By WILL NORTH

For The Beachcomber

Rarely, rarely comest thou.

Spirit of Delight

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

I made my first visit to Port Orchard the other day. I rather wish I hadn’t. Port Orchard is, in a sense, the quintessential American small town: its approaches are lined with shopping strips, fast food joints and big box superstores, but its core is dying.

You know a community is struggling when secondhand shops pretending to be antiques stores outnumber the kind of retailers that residents actually need: a pharmacy, a grocery store, a dry cleaners, a variety shop.

I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I find such places depressing. But why do I feel that way? What makes some places dispiriting and others — like Vashon — simply delightful?

This is the fifth in a series of columns I’m calling, “The Anatomy of Home.” In earlier columns we’ve looked at Place, Shape, Beauty and Comfort as components of “home.” Today we explore Delight.

It is an unfortunate fact of life in America today that the places where we live often do not delight us at all; they’re simply where we go at the end of the workday.

But let’s say you and your family decide to spend a pleasant weekend somewhere else; where do you decide to go? My guess it’s someplace that is delightful to you, a place that you find pleasurable and comforting in some way, a place that seems reassuring and validating of some sense you have of “rightness.”

Ever wonder what it is about such places that makes them feel delightful? You’d think that it was something ephemeral, almost magical, wouldn’t you?

It’s not. It’s predictable. Because delightful places have two things in common other places don’t share. They have roughly equal portions of order and complexity.

Here’s what I mean: Let’s say you climb to the top of a church steeple in an old community in northern New England, or a hill town in Italy, or a fishing port in England, to name but a few.

What do you see? If you look carefully, you see a certain orderliness in the way buildings are constructed and the community is composed. They’re made of similar and largely local materials. There are things that tie them together — their roofs, for example: cedar shingles in New England, red tiles in Italy, gray slate in England. But there is also complexity in the variations among each of the buildings in the community and the way they are distributed within the townscape. They are both distinct and also a part of a whole; they knit together easily, almost seamlessly, but don’t lose their character.

Places that have one of these characteristics, but not both, are not delightful. When there is order, but no complexity, for example, the result is boredom.

After World War II, Arthur Leavitt built Leavittowns for returning soldiers and their families, vast subdivisions composed of inexpensive and identical houses on identical lots.

The economics of such developments were such that building them was like printing money for the developers, and they spread like wildfire, and still do.

Malvina Reynolds’s song, “Little Boxes,” captured the aesthetic, such as it was: “Little boxes made of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.”

What was missing was complexity. But the reverse — complexity without order — is just as deadening. That’s what strip development yields. As you approach Port Orchard (and the majority of communities in America), you have complexity run amok. There are so many shopping strips and so many signs telling you what’s there and demanding your attention that you actually can’t take all the information in. There is no order by which to make sense of it.

Now, consider Vashon. You get off the ferry and drive south on the highway, and the structures you see, nestled amongst the trees, while they differ, also are orderly in that they tend to be of similar scale and are built with similar materials. (Oh sure, we have our McMansions, but they’re well hidden.)

You arrive in Vashon center, and what you find is a cluster of businesses mostly modest in scale, varied in construction, yet nonetheless companionable. And the necessities of living are provided in a concise, walkable arrangement — in short, a community.

There are grocers, bakers, banks, cafés, restaurants, bookstores, hardware stores, gift shops, a pharmacy, gas station, bike shop, insurance and real estate agents, florists, an eye clinic, a veterinary clinic, a holistic health center, the library, post office, consignment shops, the farmers’ market and on and on.

Not to mention people you look forward to seeing and speaking with every day: Glen and his tricycle, the chap who sweeps the sidewalk outside the pharmacy, the woman who always dresses in purple and many more.

There it is: order and complexity, side by side. And one more thing: enticement — the sense that just around the next corner there will be some pleasant surprise: something new in a shop window, a neighbor you haven’t seen for a while, a patiently waiting dog, all the tiny little elements which, when combined in just the right proportion, yield that ineffable quality of home called…

Delight.

As Shelley said, it comes rarely. But we have it here.

— Will North is an Islander and author.