Vog on the Water

In one of my elementary school social studies textbooks -- second grade, I think -- was a page with three pictures on it. A City, a Town, and a Farm. We were taught new words for these places: urban, suburban, and rural. Looking out my office window to Hilo Bay, the view of the port, hotels, and church, looks very much like the picture of the Town. Less the palm trees. I find this very ironic, since this was a textbook in suburban Indiana, and this is the first time I have ever lived somewhere that I could identify as matching one of those pictures. In suburban Indianapolis, we were technically in a Large City, but all that was around us was housing developments and strip malls, and the occasional, randomly situated corn or wheat or strawberry field. Now I see the water, the steeple, the port, the tableau of multi-colored, tree-covered hills. It's very idyllic, just like that picture in my textbook. I just have to be careful not to look too much in the foreground, with its palm treet, or too much to background, where beyond the tree-y hills, there is a vast (oh, so vast) expanse of ocean, or two far to the south-west, where I can see the vog (volcanic fog) rising from the cindercone at Kilauea.

I also work at the most American of institutions, the US Department of Agriculture. As a federal employee, I help protect my country's ability to farm food for itself, protecting dairy cows and corn from poisoning and locusts. Or rather, since it's the Hawaii field office, protecting orchids and macadamia nuts from rats and liwi.

And then I will go to protect America's right to obesity, at the Coldstone Creamery.