Original subtitles

Something as stupid as cutting myself with an ax took me out of this

unbelievable experience of a lifetime.

That's the catch of the day. Some kind of gnarly looking seaweed.

If I don't start catching fish soon, I'm gone.

Oh, it's a bear.

All right, bear, you stay over there. Please stay away from my camera. Thank

you. They don't call this alone for no reason.

It's like a whining and a really deep sniffing right here at the back of my

head. Get on out of here!

Who are you when everything's been stripped away?

You're out here in these woods.

I have not had a serious meal in a week. I can't get a player, and I can't stay

here. It's always in the back of your mind. Well, I can tap out.

Putting up with a filming booth?

We're running into a predator. It's not an if, it's a when.

Get the hell out of here. I see you. Get out of here.

I'm living a hand-to-mouth existence.

Yes!

$500,000 is a lot of money. It's just going to keep getting harder.

It's not the world that needs to change. It's me that needs to change.

Get the hell out of here. I see you.

Get out of here!

Go on, get!

Oh, man.

That is a cub.

I couldn't figure out what in the hell it was. I've never heard noise like that

come from an animal.

Turned out it wasn't one animal, it was two.

It was mama and a cub.

The mama was making the huffing noise and the baby was making the neighing

noise.

The baby is okay.

God.

Oh.

Now this just brought back the rage monster that I had. I hate that part of

me. I can't stand that part of me.

Being good at violence is not good.

And it kills me that that's exactly what the hell I reverted back to here

tonight.

I hate to do it, but I'm going to tap.

It's just starting to feel peaceful here, you know?

That quietness, you know?

Hi, Tracy.

Hey. How you doing? I'm rattled, I'm not gonna lie.

When I saw the little bear, it was just this feeling of remorse hit me for being

so aggressive over it.

Because that's the way I've always been. I've just been uber aggressive.

And I just felt really bad.

My heart aches for tapping because I feel like I quit and I don't quit stuff.

I feel like I'm leaving a little bit undone.

It's just that I know that I don't want to be in physical confrontations anymore

in my life.

That part of my life is gone, and it's over. I can't do it.

Mother Nature's going to bring everything out, and maybe this is her

way of telling me it's my time to go back. I don't know.

As they say, one hell of an amen.

Last night, well, I suppose about midnight, I was sound asleep

and dreaming.

I don't know what I was dreaming about, most likely Barbara.

But I felt her kiss me.

And so I kissed her back.

Then I woke up.

And a slug was crawling across my lips.

And I kissed a slug in the middle of the night thinking it was Barbara.

That's nasty.

And I hope that didn't scar you for life.

Got myself all fed.

I had fish because of the gill net.

I've got plans for my shelter.

And I can't wait to get on them.

You know, I want to build the drying rack over the fire.

Everything is so super wet, firewood won't burn.

It'll just be a matter of driving in four stakes and then tying two

poles to that.

And then the racks crossed it.

and just have it all above the fire.

So on long rainy days, I can be busy drying out wood like this.

So I've got the basic three piles going here.

The bigger wood sticks about that thick and then

sticks not quite as thick.

And then much skinnier, thinner sticks.

That's just me. I'm a neat freak.

I just like everything orderly. I like to know where stuff is, and I don't want

stuff in the way.

And if it's all disorderly, then I don't feel at peace or at rest with it and

don't know why I'm that way. Perhaps it was being in the orphanage and having so

few things and wanting them just so-so.

My mind needs to stay busy.

This morning laying in bed, I started thinking about tacos.

Oh my goodness, tacos.

And that's the two things I've missed the most, fried chicken and tacos.

I get thinking about this bucket of chicken, and I just can't stop thinking

about it.

Yes, I'll have four original recipe thighs, the potato wedges,

and a big old Coke. Oh, yeah.

When you're this hungry, food like that grabs a hold of your brain. It just

doesn't let you go.

Starvation really does get to you.

And I am starving.

A lack of food has really put me at a low burn. I just don't have the energy

to do anything.

I'm just numb with hunger.

I haven't eaten in what days? I haven't even been counting.

It's terrible.

I've got to pack my gill net.

Disappointing. Nothing.

Just a big, hollow, sucking sound from my mouth.

It mocks me.

I'm not really impressed with that gill net.

The mesh size on it seems very small.

Fish would just bounce off that net.

If I can't get fish, I'm not gonna make it.

It's day 276.

I've learned how to communicate with the animals.

So, yeah, I'm going to take a walk, check my net. I know there's not going

to be anything in it, but I'm going to check it anyway.

Already my stomach's growling.

I'm really hungry.

Getting stuff from the water is going to be tasking because the fish aren't just

running up and jumping in your arms out there.

We

got

a fish.

We got a fish.

