Stephen Colbert's Most Interesting Town in America.

© David Shankbone | Wikimedia Commons

Stephen Colbert: James Island, South Carolina

“I grew up on James Island, which is, at least when I was there, dirt roads and 
alligators and oak trees and Spanish moss. And then my family moved to Charleston when I was 12 to have more of the cultured, old, old antebellum South. Now I don’t even go down there; it’s too touristy. I just want to be near the water. That’s it. So it’s me and the water; the water’s in my blood, I’d say.

“Pluff mud is what’s at the bottom of a marsh or in a harbor in a tidal area. It is silt and decomposing animals and fish poop, and it’s an incredibly fine, claylike, slippery, quicksand-y kind of material, and it’s dark, dark, dark gray, almost black. You can smell it at low tide—and it, more than anything, says home to me. I grew up right near a creek and spent my whole childhood on the water, fishing and crabbing and shrimping … Home for me is being in the water, like floating in a creek.”

Source: Reader’s Digest.