On a rare, clear, calm day Jupiter, carrying the past of a man, cautiously enters Wooden Wheel Cove in Port Protection. The crew is on a self-deputed quest to deliver a singular biographical record lost, then found earlier this summer.

National Geographic portrays the people and the place of Port Protection over eight seasons in a dramatic reality TV series that we have not yet viewed.

However, we are not strangers to this enigmatic northwest corner of Prince of Wales Island, having explored the area on multiple occasions.

Wooden Wheel Cove

Wooden Wheel is a residential salt chuck within the larger inlet known as Port Protection, named for a wooden propeller devised long ago by a fisherman as an improvised replacement for his damaged metal “wheel.”

Expecting to anchor on short scope within the confined harbor, Jupiter is waved onto the dock by a pleasant, sinewy fisherman presenting every particular of a reality TV resident.

Delighted by the unexpected invitation, we tie alongside the float below the Lodge and hope for the best. Jupiter appears altogether out of place among the ageing gillnetters, dusky skiffs and roughsawn residents lazing about wondering why.

The lodge, general store, float and fuel dock are managed by Shiloh who knows everyone and everything about Port Protection. We find her assembling a new rolling desk chair to replace the previous unit that trundled ashore in 1980. Jupiter’s crew is warmly welcomed and no charge is levied for moorage.

“Since the reality show, people land here asking what it would take to live here.
I tell them… money.”

~ Shiloh, General Manager

Wooden Wheel Cove with a winter population of thirty, appears like many rustic Alaskan outports, but more so. Boats, cabins, docks, detritus, dogs, and denizens offer the visitor a compelling, painterly prospect reflecting many things about few inhabitants.

Fishermen and filmmakers find compelling perspectives within the cove.

Port Protection has always been a self-governing, cannabis-friendly community and is reported to have codified this tolerance within the City Charter. A hand-rolled mixture of pot and tobacco appears popular, and many people pass their hours, days and years smoking and drinking beer. A vaporous musk perfumes the shores, and when speaking closely to local paladins, one must occasionally brush off a dusting of ash.

“Did the community make money from the show?
No, but regulars on the series, of course, made hundreds of thousands.”

~ Mike, veteran tree-faller

Curious to know if the community benefited from filming eight seasons for television we probe the locals. Shiloh is ambivalent and Mike, who did appear in one episode, offered that the village, as a whole, never benefited other than from a few rentals, and most of the local actors who made big money left Port Protection with their stardom paychecks.

“Was I in the show? No, I’m way too boring.
Here’s me opening a beer, watching TV, and here’s me opening another beer…”

~ Dave, good natured longshoreman and chill-master

The Mission

Jupiter’s purpose at Port Protection is not to assess the legendary locale, but rather to reunite important documents, found nearby, with their owner.

While exploring neighboring Labouchere Bay in June the crew and their guests find a foundering floathouse hidden within a maze of tidal channels. The demersal cabin appears long abandoned and ransacked over time.

Inches Above Sea Level

An archive of ephemera belonging to a former floathouse resident is slow-moulding near sea level within the seeping structure. These sodden papers are removed to drier environs aboard Jupiter where a lifetime of military service, employment, schooling and correspondence are peeled apart and inventoried.

The floathouse in June—merging with the forest and foundering two miles from Port Protection

A Man Called Bill

It is resolved to preserve the administrivia of a man called Bill, to locate him or his next of kin and return the trove. Online searches are made, obituaries scoured, family history researched, and distant relatives contacted, but nothing about Bill’s current status surfaces. It appears that Bill has been washed below the tideline.

The Petersburg Connection

For much of summer Jupiter carries about Bill’s life records without finding Bill. Investigators come to believe that Bill is missing or lost forever.

In Petersburg, Glo, the Harbormaster, introduces us to Ben, the local facilitator to National Geographic’s production team. Ben texts the astonishing news that Bill is alive in Port Protection. He connects us with Gail, Bill’s near neighbor, and we learn that he resides at Wooden Wheel Cove — within two miles of the floathouse abandoned decades ago.

“Ask Shiloh at the store, she’ll point you in the right direction.”

~ Gail

Afoot at Port Protection

Jupiter shapes a course to Port Protection. Shiloh directs us along a boardwalk—watch for bears—across the shore, over a dock, along a beach to a further boardwalk where we encounter Mike, a bountifully bearded tree-faller, who leads us along the high tide line of a second beach to a stack of blue pallets marking a turn up the hill through the bush to a red barn where Bill, alone, is said to occupy the loft.

Mike, the tree-faller, guides us over the creek and through the woods to Bill’s barn.

Mike bounds up impossibly steep steps, pounds his fists on a door like he’s waking the dead or the deaf. After a long pause, more pounding and shouting, the door buckles open. There stands Bill. Mike disappears like a wave dissolving on the beach.

Surprised by the arrival of strangers in his garet, Bill adjusts enough to understand the delivery of his abandoned records, and we agree to muster later at the General Store.

“Sorry about the mess.”

~ Bill

We pass time with Bill on the deck of the store, and appreciate his quiet and friendly demeanor, his penetrating eyes observing all from within a facefull of whiskers. We discuss his army career, auto-mechanics, and his interest in art, of which we know something.

Bill, like others encountered at Port Protection, seems content with his reclusive existence in a community that understands and cares about him in a way that more conventional societies have not.

We have followed Bill’s trajectory around the country, until the trail ran cold in Ketchikan. We never imagined finding him two miles away from the floathouse, over the hill in Port Protection.

As at other communities we visit in Alaska, people have a value unmeasured by resources, abilities, orthodoxy or logic. They are accepted simply for their living autonomy.