Colbert's Life in the Swamp | Live Free or Die
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Every day in the woods is just a constant challenge. It's urgency after urgency, project after project. Got an otter! It's a river otter. This is one of my most valuable pelts; it brings a top price, and, uh, not many people do, but I try to eat a few otter now and then. It's an incredibly intense, dense meat, but, uh, I'm a pretty intense, dense woodsman, though.
At an age when most people retire, Frontiersman Colbert carves a life for himself out in the wild swamps of Georgia, all by hunting and trapping. He sells the pelts to pay for his living expenses—about $2,000 a year. When you really enjoy what you're doing, it's not really work. I don't wear a watch, and I don't do time. I'd rather spend an hour in the woods lost than 10 minutes in a traffic jam.
Grab them by the nose, grab them by the tail. All right, the part that I delete comes in two different sections: the body and the head. One thing that I like to make with otter once the meat's falling off the bone and very tender is make otter chili. And if you've never had otter chili—which you probably haven't—you'd come visit me sometime.
Colbert walked into this swamp 21 years ago, leaving a financial career in suburbia behind. So I don't have electricity—no electricity, no refrigerator. If I were to win the lottery and have a lot of money, I still wouldn't buy electricity. To me, it's just impractical.
He spent 14 years building a two-story cabin by hand, but last year, tragedy struck, and it burned down to the ground. I'm overwhelmed since the fire; right now, I'm toughing out life on this open-air fishing deck. But winter temps are dropping as low as 23°, which have turned Colbert's attention to a permanent solution.
Since you've been here last, I've been really, really busy with lots of projects when I rebuild my life and rebuild my cabin. I need lots of material. All of this super heavy wood is a result of weeks and weeks and months of harvesting material. This giant chunk of a large utility pole—I’ve had my eye on that for about 12 years, and every time I'm sitting on my porch and I see that log, I say, "Yeah, me and that log go back a long way, and we're still friends."
Basically, just this one floor will be a two-bedroom mansion with a wraparound porch. I still need to gather material and bring it to location. We've had some big rains the last few days. The river's coming up, so I've got a window of opportunity where I can go out and harvest and bring material in. It's a dance; it's a balance between the water levels, finding material, and building my house, along with all the other things in my life.