By Michael Bishop
Ehukai is a case of magic lost in translation—Hawaiian for ‘sea spray,’ a faint wisp or mist of seawater. The phenomenon, though, is divine: the veil of a wave lifted by the power of the sea.
Pulled by the eternal rotation of the earth, a lethargic swath of cold air spirals from the winter darkness of the Arctic Ocean and spills off the coast of Kamchatka. This frigid air mass soon embraces its tropical counterpart: drifting northward is a low-density warm front, vibrant with the energy of the sun. These two atmospheric bodies entwine into a self-sustaining and ascending double-helix.
The swirling elemental vortex tumbles across the North Pacific, tracking east-southeast, generating sustained winds across a vast stretch of open water, aimed at a serendipitously located archipelago. The tempest exhales its energy across the ocean’s surface, sending massive swells undulating for thousands of miles—all the way to O’ahu’s North Shore, to Ehukai Beach Park.
Here, the bathymetry of the seabed refracts, gathers, and focuses these swells onto a triangular coral slab just seventy-five yards offshore. Each incoming wave lurches skyward upon meeting the reef, pitching its crest forward so quickly that it feathers into spindrift, leaving an ethereal mist trailing the crashing lip. The wave then unspools along the reef’s edge, transformed into a hollow tube of whitewater spiraling into the shallows—all trailed by a ghostly cloak of, yes, sea spray.
This force of nature, the Banzai Pipeline, is the single most iconic wave on Earth. Its breath is ehukai.
Michael Bishop is a sea-sculpted writer from O’ahu, Hawai’i. After completing an MFA at the University of Idaho and a Fulbright fellowship in Aotearoa New Zealand, he is once again at home in the heart of the Pacific. His next love letter to the seas is forthcoming in Boulevard Magazine.
Image by Paolo Nicolello courtesy of Unsplash
You translated the magic beautifully.
I was educated, transformed, and transported.
Thank you.
Aloha!
Mind bending in a language as rich as the sea: poetic, precise, profound. A mighty collision of nature juxtaposed against a delicate mist, a visual chemistry.
You make magic on the page, not lost in translation.
I am so fortunate to have witnessed this phenonomon and now to read about it in such lyrical language. And learning a new word along the way.
Thank you for the beauty of your words and capture in this piece.
We have an additional name for this is New England, mare’s tails.
Breathtakingly beautiful piece.
I feel like nature rolled me in the alley of a long-shore current and left me snorting out a nose full of salt water. You captured the power and ethereal that can be dished up at the same time. Thank you for the translation and education. And for the intro to this online journal.