

“Mara dhuit,” they say as a greeting in Donegal, “The sea be with you.” The more common greeting is “Dia dhuit,” ‘‘God be with you,” and in the divergence of the greetings I have sometimes felt the tug of allegiance to T. S. Eliot’s rumination that the sea has many gods and many voices. The seas of Ireland are Godful.

The sea is so loud here, along this stretch of coast, that it can obliterate other sounds. You have to stand close beside somebody on the shore if you want to catch their words before the howl of the water carries them jealously off. Our family has lived their lives for generations within earshot of the same guttering thunder of wave on rock. A landscape of water and shifting land it is impossible to own, though the language tries. Irish has many names for the sea. Some of them have slipped away over time; Jim knew more of them than I do, and I am sure I have already lost a few.

Not for my great-grandfather or his daughters the neutral description of water as either sea or ocean. It was water of course, it was the soft sounds of uisce, with its gentle cascading vowels and assonant hiss. It was muir and farraige—the sea as a rolling geography of tidal Rs. But it was also lear and sáile—the sea as a place of distance that must be travelled over to reach an implicit other shore. It was sometimes díle, the flood or the deluge, and aidbhéis, the unfathomable abyss. It was aigéan, a bottomless depth, and without warning it might also be aigéanta, a mountainous place of water and wave.

I have grown up in these seas. It was farraige when my sister and I plunged our arms into briny pools to prise small lilac shells, like loose fingernails, from their rock-bound places, and worry fat, red anemones with our fingers. It was muir when I wandered the shoreline with our dog, collecting crab claws and periwinkles and sucking the salt off the small black pebbles the sea had licked. It was aigéanta, churning me in its belly until I could not see where the sunlight was, teaching me how not to drown on days when I tested its waves too far. And it was aidbhéis as I watched it roll under my boat with the coast of Doolin fading to a purple outline in the pale light of a June morning. But mostly it has been lear, and sáile, as I have watched it recede through plane windows and rearview mirrors.

There were always better schools and jobs and more money and more chances somewhere else. Sooner or later we all left this sea, left over it. My great-grandmother taught her children English and Irish. But she also taught them Latin and French. There was no electricity or running water in their farmhouse on the crest of Sliabh Eilbhe,[1] but they could name the sea in four different languages by the time they crossed it.

I kept coming back though. In my twenties there was no distance far enough that I would not boomerang back to this mountain, this sea as often as I could. To fall asleep to the gravel snores of the tide turning two fields away. Just for one night. I came back to be closer to the mountain. The family it holds. And this year I came back for good. I had become so used to following opportunity to a new country every twelve months that I knew if I didn’t stop, I would become an unmoored name, not belonging anywhere. So, I turned my back on lear and sáile and began to know the sea once more as a landscape rather than a distance to measure separation.

The last time I touched the Atlantic was on the beach below our house, where the waves hit Ireland’s west coast at a full sprint after hurtling west from Newfoundland. It was one of the dreg days of August, but the light already had an edge of winter. White filtered and opalescent as the sun teased the edges of swollen clouds. What we call a “soft day.” When the rain is light, and so directionless it might simply be visible humidity.

The sand rolled in dimpled folds down to the water in bands of dun and ochre. At ocean’s edge the final ripples of the Atantic were churning softly back on themselves. The tide was turning. A bad time to swim. But this is a bad beach in every tide. You cannot land a boat on it because of the submerged geography of the sea shelf below, which pulls waves suddenly upwards without warning. The Caher River rushes to sea at one end, feeding cold water from the limestone mountains out into the bay, creating a submerged current. Farther along the beach, the same five or six rips appear, and just as suddenly fade away, playing snakes and ladders with swimmers. Pulling them out and across the coast faster than they can escape.

