SMITH ISLAND, Md. — It’s 6:15 in the morning when 50-year-old Terry Laird starts work for the day. The moon illuminates the path he drives from his house to his little red-and-white boat, The Captain Jason.
Little Terry, as he’s known on the island, unspools a thick brown rope and sets the boat free. He hops in the front seat and jets off. Orange and blue start coloring the sky.
“The sunrise,” Terry says, smiling through oval-rimmed glasses. “Every one’s different.”
Smith Island, a cluster of three island communities in the Chesapeake Bay, lies about 12 miles from mainland Maryland and is accessible only by boat. Known for its remoteness, it has no hospital, pharmacy or liquor store. The government installed high-speed internet for the first time last year.
Terry is one of two ferry operators that serve the island’s 200 full-time residents. He transports locals and tourists for any possible need — a dentist appointment, a visit to the nail salon, a trip to the doctor. While the other boat takes passengers and delivers the mail, Terry also shuttles groceries, tools, beer, dogs, pigs, goats, refrigerators and more.
It’s a role that Terry always knew he would occupy. For roughly 40 years, Terry’s father, known as Big Terry, and uncle, Larry Laird, presided over a small ferry dynasty on Smith Island. Big Terry, with his son as his first mate, ran a route from Ewell on Smith Island to Crisfield on the mainland while Larry handled the route from Smith Island’s Tylerton neighborhood to the mainland.
In late 2024, Terry’s father and uncle died within weeks of each other. He leaped into the captain’s seat of his father’s boat and took over his uncle’s route. He kept everything circulating — from people to cakes to Christmas trees to toilet paper. From Ewell to Tylerton to Crisfield and back, over and over and over again, every day of the week.
But it’s unclear how long he will continue to do so and who will take over when he stops. Terry has no children who can take over the business, and he doesn’t imagine anyone else would be interested.
“I don’t think nobody would want to do this,” he says. “If you want to do it, you got to do it right. You got to be here 24/7.”
A place without traffic lights
Along the Eastern Shore, Smith Island is famous for the islanders’ languid accents, marked by an almost Southern-like drawl and elongated vowel sounds, as if the words are on island time.
It’s a community where people wave at each other before they even make eye contact (surely, whoever it is, they already know them). Golf carts roll down single-lane streets with no traffic lights in sight. Residents mostly refer to one another by first name because there’s only one Hester, one Otis, one Angeline.
Perhaps its biggest claim to fame is the Smith Island cake, an 8- to 10-layer yellow cake slathered with fudge frosting that has been Maryland’s state dessert since 2008. Legend has it, the women on the island used many layers because electricity arrived there relatively late. Cakes needed to be baked in wood-fired ovens, which couldn’t handle thick layers.
The island’s median age is about 52, according to census data, and the cemeteries can appear more heavily populated than the homes. The middle-aged and elderly islanders are devoted to maintaining the essential roles on the island — working at the museum, church and gas station.
Terry understands the importance of his longevity for the island’s sake, he says. And he knows his genes don’t work in his favor. Diabetes runs in the family. Larry died at 78. Big Terry was 74 and lived up to his nickname, weighing around 500 pounds.
At one time, Terry himself weighed around 400 pounds. In his 20s, he decided to turn his life around. He started jogging every morning and trimmed down. He maintains that ritual, squeezing in his daily run before heading to work.
On that morning before dawn, he hopped in his boat and headed to Tylerton to pick up an order of 50 Smith Island cakes from Mary Ada Marshall, a local baker. A painful sensation ran down his spine.
He’s the youngest boat captain on the island, he says, but, at 50, the work still takes a toll on his body.
“Something’s killing me in my back right there,” he says rubbing it as he repositions himself in the captain’s seat. “Mr. Arthur, I call it. Mr. Arthur A. Itis.”
To Terry’s right, a faded black-and-white image of Jesus hangs in a wooden frame. To his left, a laminated photo of his father is tacked on the wall. Yellow grime coats the lower perimeter of the dashboard window, where the windshield wipers can’t reach. A small green clock, cracked in three places, is perpetually stuck at 11:50.
When Terry pulls in at Tylerton, the cakes are waiting for him, wrapped in black garbage bags and lined up on the dock in stacks of threes. Robin Bradshaw steps aboard. She’s going to Crisfield on the mainland to babysit her sick adolescent grandson.
Her children, like many in the younger generation of islanders, moved onto the mainland for better job prospects.
Bradshaw was a crab picker when she was younger, a fast one, too, she says. Now she mows lawns and cleans the church. “I don’t mind hard work,” she says.
She chose a life of physical labor on the island over a life of academia off of it. Less than 3 percent of island residents hold college degrees, according to census data. Many stay on the island after high school. The upside is familiarity. The downside is loneliness.
When she yearns for her children’s company, she hops on Terry’s boat. He keeps her connected.
A wedding in a crab shanty
Much of Terry’s upbringing was rather conventional as far as Smith Island goes. He grew up playing with the small group of island kids in the 1980s when the island boasted a population of about 600 people. The scent of fudge frosting frequently wafted through the family’s kitchen. Erosion had yet to severely eat away at the island’s edges. And life centered on the church, which Terry attended with his grandmother every Sunday and supplied with fresh wildflowers he and his grandmother picked each Saturday.
During his teenage years, he rode the school boat each morning to the high school in Crisfield. Once he finished school, life became all about the ferry and helping his dad run it.
“It comes naturally to me. I love the water,” Terry says. “I always did.”
All Terry knew was the island, the water and a few hundred neighbors — until 2018, when a petite single mother from Montgomery County moved ashore.
