Brady Smith does most of the things other 12-year-old boys do. He plays video games, in-line skates and wiles away long summer afternoons exploring his own back yard.

Brady does, however, have to take into consideration certain things most kids his age don’t pay attention to, like how many volts of electricity are coming into the house and how to skate when there are no paved surfaces in the neighborhood. He can and does, without much forethought, spend hours wandering barefoot over his family’s 10-acre property on Green’s Island.

Like the other dozen or so residents of Green’s Island, located between Vinalhaven and Hurricane Island, the Smith family lives a “wireless” existence. There are no power or phone lines and no asphalt on the island, which is a 10- to 15-minute boat ride from the Vinalhaven harbor.

There also are no stores, gas stations or businesses, except for home-based ones such as his father’s art studio. Nor are there any services such as trash pickup or mail delivery. Everything from food to propane to groceries to school supplies to construction materials, the family must bring from the mainland themselves.

“Nobody comes to us,” said Becky Smith, 51, on a recent sunny September afternoon. Her husband, Buckley, 54, is an artist known in the Rockland area for his drawings and paintings of sailing ships and bringing to life on canvas legends of the sea.

It may seem like a Spartan existence to mainlanders, but it is the only shore life Brady has ever known. And, with a little creativity, engineering and elbow grease, he has everything (with the exception of indoor plumbing and Internet access) other boys his age do. It’s just a little tougher to beat his favorite video game after a week of cloudy days, and he has to carry his in-line skates to the attic rather than a local skate park.

Buckley and Becky Smith built their home literally with their own hands. It took them four summers, but in 1984 they were able to move in. They first laid eyes on Green’s Island in 1979 when they anchored their first home, a 32-foot gaff cutter called God’s Bread, off Vinalhaven.

The couple met in the early 1970s at the University of California-Irvine while native Californian Buckley Smith was building the boat. They first visited the Maine coast after sailing around Europe for two years.

The Smiths purchased the land in the early 1980s and built a two-story “temporary” structure. The couple lived in one room on the second floor over a combined shop and art studio with their elder son, Bowen, now 19. Becky recalled that she rarely saw her husband above ground during the summer of 1982, when he spent long days digging the foundation of the still-unfinished three-bedroom house where the family now lives.

The artist incorporated the large rocks he unearthed into his design of the structure and much of the first floor is faced with stone. He hauled materials to the island from Vinalhaven on a scow, a flat-bottomed boat, he built himself.

Buckley Smith designed the house to nestle against the hill, in-between two small coves, and face south. The afternoon sun warms the kitchen, living room and an upstairs bedroom while six solar panels absorb its rays. The view across the water to Vinalhaven is spectacular.

At the center of the house is a 30-foot chimney made of stone cut from a quarry on Hurricane Island. Each stone is about the size of a bread loaf and they fit easily and neatly, according to Buckley Smith. The double-sided fireplaces, one facing the kitchen, the other the living room, are about 31/2 feet off the floor.

The large, roomy kitchen sports a combination of modern conveniences and old-fashioned cooking equipment. The propane-powered refrigerator works just as well as electric ones, but is silent. The family cooks on a combination wood- and propane-fueled stove that’s painted green-and-black and bears the date 1928.

There are a blender, toaster and electric mixer but no microwave. A small, round table in the center of the kitchen is where the family takes most meals. Yet, close to the windows at the front of the house is a long, oblong table with benches. This is where the Smiths feed the 25 singers who attend a summer camp on their property each year.

Beneath the living room windows sits a worn couch. Across from it, under the stairs to the second floor, is the entertainment equipment most modern families consider essential – television, VCR, PlayStation, stereo. Musical instruments are scattered throughout the room and family pictures dot the eastern wall.

Several are of Ruth Maxheimer Smith, Buckley’s mother. She was California’s women’s bicycling champion for seven straight years during the 1940s. Old black-and-white photographs are framed with old newspaper clippings heralding the athletic prowess of “The Blonde Bomber.”

Upstairs, the master bedroom overlooks the front lawn and the family’s dock. From the large window seat, where Becky Smith says she does all her paperwork and bookkeeping, she can see to the mainland, 15 miles away. The most striking feature about the room, however, are the walls and ceiling.

