The great English landscape painter John Constable once said, “We see nothing until we truly understand it.” That’s a pretty surprising thing for an artist to say; you’d think he’d be focused on the visual. What Constable meant was that unless you understand the story behind the landscape, you don’t really know what you’re seeing — even in a place that seems as easy to “see” as Vashon Island. Looks deceive.

This is the second in a series of columns exploring what seem to me to be the component parts of what we might call “The Anatomy of Home.” Today, we consider Shape — the way the landscape influences our experience of home.

A landscape, being visual, seems simple to appreciate. But in fact even the word itself is problematic. The commonest English definition of the word is “an expanse of scenery that can be seen in a single view.” That’s because for the last 300 years or so landscape meant a picture of a view — literally a painting.

But the word has ancient Germanic roots. A land typically meant a defined plot that was plowed. And the word scape, which is related to the word “sheaf,” meant a bundle or collection of similar things. So landscape long meant a composition of manmade spaces on the land — which is a far cry from “scenery.”

The manmade spaces in this region are organized on a stunningly artificial — not to mention monotonous — system: the survey grid. We have Thomas Jefferson to thank for this. He’s the chap who got Congress to order the surveying of the West, the result of which is that all the land west of the Appalachians looks like a net was dropped from space to capture and tame it. The grid has no respect for Mother Nature.

As an Easterner, I was accustomed to roads that conformed themselves to the contours of the land. They do sensible things, like avoiding steep hills or bodies of water. When I moved to Seattle, I was astonished to find that streets here are both airborne and amphibious: They climb over hills, leap from vertical bluffs, dive under Lake Union, for example, and reappear on the opposite shore, streaking onward, relentlessly and arrow-straight to, I suppose, infinity.

Then there’s the numbers. I live on a dead end street overlooking outer Quartermaster Harbor. Where I come from, this street would have a charming and descriptive name — something like “Outer Harbor Lane” or “Beach Drive.” Out here it’s called S.W. 242nd Street.

This, it seems to me, raises far more questions than it answers: Southwest of what? Where do the numbers begin? Do they ever end? I haven’t a clue and I’ll bet I’m in the majority. But I digress…

Let’s return to this Island we call home. How do we understand the almost feminine shapeliness of the landscape of Vashon Island — so different from, say, the rocky peaks and cliffs of Orcas? It’s simple, really: Vashon is a sort of geological landfill, a dumping ground of gravel, sand and mud left behind by a messy retreating glacier. The Island’s contours are soft today because the pile of rubble is slowly — very slowly — eroding away. Soon — geologically speaking anyway — it won’t be here at all. Maybe that’s why property values are dropping.

Consider also the woods. Visitors comment on how lushly forested the Island is, how undeveloped. They should stop by the historical museum some day and see pictures of what many parts of the Island looked like just 100 years or so ago: raw, bleak, stripped of timber — a kind of temperate zone moonscape. Take a walk through the wooded paths inside the Burton Loop, and you can still see the stumps of the giants that once furred these slopes. Today’s woods, while lovely, are like some adolescent boy’s wispy attempt at a beard compared to what once was.

And then there are the fruit trees. At this time of year, almost anywhere on the Island, scraggly old apple and Italian plum trees rain neglected fruit on overgrown lots and the lonely yards of departed summer people. These trees are what’s left of an Island that, before and for many years after World War II, was a major producer of orchard and vine fruits: apples, plums, peaches, loganberries, raspberries and, of course, strawberries.

Up where the airstrip now is, imagine strawberries as far as the eye could see. Truly vast tracts were under cultivation. The same is true of poultry farms; there were dozens of enormous, two- and three-level hen houses with 1000s of pullets. The manmade landscape that resulted is almost all gone now, returning inexorably to “scenery.” The wartime internment of the Japanese-American families who owned many of the berry farms was one blow, but eventually it was the cost of labor and other market changes that drove them out of business.

So when Constable tells us, “We see nothing until we truly understand it,” he’s reminding us that while the shape of the landscape we call home is important, it’s also more than just the picture we see of it at this moment. That’s like looking at a single frame of a movie and assuming we can understand the whole story from that one still.

— Will North is the author of more than a dozen books. His latest is “The Long Walk Home,” a novel.