Where is Uintah anyway?

One of the finest people there ever is Ryan G. Anderson. You may look at his mansion home, his swimming pool, his rangers, golf carts, and other "toys" and his model wife and cute daughter and SONS and.................... where was I? I started daydreaming. Oh yeah, you may look at all these things and be jealous of him but he is a rad guy. You know those guys that would do anything for anyone without really knowing why they should? I think I respect that about him so much because I am the opposite. I have to know if the person is deserving of my service before I provide it. Stupid, I know. I am working on it.

Ryan spoke in church and reminded me of the following story from high school. I can't remember how he tied this story into his talk but he did it and it worked. So, it is my senior year and Ryan's junior year and we are going up to state wrestling where our friend Russ is wrestling. So I can't remember all the people that were there but I know that Court was there, me, Ryno, I am pretty sure Sapp was there, this girls husband was there as was this girls husband. I can't remember if Kenny was there. Dyer was probably there too.

I remember this trip for this story and also getting caught in a blizzard around Beaver on the way up or back, it was like white out conditions and Ryan just kept driving 60 miles an hour like there was no problem, just as cool as a cucumber. I don't know how our parents slept at night when we were out of town or even at friends houses for the night. So much could have happened to us. I can't believe we made it out of high school with just one friend in a wheelchair.

Anyway, so there is like 10 of us going up in Ryno's suburban. We had plans to stay with a friend in Springville. This friend, John Dunckley, had lived in St George in middle school and was friends with many of us when he lived here. We were excited to stay with John, mostly because he knew tons of Springville chicks.

So we left late in the evening and we get up to John's house and it is like 2am. We had to go slow and left late. John told us to just come in and go downstairs to crash when we got there. So we go in the house and his parents room is upstairs so we turn on some lights and see the stairs in the front that go upstairs. We know the stairs that lead to the basement are through a door on the other side of the upstairs stairs so we go around and open that door and it is a pantry.

I remember being seated on the coach at that moment and looking around at the unfamiliar family photos on the wall when I first realized that we were in the wrong house. Unfortunately, some LDS guy in his magic underwear realized we were in his house about that same time. I remember him having a bat in his hand as he came down the stairs and started totally cursing us out.

We deserved to be cursed at but at the time I remember thinking something like "what's the big deal pops?, so we got the wrong house, our bad, we'll be on our way then, jeez, take a chill pill". It's only with the wisdom of 17 more years I can imagine what it was like for that guy to come downstairs and see about 10 6 foot teenagers (all my friends but me at tall) opening up doors, turning on lights, and otherwise making themselves at home at 2 in the morning. I would have been in the garage opening my gun safe if that would happen to me today. Truth be told, that bat would not have helped the guy much if we were there to do him harm.

I don't remember much after that about that trip, we left the guys house and I assume made it to Dunkleys ok. I remember Russ took 2nd place in state for like the 3rd year in row to the same fetcher from Uintah, his last name was Van Tassell. Even though I have never met him I still hate that guy to this day for doing that to poor Russel.