yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Colbert's Life in the Swamp | Live Free or Die


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] [Music]

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.

More Articles

View All
Affordable Alternatives To Luxury Watches | Teddy Baldassarre
Oh my goodness! I mean, come on! I think you said there needs to be some litigation. There should be some litigation. Just look at that! People have stopped me saying, “Would you want to sell that watch?” No, pretty good knockoff. Teddy, totally [Music]. …
WTF Just Happened To China's Economy?
China’s economy has slipped into a deep slump. China is announcing stimulus plans; they are going to really push out a bazooka to get stock prices up. This is the broadest push so far year to date. You can call it a bazooka or not, but nothing seems to be…
Solar System 101 | National Geographic
[Narrator] Our solar system is one of over 500 known solar systems in the entire Milky Way galaxy. The solar system came into being about 4.5 billion years ago, when a cloud of interstellar gas and dust collapsed, resulting in a solar nebula, a swirling d…
Estimating quotients
We are told to use estimation to tell whether each estimated quotient is reasonable or unreasonable. So we have a bunch of estimated quotients here. Someone is estimating that 2419 divided by 3 is roughly equal to 7500. We have to figure out is that reaso…
Calculating correlation coefficient r | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is calculate by hand the correlation coefficient for a set of bivariate data. When I say bivariate, it’s just a fancy way of saying for each x data point, there is a corresponding y data point. Now, before I calculate…
Example: Analyzing distribution of sum of two normally distributed random variables | Khan Academy
Shinji commutes to work, and he worries about running out of fuel. The amount of fuel he uses follows a normal distribution for each part of his commute, but the amount of fuel he uses on the way home varies more. The amounts of fuel he uses for each part…