It took me a while to figure it out. I knew something familiar was missing, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Finally, it occurred to me: No cars. No roar of engines starting or sharp thud of doors slamming in the mornirg. No crunch of car tires on gravel during the day. No searchlight effects from headlight beams sweeping through the cabin's windows at night.

Not that it was totally silent. There was the occasional chug of an outboard motor from a fishing boat trolling by, and shrieks from kids frolicking on the beach. And of course there were the honks and trills from assorted waterfow1 flying overhead or bobbing in the nearby lake.

Nor was this exactly a remote wilderness outpost. My car was parked just across the narrows that separates Ludlow's Island from the south shore of Lake Vermilion, the fifth-largest lake entirely within Minnesota's borders and one of the most popular with vacationers, despite its five-hour driving distance from the Twin Cities.

Still, there is a definite sense of seclusion that you get from island 1ife even if the island in question is only a few acres in size and a few hundred yards from the mainland. For a citified land lubber, just having to get in a boat to go anywhere adds a hint of adventure to a vacation.

Staying on Ludlow's Island must have seemed far more adventurous back in the 1930s, when one Hod Ludlow, at the tender age af 19, built himself a small cabin on the island. He cut the wood for the cabin from a nearby ridge and milled the lumber himsel£. Hod and his wife, LiI, lived off and on in the cabin for most of the next 20 years, though in the summer they moved to a tent elsewhere on the island and rented the cabin out to employees of a box company.

lt wasn't until 1949, by which time they had four children, that the Ludlow's decided to turn their island retreat into a resort. Over the next 15 years or so, they built several more cabins and a lodge. In the early 1970s, they sold the resort to their son Mark, who had been teaching business at the University of Minnesota (a practice he kept up in the off season until 1988).

Today Ludlow's Island Resort has a grown-in look. Eleven cabins of varying sizes and vintages ring the island, tactfully separated from one another by dense forest. (There are seven more mainland cabins across the narrows to the north and south of the island.)

As it happened, our clan -- my wife and me, our two young children, and another family similarly composed -- ended up nesting in Night Owl, the original cabin that Hod Ludlow built when he first settled on the island. Parts of it have been updated considerably since then. It has a modern kitchen and two bathrooms, and a spacious upstairs bedroom that opens onto a small screened porch. But much of the cabin seems unchanged. The smoke-blackened fireplace, the small downstairs bedroom with the built-in bed and cabinetry that gave it the look of an officer's quarters on an old sailing ship, and the hand-forged iron hinges and bands on the massive door leading out to the sleeping porch all lend it a romantically rustic air. With eight of us sharing the space, it was decidedly cozy. But as long as the weather remained perfect outside, we had a whole island on which to spread out.

Our days on the island quickly settled into a relaxing routine. After a leisurely breakfast on the deck, everyone straggled down to the beach in front of the lodge. The beach serves as the resort's town square -- it's the focus of most activities. Adults stake out spots on lounge chairs, while kids show off their nascent architectural skills making sand castles or hone their George of the Jungle impressions on the water slide. Fishermen begin and end their expeditions at the docks next to the beach. Less industrious guests socialize with their indolent ilk, trading stories about their hometowns or just commenting on how great it feels not to have to be anywhere.

Back home in Minneapolis, one of the most popular pastimes is circumnavigating the lakes. Ludlow's guests frequently indulge in a similar routine, but in reverse, circling the island in the resort's paddleboats, kayaks, and other sundry watercraft. My vessel of choice for these floating constitutionals was a classic wood rowboat. Its elegantly tapered lines woefully outclassed my rusty rowing technique, but there were moments when I lacked only a white boater and linen suit to feel like a proper 19th-century gentleman smoothly plying the waters.

One day when we were feeling ambitious enough to overcome the beach inertia, we put together a picnic and motored out into the lake on one of the resort's pontoon boats. As we began exploring the highly irregular shoreline, I was grateful that we had the foresight to pick up a detailed map of the lake. Vermilion was scoured out of granite by glaciers, but the glaciers did a lackadaisical job; they left jutting peninsulas and enough islands to keep you busy for a whole year if you set out to visit one each day. Figuring out where you are at any given moment can definitely put your navigational skills to the test.

Under a gloriously blue sky, we steered our floating patio west at an unhurried pace through Wakemup Narrows (named for the chief of a Chippewa village on the lake), eventually emerging into the vast watery expanse of Wakemup Bay. Rounding a point, we discovered a pristine, fjordlike arm of the lake stretching far to the northeast. By this time, our kids had polished off all the snacks we had brought and were clamoring for a swim. We decided to anchor on the lee side of a small hump of land identified on the map as Turtle Island. As we set our anchor about 20 yards offshore, a bald eagle that had been standing immobile on the island's granite slab spread his majestic wings and flapped away in a huff.

After everyone cooled off in the lake, we continued our dawdling journey into the virtually deserted upper reaches of Norwegian Bay. Cruising through a channel between two heavily wooded islands, we spied a huge hawk's nest perched precariously in the crown of a pine. We could see one hawk sitting in the nest, and another standing on a branch below it. Killing the motor, we drifted in a silence broken only by the hawks' plangent calls.

When evening shaded into night, after all the motorboats had been tied snugly in their slips and everyone had dispersed to their respective cabins, an even greater sense of tranquillity descended on the island. On some nights, as we sat up talking in the screened porch after the kids had all been successfully put to bed (some for the second or third time), we could see a pulsing light on the horizon from a passing thunderstorm.

On one occasion, a thunderstorm paid a closer visit. We were awakened in the middle of the night by a chiId's cry, and quickly realized that all of the power on the island had been knocked out. It was a moonless night, and the darkness was absolute. I felt my way down the stairs in complete blindness, following as best I could the sound of what I now recognized as my four year-old daughter's frightened wail. Miraculously, someone was able to find a flashlight, and then some matches. We lit a kerosene lantern that sat on a shelf in the living room and that I had viewed until that moment as a purely nostalgic ornament. My daughter's fears quickly subsided, and we let her join us for the rest of the uneventful night in our king size bed.

This may not have been the kind of adventure we had in mind when we set out for this trip. But I couldn't help thinking that Hod Ludlow would have approved as we drifted back to sleep in the cabin he built before electricity came to the island.

MM