Oh, you're an ugly b****, aren't you?

Ah, so the net actually worked.

I brought hammock.

Transition from using the hammock as a hammock to a gill net.

Anything that I use for survival situations, I try to have at least two

uses for it. And it is the military type mentality of survival.

No idea what kind of fish that is.

So we need to cook him up pronto.

I know there's people out there laughing at how I'm

belaying this fish.

This is definitely not my strong suit.

And in case any of you are wondering, like, does this dude only bring shorts?

No, I have pants.

Just like wearing shorts.

My legs and my feet don't get necessarily as cold as the rest of my

body.

Quite a bit of meat there. I'd say probably 30, 40 grams of protein and all

the fats and fish oil.

I'm going to go over, try to get a fire started so we can cook this fish.

Not a bad first meal from the sea.

About done.

that I cut my drying rack over the fire itself.

I'm going to build an elevated platform for my kitchen fire.

I'm kind of tired of sitting on the ground.

I'm going to build it up, I don't know, maybe three feet.

And then I can just work with my fire.

I love these little kinds of projects.

They gave me something to do to keep my mind occupied so I can make it for the

long haul.

I'm looking at this for a full year.

All right, so I got the four poles driven in.

Now I'm lashing the cross pieces that will support the plank upon which I

will put gravel and a rock and build the fire.

My uncle was big time into outdoor bushcraft and survival skills, and he

turned me on to it.

And I'm very thankful for it.

I got my bucket of gravel just from the beach here for cooking.

So it'll withstand heat for quite a while.

That's my stove top.

It's a one burner.

That's all I need though.

Very nice.

Very nice indeed.

I feel like charmed or something because everything is just going so well.

All right, I'll finish, and I'm ready to wash up.

I built a hands-free, foot-operated, gravity-flow water

faucet out of a gallon jug and some cord.

I tied this stick to the tree, and then I tied the one-gallon bottle that

washed up here on the beach right here to the stick.

Then I tied this longer stick here around the bottle, and I extended it

that far so that the line would come up and over and then down

to the pedal.

You just step on this lever down here.

It'll tip it up, and then the water flows out, and I can wash my hands.

It's not pretty, but it gives me running water hands-free.

You know, the projects keep me busy throughout the day, and so time just

flies by because of that. And so I'll need to keep thinking of projects in

order to maintain that feeling out here.

Yeah, so I got my fireplace, my drying rack over the fireplace, my kitchen over

there.

And, you know, my water is simple. I don't have to work for it. Just simply

walk over there and fill up my containers.

So right on.

I have achieved modernity here.

I

just

need Barbara.

Protein, man, I just, I'm still perplexed about the whole fishing deal.

I'm not Lucas. I'm not going to make a canoe.

I'm not going to make a yurt.

I'm not Alan. I can't eat just whatever freaking crawls by.

I just, I am what I am, you know. I'm trying the things that I know how to do,

and that's all I can do.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do for protein. It's kind of perplexing.

I set up my gill net.

and my fishing line, but they haven't given me anything.

It's like everything else in this place. Nothing comes easy.

Nothing comes easy.

Today, I want to make a spear of some sort, just in case I do see something

while I'm climbing along these rocks at low tide. I'm not just, oh, hey, there's

something. Too bad I didn't have a spear.

Hard on your forearms.

And I'm not very good with my right hand.

Survival here is not easy.

It's work.

It's just everything takes time.

There's just never enough time in the day. If I got proper rest, proper food,

you know, maybe it wouldn't be that big a deal. But I think it would be. This

terrain is insane.

This spear shouldn't be this hard.

Only in this freaking place is a spear like this this hard.

Oh, my God.

So I split it down the middle. Then I just start taking sections off like

slices of the pie.

I'm just going to

shove these.

down inside these little slots.

But you've got to force it down in here.

There's one.

I'll do another one.

The object is just to spread these fingers out as much as possible.

So you can see it's starting to spread out a little bit.

God, I wish I'd get a fish.

Freaking starting to get hungry.

Like, really hungry.

Like, that's all I can think about is food hungry.

I've never been this hungry ever.

Done.

Now I've got a spear point for when the mammoth comes.

And then I have more of a shotgun approach, or if I ever see a fish or a

crab that's big enough to utilize the spear for.

And all the while I'm doing these projects, my mind is just racing.

I don't know, man, I just, I'm doing the best I can, and sometimes it's just not

good enough.

I've got to solve the food problem. I've got to learn how to pick here.

I'm missing substantial calories.

I could be drinking a beer and having a burger in about two hours.

Well, I'm going to check my gill net, but the bears are here.

I definitely want to give these bears their space.

Kind of shocked at how little I'm getting done, to be quite honest.

I had envisioned being farther along in the process than this.

