July 20: Stout's Island Lodge: The Picture of Summer

I settled on a rocking chair in the screen porch of my room and tried to read a novel. No luck. I was too captivated with the moment at hand to go somewhere else, even by reading a book.

My room was on the second floor and the porch jutted out like an airy peninsula in a sea of trees. I was nestled among the birds. Their various calls, copious and continuous, nearly blended into one rising and falling trill. A bird flew past so close I could hear his wings flapping.

Then a noise even more quintessentially summer than the warbling of birds rippled through the air: the creak and bang of a screen door opening and closing.

Below, two young girls, tennis rackets in hand, chatted as they walked from their log cabin across a yard punctuated with bright geraniums and white Adirondack chairs. Their giggles rose and mingled with the birdsong.

The scene helps explain why this speck of land in the middle of Red Cedar Lake, near Birchwood, Wis., is called "The Island of Happy Days." Its official name is Stout's Island Lodge, a collection of gabled cabins and a century-old lodge fashioned after the storied "great camps" of New York's Adirondack Mountains.

There are no souvenir stores, no thrill rides, no mini golf and no water park. Pleasures here are basic: a swimming dock, a fine restaurant, sunny spots to relax with a book -- and plenty of screen doors reverberating with the sound of summer.

•••

Ten minutes. That's all it took, aboard a pontoon ferry, to trade in discarded roadside beer cans and the din of traffic for wildflowers and the thwack of croquet mallets.

Turns out that the waving show of patriotism hovering over the trees was only the first of many clubby, Ralph Lauren-like touches. Deer antlers jut out from under the eaves of the boathouse. Among the boat stalls, polished wooden canoes hang from the rafters. In a second-story game room above the boats, a freshly polished ping-pong table and a pool table, whose green felt had nearly faded to gray, await a challenge.

After disembarking, I walked up the stairs to the front lawn and my first view of the red cedar lodge, so thoroughly handcrafted that even the gutters and downspouts are carved of wood. Wooden beams adorned with finely carved birds crown the dining room, which has windows overlooking the lake on two sides.

Beyond clubby, the place oozes good taste and Old Money.

With reason: It was built by one of the wealthiest men in the country at the time. In 1900 Frank D. Stout grew rich off his father's lumber fortune, moved to Chicago and, when his company built a railroad to this part of Wisconsin in 1903, sent his family (and their servants, of course) to the island for the summers. Stout designed his first lodge with the bark still on the wood (the better to flaunt his lumber fortune, perhaps). It was a mistake: Bugs burrowed under the bark and ate away. So in 1912, work began again, this time with cedar Stout had shipped from Idaho. The entire construction cost was $1.5 million -- in 1915 dollars.

• • •

Amid all the leather furniture and black-and-white photos of long-ago visitors in fur coats, I felt a little like an imposter in a patrician world. But not for long.

The rooms, whether in the lodge or a cabin, make you feel at home. The beds are crisp, but always something is rumpled enough to make you feel at ease: a fading Oriental rug, or an antique dresser whose drawers refuse to close neatly.

I've stayed at Harry's Cabin, where old-fashioned snowshoes hang on the wall. I've stayed in Lodge Room 6, where built-in bookshelves hold treasures (and that three-sided screen porch lets you nest with the birds). I've stopped by Lodge Room 3, where an antique thermometer and barometer adorn the wall but no clock could be found -- an arrangement that seemed perfectly fitting on Stout's Island, where the weather is far more important than the time.

There's talk of adding televisions and telephones to the rooms, but so far only one has a television and none have phones (my cell phone worked just fine). A placard tells visitors to ring the old bell atop the stone tower just outside the lodge doors in the event of an emergency. It last rang on Sept. 11, 2001.

Most people will be lounging somewhere reading yesterday's newspaper, or jumping off the swimming dock, or playing checkers in the lodge under the watchful eye of a wrought-iron bird, part of the chandelier above. Or they may be sipping wine in the old picnic cabin on the northern tip of east island, a small parenthesis-shaped spit of land connected by a bridge to the main island.

•••

After giving up on my novel, I crossed an expansive lawn dotted with croquet balls, spied the girls playing on the clay courts, and crossed the wooden bridge to east island. Midway down the narrow island, an osprey nest crowned a soaring pine. I craned my neck waiting for the great bird to appear, but saw only flitting wrens, busy squirrels and clouds swirling on high.

Further down the trail, two split-log benches faced a firepit. At the island's southernmost point, two Adirondack chairs faced the water. A spider resided on one. Nearby, a delicate bird's nest lay on the ground, a broken shell inside. Bird feathers were stuck in the ground surrounding the nest. It was the only sign that other people had been there in, say, the last decade.

Later, I grabbed a beat-up kayak from the collection of watercraft available to guests (including hydro bikes and canoes). I spent an hour circling the islands, relishing the calm waters, the friendly banter from the swimming dock, and a new perspective on the land.

My own dinner would come soon.