Danielle “Elley” Linton was desperately seeking peace and calm in a place she didn’t need to work three jobs to support her family. She visited Smith Island as a young girl and fell in love with the slow pace of life, landscapes that looked like watercolor paintings and tiny pastel homes so seamlessly linked the island ducks can waddle across several lawns in one uninterrupted stroll, no fences or gates disrupting their paths.
It felt like “a totally different planet,” says Elley, now 48.
After awhile of living on the island and riding the ferry, Elley noticed she was eyeing the captain’s mate.
“Terry is the most jovial and funny guy,” Elley says. “He’s always happy and has the best smile.”
She started leaving food outside Terry and his father’s front door “just to take care of them,” she says. Pecan pies and other goodies she’d whipped up, already engaging in the island love language — baking.
“Yeah,” she says, smiling. “I had my eye on him.”
They married in a crab shanty on the water in 2021.
Early on in their relationship, they knew they wanted to have children together, but Elley had her uterus removed long ago because she was precancerous, she says. So they decided to adopt. They’re expecting a call from their case worker any day now. They already have the future kids’ rooms wallpapered and beds made.
Perhaps Terry will teach one of the youngsters to operate the ferry, he says. But he’s not going to force it, he says.
“If they don’t want to do that type of life, I’m not going to push them into it,” he says.
Once the kids arrive, Elley and Terry say they are aligned on making sure all subsequent decisions prioritize the children. Even if that means moving.
“If our family is really big, and we grow out of our house then we probably wouldn’t stay on the island,” Elley says. “We’re just going to have to see where the chips fall.”
A sinking island
Islanders worry about Terry stepping down someday. Several months back, a rumor circulated that Terry was quitting the ferry service, says Michelle Bradshaw, a lifelong islander in her late 40s. It sent the island into a tizzy.
“Everyone was devastated,” she says over Christmas music at an island holiday party.
Without Terry “we’d be ruined,” says Sheila Bradshaw, Michelle’s mother-in-law who is in her mid-70s. She depends on him for transportation and for lifting her heavy groceries.
Others are less concerned. “I think someone would step up,” says Laura Angeline Marsh, who is in her mid-20s.
Islanders are similarly divided over the fate of their environment. One word can set off a tidal wave of emotion: “Sinking.”
“It’s been ‘sinking’ ever since I was a little kid,” Terry says.
Decades of scientific reports indicate sea-level rise is coming for the Maryland shores. A 2023 report from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science warns that sea levels along Maryland’s shores may rise about a foot between 2005 and 2050 and up to three and a half feet by the end of 2100. And, according to scientists, water isn’t just rising from below, but it’s also closing in on the sides. Erosion gnaws off about eight to 12 feet of the island in some areas every year, according to a 2015 report from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Islanders in their 50s, 60s and 70s say they’ve been hearing for decades that the island would soon be submerged and have yet to see it come close. Some attribute that to the island’s unique geography, while others chalk it up to a higher power.
“Good Lord’s been good to us,” says Sheila. “He’s looked out for Smith Island.”
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast and forced Smith Islanders to evacuate their homes. The island saw minimal damage, but it was a close call.
Following the hurricane, the state offered to purchase the homes on the island from the residents to demolish them afterward. To longtime islanders, the buyout offer felt like the beginning of the end for Smith Island, says Eddie Somers, who lives in the island’s Rhodes Point village.
“The message we all thought we got was there was going to be no more investment in the island,” Eddie says.
Opposition to the buyout program was so overwhelming that the state withdrew the program, according to a 2013 report from the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development.
Shortly after the buyout offer, island residents organized Smith Island United, an advocacy group that lobbies for more investment in island infrastructure, says Eddie, the organization’s president.
Since then, Smith Island United has been involved in a number of government-funded projects, including a shoreline restoration project to stall erosion, an effort to raise the roads, an upgrade to the sewer system and the high-speed internet initiative.
“It was like all of a sudden it was this change,” Eddie says. “I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that we would get all this stuff.”
For Maryland Secretary of Housing and Community Development Jake Day, whose office led the high-speed internet initiative, there’s no doubt that Smith Island is worth investing in.
The state has a moral obligation to ensure “every community is cared for,” he said in an interview in January. It’s also worth it because nowadays people can work from anywhere. And, despite the inconvenience of needing to take a boat to get one’s teeth cleaned or grab a bottle of DayQuil, Smith Island is a desirable place to live for not only those who live there full-time but also for a number of part-time residents who spend some of the year there as well, he says.
“The advantage that we give ourselves is on making great places. That includes places at a variety of scales,” he says. “Smith Island deserves to be vibrant for as long as that’s sustainable.”
Another day, another trip
One afternoon, food orders start piling up in the boat’s stern and passengers climb aboard.
Sommer Derickson, 43, and two of her children sidle toward the end of two rows of seats in the boat’s cabin. An old-fashioned space heater situated between the rows keeps the nippy weather at bay. The family is returning home from a trip to the dentist. Hester Smith, who is in her mid-80s and has her pink hair gathered into one big curl on her forehead, sits beside the Dericksons. Directly behind Terry, a man settles into his seat. He’s lowered a navy beret over his eyes to try to take a nap.
Sommer and Hester discuss the island’s holiday traditions like Christmas Give and New Year’s Give, where the children ring each doorbell and ask for money from their neighbors.
Sommer, who is relatively new to the island, and Hester, who has lived there her whole life, laugh about island superstitions, including that blue is bad luck or that planting a new tree will lead to the tide coming in.
Terry keeps his eyes on the water and steers with his left hand on top of the wheel. He interjects in the conversation periodically, squeezing a joke in here or there. Tomorrow, he’ll do it again, and the next day and the next.
“As long as the good Lord lets me,” he says.
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