I've got to solve the food problem. I've got to learn how to fish here.

I'm going to make another gill net.

That should produce fish.

Thinking about said dump cross there.

Once I get it built, get two nets working for me.

In my opinion, the gill net is probably the number one food producer out here.

And I could only take one gill net.

Nothing says you can't make a second one.

That's what I'm going to do.

Probably my best find so far on this beach has been rope.

I have to kind of take it apart to get the inner strands of it.

In order to make my gill net, I have to have a large volume of fine thread.

So this is the exciting world of wilderness survival.

A guy sitting in a beautiful forest playing with old rope.

Mic check.

Microphone. Microphone. Yeah, I got a microphone. Good.

The net needle I made out of cedar.

I carved that a couple days ago.

The first step of the process is to tie a series of loops all the way down the

net. And then I'm going to come back and start netting to them.

Back and forth, switching sides on the net. Back and forth, just going and

going.

To tie the knots, you have to pass the entire ball of string through the loops.

And that's what the net needle is all about. It holds all the string you're

working with and allows you to pass the giant coil of string through the knot.

Tired, underfed, and dehydrated.

Making net.

I need to eat food.

Now, this is going to be an ugly gill net, and it will probably only catch

ugly fish.

But that's okay.

Okay.

Empty net needle.

Now, I just got to refill it and keep going.

It's a long process.

Had so many high hopes.

I'm doing so many cool things.

I just feel like I'm just treading water.

Oh, my God.

I got something in my gill net, and rather than wait till tonight to get it,

I'm hoping I can race and beat the tide and get it right now.

Oh, my God. I'm so thankful. I had no idea.

Ty's coming in fast.

Okay. I get to have a good meal.

I'll probably fillet him up.

It's a little baby fish.

Oh, and I let him go.

I should have waited until freaking low tide. Damn it.

He squeezed right through there.

Damn it.

I better get out of here before the tide gets me.

The aloneness and the hunger kind of compound to make it way more difficult.

Right now, it's the freaking hunger, man.

It's always in the back of your mind.

Well, I could tap out.

I could be drinking a beer and having a burger in about two hours, probably.

Missing substantial calories, and I can't deal with it too much longer.

It is day, I'm really glad I made this because I don't know what day it is. I

think it's day eight.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

No, it is day nine.

So I am going to cut a notch, my morning ritual, into my

counting stick, which apparently I need.

Feels like it's time, but I need to start thinking about bigger food.

The limpets and the seaweed and the little crabs, banana slugs, and the

mushrooms, you know, they're all delicious.

But I want real big food.

That's the way that I'm going to make it.

My plan is to put my gillnet up today. I have a log out there to tie one end of

my gillnet to.

And then on the other end, I'm actually going to need to pound a piece of wood

into the ground itself.

So I'm going to use cedar because it's water resistant.

It's a pretty nice morning view, I've got to say.

Bears were just there yesterday.

Right behind those two logs.

It looked like they were fishing, so that's where I'm going to put my gill

net.

I've never set a gill net before. It means I probably won't catch anything

with the first go.

It's really nice to see Samister actually running.

I may not have time to set this. We'll see.

I'm running out of low tide.

And I guess I waited too long.

That was wet.

And I just got water in my boot.

The tide just came in.

Oh, man.

Oh, that was like bad timing.

Crap.

All right. Well, it's not perfect, but we're going to see how it does.

I can't remember one. It looks pretty terrible.

I'm hoping at least when the tide comes in, that top line will float a little

bit more.

I'm going to see. We're going to leave it.

I am very badly dehydrated right now.

We've had several days now without rain, and that would sound like a blessing,

but the problem is my rain catch is dry, which means I have to boil water now to

stay hydrated, which takes a lot of effort to do that.

The lethargy from dehydration is absolutely the worst. You just can't

move. You know, your body can metabolize itself, consume body fat and muscle

tissue to make energy.

But it can't do that to make water. You've got to put it in.

I don't even feel hungry right now because I'm thirsty.

That's a bad sign.

I have to boil a gallon of water every day or I get dehydrated. And if I get

dehydrated, I have no energy. If I have no energy, I don't get the work done.

Part of the fire making process is having loads of wood in camp. But the

other part is that initial flame and getting a flame going.

And the best way to do that in this environment is with cedar bark, which

has been shredded finely, and spruce resin, which has been mixed with the

shredded cedar bark.

I've got several spruce trees here, which are gigantic. They're huge.

This is bleeding, oozing sap all the way down the side of the tree. So this is

the most amazing thing.

And I can come down with the axe and scrape all this stuff off.

Cedar bark lights readily, but it doesn't burn very long. And the spruce

resin burns a long time, but it's kind of hard to light sometimes.

So when you mix the two, the cedar lights up the spruce resin, and then you

have a long-lasting flame.