The waves were all froth that day. No pull in them. Beyond the break the Aran islands seemed so close that I could have reached them in an hour of easy breaststroke. I could pick out each house as a white pixel on their shores. A sign of bad weather coming. I floated there, watching the gulls wheeling above the banks of ribbon wrack to the south. Watching the fish silver of my skin lighting up with the blue and purple of veins that pulsed with the water’s cold. Cloud shadows skirted across the mountains of the Burren. Their rounded limestone shells were mercurial. Gray and lavender, black and stone blue. Shifting as the light moved across them.

My fingers were gnarled and stiff with cold and brine in minutes and I turned to swim in. It was only when I reached the shallow water and tried to stand that I felt the strength of a rip pull my legs away from the shore. I could not walk a straight line to land, and I heard Jim saying again, “Never turn your back on the sea.”

Water is a generous element and a cruel one. It feeds without question. It accommodates, taking on the shape of what it moves through. It can carve stone, claw away earth, and uproot trees and animals off cliffs. It is plentiful, and barren, of hope. Unyielding and soothing. It is the healing element, but it is also an braonach—the tearful.

“Never turn your back on the sea. Watch the sea. Because it is always watching you.”

It was not general advice. The sea watches the land and the people on it. People who tempt it with their proximity, who try to tame it, and, most of all, people who never knew it was watching them. There are stories in Ireland about the Kinealys, descended of seals, bound to protect the animals which are their kin. Stories of women with dark hair and sea-green eyes who will leave you again and again unless you can hide the skins they slip into, which allow them to become seals again. People with salt blood and high voices who are not just watched by the sea but are of it.

Jim did not mean we were part of this group. “The sea has our name,” he would warn. It had the names of certain families. They belonged to the sea. Its bodies. The sea is always waiting for them to turn their back, to step too far, to come home to it.

I could never determine, or maybe Jim simply would never say, who else’s names the sea held, and why. Jim was a Munster FitzGerald. A member, however distant, of a family who might have had reason to watch their backs around the sea. The FitzGeralds are pretenders to Irishness, part of a wave of French Normans who arrived in the twelfth century and adopted the Irish language and the native customs so completely that they became fierce opponents to English rule.

In an attempt, perhaps, to be more than merely the Old English, the FitzGeralds decided to claim partial descent from the Goddess Clíodhna. The result of a tryst at a suitably vague period of history. Clíodhna was drowned by her father, the sea god Manannán Mac Lir, and her spirit lives on, in one of the waves that growls away off the coast of West Cork, guarding Ireland from attack. Clíodhna is also Queen of the Banshees, na bean shí, the female spirits who follow certain old Irish families and appear to announce the coming death of their members.

To be descended from Clíódhna is to claim a lineage that, conveniently for the FitzGeralds, made them both semi-divine and a living embodiment of the country they so wanted to join. To be a child of the defending sea, to be followed not only by the banshee, herald of death to Irish nobility, but by the queen of the cohort.

I wonder if this is what Jim meant. A sort of oblique reminder of some long-repeated family tree that meant we were watched by the sea god who drowned the daughter who created us. That he might drown us too. Or that Clíodhna sees us still as pretenders to belonging— invaders who slipped past her protective swell and added insult to injury by pretending a relation to her. Or that we are hers. That we belong to this mother wave that howls around the coast and that will have us back one day. The sea that has our name.

They say along our strip of the west coast, that the whole land above the water is mirrored below it. That beneath the waves is a submerged image of the landscape we walk. Across Galway Bay in 2017, a storm ripped the sand off beaches with greedy claws and exposed the petrified trunks and knurled roots of an ancient forest. When I think of this other place, this lost landscape, I find my mind drifting to Dún Aonghasa, the semi-circular Iron Age fort built on the lip of the cliffs of Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands. Only half the fort is there; its walls drop off into the space above hundred-meter-high cliffs that are splashed with mottled lichen and pocked by pincushions of sea pink. The closest flowers to America. The concentric ringed defences of the Dún do not face toward this unknown horizon. The sharp teeth of its cheval de frises face inland, bared against an internal threat.