Still without paneling, wallboard or ceiling tiles, the bare wood is covered with 12-by-24-foot canvases Buckley Smith painted in recent years during the annual Sweet Chariot Music Festival on Swan’s Island. One shows a colorful gypsy wagon heading down a winding road. Another, stretched across the ceiling, is of schooners gliding through the sky above the water.

Covering the wall next to the bed is a black-and-white drawing on canvas of an angel dancing with a man. He towers over the woman, his arms held open to her, love dancing in his eyes. While she is almost dwarfed by her gigantic wings, there is an airy weightlessness to the lovely angel. The pair bear a striking resemblance to Buckley and Becky Smith.

Bowen and Brady’s rooms look like they belong to typical teen-age boys, except for the lack of electronic equipment such as computers, boom boxes, etc. They have one thing, however, few mainland boys can boast of owning – an indoor, in-line skating course – reached by climbing up a ladder in Brady’s room.

As the boy, not quite 5 feet tall, skates up the curved ramp on the south side of the attic, he can catch a glimpse of the distant mainland through the third-floor window. In a demonstration for a reporter and photographer, he swooshed up to the top of one ramp before turning sharply for the return trip across the wooden floor and up the ramp on the opposite side of the room.

Two floors below his attic retreat, behind the stairs and next to the room where the bathroom eventually will go, is the “brain” of the house that has allowed the family to live relatively comfortably in their island home not only for the summers, but for four full winters as well. Bowen Smith, who graduated in May from the Liberty School in Blue Hill and plans to attend Maine Maritime Academy next fall, knows the system best.

Wires from the six rooftop solar panels carry direct current into the house, the teen-ager explained, adding that the family uses direct current whenever possible. A meter showed that 13.3 volts of electricity was coming into the house that afternoon, a little higher than the average 12.6 volts.

Four 6-volt batteries, which resemble giant car batteries, store the power until it is needed. At the flip of a switch, an 1,800-watt inverter can change the direct current to a 110-volt system of alternating currents, which is what comes through power lines. The VCR, stereo, PlayStation and small kitchen appliances all use alternating current. The Smiths do not rely solely on the sun for energy. They also own a gas-powered generator that is used to run the washing machine and vacuum cleaner.

The family’s most precious commodity, due to this year’s unusually dry spring and summer, is fresh water. This year is first time since 1984 they have had to haul drinking water from the mainland. There is no pond or stream on Green’s Island to provide a source for drinking water and the Smiths chose not to dig a well into the rocky earth.

Instead, they have a 1,500-gallon cistern that collects rainwater. Every other year it has held enough water to meet their needs, but this year’s drought and the demand for water from their summer campers has caused their supply to dwindle dramatically.

Water is brought from the cistern into the house with a pressure water pump system. The small water tank is heated with propane, but it runs continuously while the water is on, so the Smiths never run out of hot water. They have two outhouses behind the house and an outdoor shower.

While some young people might focus on what they had to give up for island life, Bowen and Brady Smith both said that they have loved living on Green’s Island. Their lives, they agreed, were normal with a few small differences – Bowen often “runs into friends” in motorboats as they run errands to and from Vinalhaven instead of cruising in a car.

“We don’t feel stuck or isolated,” said Becky Smith. “We can leave our front yard and sail anywhere. Every year we take the boat to Swan’s Island for the music festival.”

Buckley Smith admitted that he had forgotten how crowded and hectic summer on the mainland can be until he spent a week touring with the camp singers this summer. “I was just shocked by how many people there were everywhere,” he said.

This fall, the Smiths will leave Green’s Island and head south in a new boat Buckley Smith is putting the finishing touches on. He said that they will stop at cities and towns along America’s eastern seaboard, selling his artwork and visiting friends along the way. Brady will be home-schooled while they cruise.

They are unsure of where or if they’ll anchor for a long stretch of the winter. Last year, they spent eight weeks in Granada and the West Indies. The Smith family will go where the wind and their whims take them. Yet, no matter how many southern “paradises” they visit, they will return each summer to their own little plot of paradise on Green’s Island.

For information on Buckley Smith’s artwork, visit www.buckleysmith.com or e-mail him at buckleysmith@yahoo.com. For information on summer camp programs, call 207-691-0957.