And this is really sticky stuff, which is the good thing.

And there's a lot of resin in there, so that little bit should burn a good long

time, long enough to get these twigs and things going.

There we go.

See how much easier that was?

Now get this on top.

Get these on top of that.

But once I get some liquid in me, I'm planning on getting a lot of fuel in the

shelter here.

I'll probably work on my net. It's high tide now. It's almost dead high tide. It

won't be low tide again until this evening.

Really, really, really looking forward to having a belly full of liquid.

The thirst has to go.

The dehydration has to go.

No!

The thirst has to go.

The dehydration has to go.

No!

I did not need that this morning.

I did not swear on camera.

That was good. That was good. That was restraint.

That was discouraging.

And now I have to do this whole thing over again.

I just don't have any way around it today. I have to hydrate. I have to

drink water.

I am too stinking tired, underfed, and dehydrated to get it together right now.

But I have to because the leading cause of death in wilderness survival

situations are hypothermia and dehydration.

I screwed up.

No excuses.

I'm human.

I admit it.

It's a good thing you folks didn't hear what I said after I shut off the camera.

You'd be shocked at what can come out of this good Christian man.

The bears heard, the cougars heard, and the wolves heard, but they don't speak

English, and that's a good thing.

This place is just one big rotten log.

Kind of disappointed in myself.

And yet on the other hand, I haven't done everything I can do, but I mean,

I've tried, man. It's not like I've been screwing off.

I am getting minor food.

Limpets and those stupid periwinkles. God, I'm tired of those.

But it just blows me away. Why is there no fish here?

There's nothing in my gill net.

I'm just not going deep enough, I think.

I've got to check my stationary line.

There's got to be fish here.

I got something on my line.

I've got to be careful I don't let it go like I did that little one on the gill

net.

Ha, ha, ha.

What kind of fish these are?

To me, they're called dinner fish.

What do we have here?

My goodness.

Hello, good sir.

Hello, good sir.

Another dude.

Another double.

Wow. Another one.

Don't you start to fight on me, you son of a gun.

I'm going to be skewering a lot of fish tonight.

Spilling that pot of tea this morning, emotionally, that kind of set me back.

I was already dehydrated.

Mouth was dry.

I'd done all that work to get the fire going, and bam, the thing falls over.

Oh, my goodness.

You know, kicking myself. How could I be so stupid? I was just not paying

attention.

I've not eaten a single fish since I've been here.

My dad always said, if you want to catch big fish, use big hooks and big bait.

And he caught big fish. My dad was an excellent fisherman.

Why did I not pay attention to the man?

I'm just not a fisherman.

But that can't be an excuse. That is now the problem I have to overcome. I have

to learn how to fish these waters.

And that's a major, major problem for me.

The reality of the aloneness part of it is kind of starting to sink in.

Everything is on me and my skill set.

There's nobody to fall back on who has greater expertise.

Having talked to anybody in nine days and knowing that that's going to

continue and continue and continue, it's starting to sink in.

I can just pick up that phone at any moment and say, take me home.

That bucket of chicken is a phone call away.

Oh, this meal means so much to me, just psychologically, just knowing that there

are fish out there in that sea.

I mean, I knew that there were fish, but just that there were fish that would

come in right there.

Okay,

what I did is I filleted the fish.

Okay, that wastes a lot of meat.

So what I did is I took the carcasses and I cut them up,

bones and all, and that will be my stew. And I'll have a super rich broth to eat

for breakfast tomorrow.

Two meals back-to-back like that, man, that should really help me out.

Wow, how lucky to catch four fish today, man.

Every line that I put out had a fish on it today.

How freaking awesome is that?

Well, I'm going to check my gill net.

I want to make sure that I don't miss the salmon run.

Hopefully they're holding up here, getting ready for the run.

I hope they run up front of these rivers. That would be wonderful.

Still on?

Hey, you are, you're on.

All right.

Oh, the bears are here.

I really want to go check my gillnet, but I definitely want to give these

bears their space.

My gillnet is to the left, right in line with them. The bears are right to the

right. So they're really close to my gillnet.

I'm not sure what to do.

I don't want her to be nervous.

I'm going to let them know that I'm here and just see what their reaction is.

safe. Your babies are safe.

I need to go check my gillnet.

I need to eat.

See if I go just a little closer. She does.

Oh, mama bear just stood up on her hind leg.

Not good.

Oh, my God.

I'm searching for a sense of place here, and I'm struggling to find it.

That twisty branch, that's where I clean my fish.

It's leaving.

Come on.

40, 50 mile an hour wind, freeze, tornado.

I got to go back to camp.

I can leave this experience at any moment, but there's that half million

dollar prize.

I'm out.

My first bit of meat in 12 days.