Delano Island

Delano Island is Arthur Leander’s home island, a place whose beauty and confinement remain inseparable in his memory. Between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia, it is remembered through rain-soaked forest, rocky beaches, a village by the ferry terminal, and a lake central to Arthur’s childhood. He leaves for Toronto at seventeen, but the island continues to shape how he tells his own story: he loves it, and he has always wanted to get away.

Geography and settlement

Delano Island lies between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia, north of Los Angeles. Arthur’s habitual way of conveying its scale is to compare it to Manhattan in size and shape, but with a thousand people. The comparison offers city listeners a familiar outline while also marking the island as a place they struggle to imagine. Its terrain is mostly rock and forest, cut by narrow roads and dirt driveways that disappear among the trees.

The island’s vegetation and weather are unusually vivid in Arthur’s descriptions. It is covered in temperate rainforest; moss hangs from low branches, and cedar trees move in the wind. The ferns stand so high that, over the years, Arthur’s gesture grows until he realizes he is describing plants seven or eight feet tall. The island receives approximately two hundred days of rain each year. Deer break into vegetable gardens and leap in front of cars, bringing the forest into the routines of settlement rather than leaving it as distant scenery.

Near the ferry terminal is a village of sorts, with a general store and one gas pump, a health-food store, a real-estate office, an elementary school attended by sixty students, and a community hall. Two large carved mermaids hold hands to form an arch above the hall’s entrance; a tiny library is attached. Elsewhere, children go barefoot through the summer and wear feathers in their hair. Volkswagen vans brought by their parents in the 1970s have rusted in the forest. The small population, modest institutions, and encroaching woodland distinguish the island from the urban places where Arthur later tries to explain it.

The lake and childhood memory

A small lake lies in the middle of the island. Arthur imagines that an asteroid formed it; to him it is almost perfectly round and very deep. The ocean is always cold, so the lake becomes a favorite swimming place, shared by everyone. In his recollections, his mother reads beneath the trees along the shore while his little brother splashes in the shallows wearing water wings. Insects briefly touch the surface. These ordinary details make the lake a lived-in childhood refuge, not merely a striking feature of the landscape.

A darker story becomes attached to the same water. One summer, a young woman from elsewhere leaves her car on the road, leaves a note, and walks into the lake. Divers search for her, but local children whisper that they cannot reach the bottom. The rumor gives the lake an almost frightening depth, although Arthur later recognizes that this explanation seems improbable. What remains is the concrete event: despite an intensive search, the woman’s body is not found for two weeks. The episode surfaces retrospectively against Arthur’s childhood memories, adding darkness to a place that had seemed familiar and safe. On the lake road, a naked Barbie doll is buried up to the waist in dirt; the reason for it is unknown.

Arthur’s home and departure

Arthur describes the island as beautiful to people in Toronto and other cities, but their predictable admiration does not capture his experience. To him, its beauty is real and also claustrophobic. The tension between those responses defines the island’s importance in his biography: it is not a place he rejects as ugly, but one whose loveliness cannot make him content to stay. When people fail to understand, he reaches for general descriptions of beaches and plant life, or gestures upward to convey the height of the ferns. The effort to explain the place becomes part of his effort to explain himself.

At seventeen, Arthur is accepted into the University of Toronto. His parents help pay for his plane ticket, and he leaves. He initially expects to study economics, but in the city he discovers that the subject is not what brought him there. Within four months he drops out and begins auditioning for acting roles. His understanding of the move is blunt: school was a means of escape, and Toronto itself was the point. His parents are horrified; they love the island and have chosen to live there. Their late-night phone calls make clear that Arthur’s departure is not simply a shared family transition. He is leaving a home his parents still embrace.

The island beyond the island

Although Arthur’s adult life unfolds elsewhere, connections to Delano Island persist. His mother calls to tell him about Miranda, the seventeen-year-old niece of Susie, a waitress at the General Store Café whom Arthur remembers from childhood. Miranda has recently moved to Toronto to attend art school, and Arthur’s mother asks him to take her to lunch. The request carries a familiar place and its people into his urban life, linking his childhood memory of Susie with a new acquaintance he initially considers awkward.

The island is thus present both as a physical home and as a measure of distance. Its ferry-terminal village, deep woods, rain, lake, and family ties form a world that Arthur repeatedly tries to render intelligible to people elsewhere. Yet his central account resists a simple nostalgia: he calls the island the most beautiful place he has seen, while remembering that he always wanted to escape it. Its lasting significance lies in that unresolved combination of attachment and departure.