What required so many walls? When the fort was built, in roughly 1100 BC, sea levels here were much lower. The storm-exposed forests of Galway Bay were still green, and ran from Connemara to the Burren, a huge valley inhabited by giant Irish elk, wild boar, brown bears, wolves. And Dún Aonghasa was built looking out over all of this with its back to an estimated thousand-meter-high cliff. Against an enemy so fierce that if the walls did not hold, the vast emptiness of the gannet dive from this height was the best alternative.

It is strange to think that a memory so ancient, of a time when the bay was a forest and the islands were mountains on the other side of a valley, still lingers in the stories of North Clare. That thousands of years later we still pass on a memory of a time when this was land, not water. Was Clíodhna drowned in a valley like ours? Were her groves of ash or streams or rocks swallowed up by the seas of her father, making her a wave above the place she was once worshipped?

I wonder what will happen when the half that remains in our world is reclaimed by the ocean. When the sea rises, will we find ourselves in these cliff-top forts again, telling stories of ever greater drowned kingdoms? Will there be some group a thousand years from now who tells stories of a time when the islands were a single country you could walk across? Will they still repeat the names of the waves? Will they know the names we had for the sea? Or will there be nothing left of us—no landscape left, no language to name it?

What will rise? What will sink?

Mornings after a storm in Doolin the fields would be garlanded with black ropes of glistening bladder wrack and uprooted russet kelp, hurled hundreds of meters inland by the sea, as though the water was trying to reach the houses. Drowned cows would be found floating in the inlets, plucked off by tongues of water and high winds.

One morning, Jim’s father was walking the shore after a storm, searching for wrack. He saw the pale outline of a figure in the distance. Strange things appear in storm light. But he followed the white form through the storm-softened sun of early morning until he reached a point where he could go no farther, where the shore fell away into deep water and a dangerous current pulled towards the face of Aill na Searrach. The leap of the foals. This headland where the Cliffs of Moher begin their steep climb is named for the final members of Ireland’s godlike race, the Tuatha Dé Danann, who, rather than convert to Christianity, transformed themselves into seven white foals and leapt into the sea below.

The wave that turns the water where they landed is called Tonn Aileen, Aileen’s wave. A new name dreamed up by surfers to christen one of the world’s largest and best waves to ride. Tonn Aileen can reach fifty feet. A bone-rattling roar of white water galloping straight toward the face of the cliffs. Díle aigéanta, muir critheach, a trembling sea, a deluge of mountainous water.

Was it Clíodhna Jim’s father saw? The Queen of the Banshees, wearing white, often met in liminal places. By a ditch or a border, at a céim, a step through a wall, or a gate. Or here, at the tide line, the boundary between our place and hers. Combing her long dark hair and lamenting. Warning of a death to come. Or was it one of the drowned foals, come ashore to see the mess they had made during the night? He never finished the story. Never told us what it was. The existential made real. Or a trick of wind and the shadows thrown off by cliffs and waves.

Even if Clíodhna is a story, her wave still runs. There is still a forest buried beneath the waves of Galway Bay. The sea takes a little more land every decade, and it watches us. It grew us in its depths before we had named sea or water. It saw us make our way onto land, find a different landscape. Saw us forget that the sea had been home once.

Our family is all buried within hearing of the Atlantic. Only caoróg mhara, caonach mara, meathán mara—only these sea plants grow without care on the bellies of their graves. I may be buried here too one day, in the shadow of the old church, with the mountains at my back. If I am, Jim will have been right. The sea will have taken me back. They tried to sink a well in the next field. All they got was seawater.

[1] This name may mean Eilbhe’s mountain, which is not a common or indeed discoverable name in Irish, so it could also take its name, somewhat more amusingly, from the anglicization and re-translation into Irish of the frustrated response to an English surveyor’s attempt to extract a name for each hill from a local Irish speaker—“Sliabh eile,” “just another mountain.”