Many inns affect a homey look. The Keeper’s House looks like home, not necessarily your home, but some idealized American notion of home—comfortable, broken in, the slightest bit worn around the edges, like the house that Jimmy Stewart tried to get back to in It’s a Wonderful Life. It is the kind of place where one could flop down in the communal living room and read until late at night. (There are gaslights in the living room. Up in the bedrooms, it’s candles only.) The inn is run by Jeff and Judi Burke, who had looked for a better society in Oakland, California, in the 1960s, looked for it again during a stint in Venezuela with the Peace Corps, and finally found it on Isle au Haut. They bought the lighthouse station in 1986. “We created one little sane corner of the world that we can share with people,” Jeff said. “It works.”

And it is sane. If there was a television in this place it would be almost impossible to connect anything it showed you with what you see outside the window here: a million stars, the steady sweep of the lighthouse light, the light of the moon as it swims across the surface of the ocean.

In the morning, Karl and I pick up our bagged lunch and a map of the island. There are bicycles, one-speed, with good baskets, but we decide to walk instead. Jeff goes over the different trails with us and makes such a heartfelt case for the rhapsodic beauty of every vista that it seems like the first time he’s recommended the scenery to anyone, though I know he must do this every morning. We set off into the mossy woods until we cut back over to the ocean, hike down a beach with a log to sit on, spend an hour throwing small rocks against larger rocks, which, to our seemingly endless amusement, ping and hop around like a dizzy set on the xylophone. The ocean rages in one cove, pools in the next. We walked on and on, and for six hours the only other mammals we saw were a handful of deer, which, we were told, had at some point made the ambitious swim over from the mainland. Maybe they were looking for something better, too.

Judi makes the bread and desserts every day with a staff of island women. They are very particular about things being perfectly fresh. For dinner there is haddock in a Moroccan charmoula sauce sitting on a bed of potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers. After six hours of hiking, I almost wept with gratitude. There is a peach and wild blueberry crisp, homemade maple walnut ice cream with butterscotch sauce, apple walnut pie. The food matches the house, which matches the setting, deceptively simple, perfectly stunning. There is a generator for pumping water (and, the secret, a Cuisinart!), and a propane tank fuels the refrigerator and the stove. But there is no dishwasher, except the one they hire. The other kind, I’m told, won’t gossip, and what’s the point of having a dishwasher that won’t gossip?

Does anyone ever get bored by endless beauty? Is the white pillar of the lighthouse enough? There are other things to do, Jeff tells me. When I say I want to ask him a few questions, the guests from all five rooms file into the living room to hear what he has to say. Tonight, we are the entertainment.

“Town Hall has a VCR, and the library has videos,” Jeff says. “There’s a writers’ group that has readings to benefit the library.” There’s also a square dance, a great clambake the third Sunday in August, yoga, a church rummage sale, nine cemeteries. “One of our neighbors, Felipe, has built a pizza oven. He doesn’t have a restaurant but he’ll put chairs out in the yard for you.”

But the city has stuck to me like old gum to the bottom of my shoe. There are no police here. Is there ever crime?

Jeff grows serious. He nods. But it’s not the kind of crime I’m used to; no one gets robbed. It’s psychological crime. “If someone gets their feelings hurt, they won’t wave to you.” On an island with 70 full-time residents, this is something to think about.

When the mail boat comes back to claim us, I know that we’ve made a mistake. We’ve come too far to be here such a short time. I want the chance to stay until I’m bored with it, until I am tired of so much desolate ocean and deep forest, until I long to make a phone call. Maybe it would happen in a couple of weeks, or by the end of the summer. Surely in a year or two I’d want to send someone a fax, eat Thai food, see a French film. Maybe, over time, I’d want to spend my summer on the Jersey shore, inhaling the sweet coconut smell of other people’s Coppertone. But until I’ve actually had the chance to miss civilization, I think it is a shame to have to go back to it.

The Keeper’s House

P.O. Box 26

Isle au Haut, ME 04645

(207-367-2261;

www.keepershouse.com)