Unfair perhaps--but you see what I mean:

Talking on the phone yesterday with a young, black, female (but perfectly nice and sympathetic) representative of my new damned insurance company--She was calling from Maryland, where it was already past six in the evening; hence her charming, but slightly surprising (to me here, at just past noon in Honolulu) greeting of "Good evening." We spoke in desultory fashion of insurance matters; then, our official business concluded, she felt free to ask me, anent her own inner vision of Terrestrial Paradise such as is so often evoked in those who live on the Mainland, by the words "Honolulu, Hawaii," "Is the sea really blue where you live?"  So I gave her the talk, on how that depends on which side of the island you're on--and how the blueness of water is inherent in the nature of water, if, of course, it's pure, as it is, for example, in certain bodies of fresh water that are found in Oregon, like for instance Crater Lake.  Which name I spelled out, as she had never heard of it--but she was evidently typing it into her computer as we spoke, because she suddenly stopped and exclaimed, "My heavens, that is blue!" Which, in her droll, southern black dialect, was a good four morae  of rising followed by falling circumflexion.  "Yes," I said, "And the picture you're evidently looking at doesn't lie.  That's really the color it is, as close as you can get to look at it--like sapphires.  There is nothing on the East Coast, or in the Atlantic Ocean, like it."  And without the least hesitation, she concurred.