A young boy's father moves his family to a small coastal Indigenous community in Washington called Teahwit to set up a store. In the area, there is a woman who the locals call Hanging Hair. She wanders along the beach looking for clams. Some people think she is crazy, but others say she is a spirit.

After a bad fishing season, there is little business at the store. This causes the boy's father to get upset and start drinking heavily. When he drinks, the mother locks herself in her room and the boy's grandfather sits upstairs with him and his sister, telling them stories to distract them from the havoc below.

One night, after trashing his store, the father goes out onto the beach. The children's grandfather is upstairs telling them the story of how he met their grandmother, who had passed away while giving birth to their father and who is in many ways similar to Hanging Hair. Meanwhile, Hanging Hair approaches the father. When he falls off a rock into the water, she pulls him out. The grandfather says that she has had to drag him out of the water before; the grandfather would do it, but raising him alone has been more than he could handle. On the beach, the father begins to fight back, and tries to hold Hanging Hair's head underwater.

The boy, his family, and their neighbors run down to the beach. The grandfather gets there first and pulls them apart. After breaking up the fight, he threatens to whip his son, something that he's never done. Both the boy's father and Hanging Hair yell at him, so he drops his son and wanders off alone.

He reappears a week later, not saying much until he goes upstairs to the children's bedroom to lie on the bed, looking at the ceiling and talking to them. As he talks, the boy looks out the window at the beach, where he sees Hanging Hair prodding the ocean with a stick. The grandfather tells him that she is trying to calm down the ocean god but she never succeeds. The boy says that this time she is. This alarms the grandfather. He gets up and looks out the window to see the ocean receding and Hanging Hair following after it.

The grandfather yells out to the rest of the family to get into the car, knowing that a tsunami is on its way. The commotion alerts most of the other people in the community, and they are able to get to higher ground. But before the car leaves, the boy's grandfather runs back to the beach without explaining why.

They find him a few days later, unharmed. The rest of the village is completely ruined. The grandfather had chased after Hanging Hair, but right as he reached her, the wave hit, washing him ashore into a tree but carrying Hanging Hair out to sea. He suggests that they start all over again and rebuild, but the boy's father calls him crazy for risking his life for Hanging Hair. The grandfather responds, in tears, that maybe he is crazy for loving and wanting to start again.