The Twenty-Second Year - 2001

I had been living in Scottsdale with the Walls for about seven months by the time of my 21st birthday. I had made some new friends and was working to get back out to finish my mission.

Working for PracticeMax had its advantages - I got to use my Spanish daily (with the Hispanic collection calls) so not only was I not losing it, I was learning new - non gospel related - vocabulary.

One day on my way home from work I stopped at a red light. A few seconds later I was in the middle of the intersection with a truck attached to the back of my car - luckily the traffic moving in the other direction hadn't quite started to move yet. The truck that hit me was pulling a trailer loaded with a commercial size street sweeper. The idiot drive was talking on his cell and didn't even notice the light change OR see me stopped in the lane in front of him. My car was a total loss. On the bright side, just a few weeks later I got a couple grand for the lost car (surprisingly more than it was probably worth) and it just happened to be the amount I needed to pay for the rest of my mission - which I also got called back out on. I was reassigned to the Texas Fort Worth Spanish speaking mission. The call came by phone on a Thursday afternoon in November. I was at work, just getting ready to leave for the day. It was my stake president that called me with the news. He told me, "well Jacob, pack your bags - you leave Monday morning - now, would you like to know where you're going?" I was shocked to say the least. That meant I basically had two days to buy all my stuff I needed - most all of my original belongs I gave away to locals in Ecuador when I left. But I was excited to for the call and accepted. I told my boss (who was actually in my ward at the time so he understood and was fine with it) and I spent the next two days buying my stuff and saying goodbye to the friends I had made there over the previous year.

Monday morning I boarded a plane headed directly to Texas. I got there and was put with Jason Hoppie. He too had been reassigned from another mission. He originally was serving in Bolivia (he was only there a couple of months) before he got sent home stateside. He and I got along great and had a lot of fun. There were, however, several missionaries in that mission that did NOT like me. Apparently I didn't fit the mold that the previous mission president set for that mission. One of those missionaries that really didn't like me was Tyson Knudsen - he was in the same district as me. I was only with Hoppie a month before he got moved out west. My next companion was... Tyson Knudsen. I was honestly happy with it because I thought he seemed like a pretty cool guy the few times I had met him at district meetings. However, it wasn't until after a month or two with him that I learned he said "oh shit" to the mission president on the phone when he heard we were going to be companions.

The companionship was inspired. Tyson happened to have only four months left in the mission when we were put together - and he STILL had the proverbial "MTC stick" up his butt. I pulled that thing out and gave him the beating of his life - kind of like Hendrickson did for me back in Quevedo. Tyson learned how to enjoy the work he was doing and love, truly love, the people he was serving. We had great success and fun together. Tyson was a year younger than me but he looked like he could be my dad. He was... portly... and quite bald - balding at the very least. Every Thursday night he and I would have "Thursday Night Smack Down." It was a great way to get any frustration out - which he seemed to have a lot of some days. One time, and I have no idea to this day HOW I did it, but I lifted him up almost over my head and slammed him down on my knee - breaking one of his ribs. For the rest of our time together he snored.... LOUDLY. Probably served us both right.

I used to tie my tie like a "waterfall" - I wouldn't put the long end through the hole at the last part of tying the knot, so it just hung over the top and lay flat from my neck down. Anyway, several missionaries had conniption fits over it. I loved doing things that pissed off the uptight elders. It never ceased to amaze me how some missionaries got SO caught up in the "letter of the laws" that they would miss the most important parts of serving - enjoying what you're doing and loving those you serve.

Tyson finished his mission and went home just after my birthday. We had some of the best times together and after he went home, even now, we keep in touch.




When I was younger, my family used to go crawdad hunting at Rainbow lake. One time we went with my mom's cousin Lois and her husband Jim. We caught SO many crawdads that we filled an entire five gallon bucket. I remember going home, cooking and eating them all. Crawdads were a treat growing up - it was the closets thing to shrimp we got all year - except for on New Year's Eve. Every New Year's my mom would buy us shrimp, smoked oysters and kippered snacks - I think we loved them so much because it was such a rare treat!

My family used to do a lot of camping. We camped out at Green's Peak one year and my dad taught us how to carve a ball inside a cage out of a single piece of wood. He also taught us how to carve a chain out of a single piece of wood. I attempted both. They weren't as good as his by any stretch of the imagination, but they worked.

We used to camp at lower log (or was it upper log?) on the way to Sunrise. There was a natural spring that we used to fill up water bottles with near there too. One camping trip I remember playing Mexican Train (Dominoes) pretty much the entire time. Those were some of the best camp outs, when we would sit around outdoors playing games, talking and laughing with one another.

We went camping up past Sunrise with my aunt and uncle, Aaron and Deanne Webb, shortly after I came home from Ecuador. They brought their horses and we went riding out in the meadows there. It was the first (and last) time I had ever actually rode a horse at (or close to) full speed. It was SO much fun. I've always wanted to do it again, but I've never had the opportunity.

For a Webb family reunion one year (when I was probably around seven or so) we camped out at Los Burros. There was an old barn out there (not sure why there was a barn in the middle of the forest). My uncle Karl brought out his Clydesdale horses he used to have and he took us on hay rides.

Years later, we went on a scout camp to that same place and Shane and I made our first (real) attempt to go cow tipping. It's not as easy as some people make it sound - especially since the cows we were trying to tip weren't asleep yet, so they kept running away from us. When we finally caught up with one, we found that two boys whose combined weight was probably under 180 pounds, had NO chance to even budge a half ton (or more) cow.

We went on several camp outs to Brown Creek - the same spot I got lost at. My cousins, siblings and I used to catch small frogs and put them on pieces of wood to have races floating them down the stream that ran through the camp. I remember we had one we named Herman. There was also a bigger pool of water that we (or someone) had dug out up stream a ways. It wasn't very big, or deep, but I remember being afraid of it for the longest time because I couldn't swim.

Not all our camping trips were in the forest. One time we had a Webb family reunion at the church baseball field in the middle of town. It was kind of weird camping in town like that, but I couldn't complain about the fun we had playing ball.

Whenever we would go camping it was a guarantee that SOMETHING was going to get cooked in a dutch oven. My favorite was biscuits and gravy and my mom's dutch oven pizza (not all in the same meal - but... you know what I mean).