Watch: Man Makes Swimming Pool Using Only Bare Hands, Bamboo and Clay
There’s a certain appeal to living out in the wilderness, isn’t there? Forget about bills, dental appointments, broken heaters and too-tight schedules.
Indeed, the hectic nature of modern life seems to spawn these sorts of fantasies. Just look everything from the tiny house movement to Jean Craighead George’s 1959 novel “My Side of the Mountain.”
To many of us, wilderness living has a definite appeal. But as video from a popular YouTuber shows, any sort of amenity requires a lot of work when you’re roughing it.
With nearly two million subscribers, Tube Unique Wilderness has definitely capitalized on the back-to-nature craze. Most of the shorts feature men who appear to live somewhere in the jungles Central America or perhaps Southeast Asia.
Although the unnarrated videos don’t provide the participants’ names, viewers won’t soon forget their daring feats. Eating centipedes. Digging up snakes’ nests. Catching crocodiles.
Yet for every eerie encounter with wildlife, the videos also highlight remarkable construction projects. Using nothing but the materials at hand, these men craft incredible edifices.
One project involves a mud-walled villa. Another deals with creating an ancient kind of winepress.
But one of Tube Unique Wilderness’ more recent videos involves the construction of something entirely recreational: The subject transforms his primitive villa by putting a pool on top of it.
The footage opens with the man coming out of his small, two-story home and watering the plants that sit in a raised, rectangular bed above a central depression. You can soon tell that he has something more in mind, though.
He collects rocks from a nearby ridge and begins piling them in the depression, making trip after trip. Once finished, he beats them with a stick to break them into smaller pieces until only a fine powder remains.
Next comes pot after pot of water that the man pours in to make a kind of slurry. As he mashes it with his feet, you realize he’s creating a crude kind of cement.
That cement-like clay gets packed and smoothed all over the wooden walls and floor of the depression. Then comes dirt that the man pounds into the floor area and reinforces with lengths of split bamboo.
The bamboo goes into the soft, concrete-like structure in the same way that tile would go onto a pool. When it’s set, the man has as neat and tidy a little pool as you could want.
But one thing is still missing: the water. That involves many more treks to a nearby river.
The man pours bowl after bowl into his bespoke pool until he has enough to bathe in. The video even shows him taking a lap or two around the small space.
That’s a lot of work to enjoy “simple” living. What do you think? Is the primitive life for you?
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