8/27/15 Filthy Riches On Netflix Was Cool?

    I just saw the first season of Filthy Riches on Netflix, and it was quite enjoyable.  It follows about five different harvesters of our country's weird riches waiting for any and all.  Each is quite unique and even the personalities of the people vary quite a lot, but their personnas match what they go after.
    I believe the most profitable is the family of "ginsengers."  The family is led by the dad who is no nonsense when it comes to business, but while in the woods and doing his job, you can see the family has a lot of love for each other and they get to be together all the time.  Time and again, they show demanding customers from all over the world needing specific ginseng or crazy amounts and the family joins together to make themselves the ginseng people.
    The second group was "wormers"  they go in where the tide goes out and dig on riverbeds, looking for bloodworms, which are prized for saltwater fishing.  They spend their days bent over with a little rake device that cuts up the mud about 8-10 inches deep and they then collect the worms.  They are paid .27 cents per worm, .50 cents if they are jumbo.  They manage to make about $200 a day.  This is a dirty dangerous job, as the tide can come in and trap them, sometimes the mud acts as quicksand, and in one scene, one of them was sucked in to his waist and he did panic.  The two guys showed have been "worming" like 25 years together.
    Then there was the guys who hunt for burled wood, which grows like a knot on certain trees.  This burling, gives the wood a beautiful color and texture, so it is prized and used in high end cars, and other high end furniture.  These guys don't make the furniture, they just go and find the huge chunks of trees, weighing as much as 10,000 lbs.  Guy is fifty years old and runs up and frequently falls out of the trees, doesn't seem to hurt him.
    Then there were the "mushroomers", both totally look like stoners, but they go in the woods and find all sorts of varieties of mushrooms, which they sell to local restaurants.  They also have their own business selling the mushrooms at whatever local farmer's market.  They move all over the country depending on the seasons.
    The last exotic collector was an eel farmer.  He has a very specific eel trapping device, called a weir.  It siphons the river through a wooden box with layers, once the eels get in, they cannot get out.  He comes and checks on his contraption daily, sometimes twice daily and smokes the eels and then sells them in his little store he has set up by his house.  He can catch as many as 60-70 and sells them for $20-$30 an eel.  Seems to do alright.
    All this people are proudest of the fact that they answer to nobody.  They live and die off the skills they have for their given craft.  The people were a little rough around the edges, but I really enjoyed watching them do their thing, even if some of the drama is a little staged.