Have you ever wanted to find a feather of a bluebird, or swing from a rope into a pond on a hot summer day? Have you ever wanted to hike to the top of a mountain just to say you could?
These, among other things, were put on Juab County Tourism Director Shanna Memmott’s bucket list during a very difficult time in her life. And if you visit Juab County, you may very well experience these things, and they may just brighten your day, too.
Memmott was recently named Outstanding Tourism Director of the Year at the Utah Association of Counties after just three years on the job. And, according to Memmott, getting the job itself is something she never even dreamed of.
“I worked in the elementary school with the special needs kids for 29 years, and I began when I was 21 years old,” Memmott recalled. “I started out working with the special needs kids, then I helped as a reading tutor, and then in my last years, I was the speech aide. I had a cushy job. I just gave the kids a treat, took them to the therapist and then brought them back. The kids just loved me because I was the fun girl who got to take them to their classes. But then this other job came up and I just felt like I needed to do it.”
The job that Memmott is talking about was a part-time secretary position working for the Juab County Travel Council. Memmott said that when she saw the job posting, it was so entirely out of the box of what she had done her whole adult life, but recent events leading up to that time, had caused her to want to try new things.
“I was a year away from retirement, and had a midlife crisis, I guess,” she joked. “I had spent my life as a mom and my whole focus in life was being a mom. It got to the point where my kids were starting to grow up and leave the nest and I was finding that I had focused so much time and effort on my kids that I didn’t know who I was. I was starting to be depressed.”
Depression and mental illness was something that Memmott says she has struggled with most of her life. Being a victim of abuse as a child by an individual in her community, contributed to her low self worth well into her adult years. She said that the guilt and shame that came along with it, caused her to experience lows that she didn’t know if she’d make her way out of.
“Having to go through this and the shame that I’ve always felt, was just awful,” Memmott said. “One day, it got to be too much and I took a whole bunch of pills, and it didn’t work. I was like, ‘Look, I can’t even do this, right?’ I can’t even succeed at this.’ So I was just in this low, low thing.”
Memmott was thankfully able to get into therapy, and at about that same time, she developed some friendships and a love of the great outdoors – particularly those surrounding her hometown of Mona.
“I got into some therapy, which really helped, and I started to do things outdoors and I found a group of ladies who all decided that we were going to hike to the top of Nebo.”
It took her and her friends three tries to get to the top, but that adventure gave her the confidence to try things she’d never thought possible. One of those things was putting in for a job she had no experience doing – at nearly 50 years of age.
A ‘stranger than fiction’ job interview
Going in for the interview, Memmott said that she was just going to tell the interviewers how much she loved Juab County, but then there was one question that caused her to give a rather unconventional answer.
“Part of the job would be sending emails to residents, and the interviewer asked me to give them an example of the blog that I would write about that would get people excited about Juab County, and I told them about my hike to the top of Mt. Nebo,” she said.
Memmott recounted the following experience to the interviewers:
“It normally takes people eight hours, and we were probably on hour 13 and it was starting to get dark. We needed to get down and I had to pee really badly, but I was scared to stop because I didn’t want to get eaten by a bear. So we kept going and I thought I could hold it and I got so far and my friend slipped, so I went to catch her and I peed a little bit. And so then we got laughing so hard that I totally peed my pants. And by the time I got down, I had diaper rash and it was so miserable. So you see, I had this accomplishment of me hiking to the top of Nebo, but in all my pictures, my legs are spread out because they can’t touch because I was chafing so badly that it was bleeding. I had to call into work with diaper rash.”
Memmott recalled getting into the car after the interview feeling extremely embarrassed because she had “just told perfect strangers that she had wet her pants.”
“‘This has gotta be the worst interview in the history of interviews,’” she recalled thinking. “It took the interviewer about two weeks to call me back, and they offered me the job. They said they wanted me from the very beginning because if I could sell peeing my pants, I could sell Juab County. And so that’s how I got my job.”
‘Selling’ Juab County with a bucket list
At first, Memmott’s job was more secretarial, and consisted of answering the phone and sending emails. As time went on, she got more responsibilities. Things were looking up, and then she started to experience some chronic pain in her face that she described as a really bad toothache. After a trip to the doctor, she learned that she had trigeminal neuralgia, which is chronic nerve pain in your face.
“Any time I talk, it feels like I’m chewing on tin foil,” she said. “The pain is just unimaginable. “I didn’t want this diagnosis because from what I kept learning, it was called the suicide disease’ because the pain gets so tremendous that there’s nothing you can do for it.”
The medication she was prescribed caused her to be tired all the time, and she didn’t like that. Wanting to live her life, she decided that she would do just that. She continued to hike with her friends and experience the outdoors in many different ways, and while the pain didn’t disappear, it became manageable. Unfortunately, around that same time, she found what she describes as a dot on her arm that was cause for concern. After some tests, it was found that the news was bad.
“Three days later, the doctor called and said, ‘We need to get you to Huntsman right now. You have stage two melanoma,’” she recalled.
Having had a family member who passed away from melanoma, Memmott prepared for the worst.
“In my mind, I convinced myself I was going to die,” she said. “I was telling my husband who he could marry. I was planning out my funeral and who was going to speak. Around that time, I went for a hike to the bottom of Notch Peak and I started to cry because I didn’t want to die anymore. A few years before, I wanted to die – like, I was done with life and I wanted to die. And all of a sudden, I realized that I didn’t want to die, and I knew that there were so many things that I wanted to accomplish in life. The first thing I wanted to accomplish was to make it to the top of that top Notch Peak because I had never done that before. And so I got back to my trailer and I sat down and wrote a bucket list.
After undergoing several surgeries to rid her body of the cancer, she is now cancer free, and is now the Director of Tourism for Juab County. As the director, her bucket list has served as her inspiration for the way she sells Juab County to the world.
“I think everything I base my job on in my bucket list,” she said. “If I can give someone the opportunity to be outdoors and help them overcome their struggles with things like that, that’s what I want to do. My bird watching tour is based on my bucket list item to find a bluebird feather. To me, seeing a bluebird means to find joy in your life, and I’m sure there are other people who can find joy by watching the birds.
“I’ve ended up with this job that I have no experience in,” she continued. “I know nothing. I don’t have a marketing degree. I don’t have a business degree. I just know I love my home. Now I’m starting to get this recognition for these things that are just me being me. I’m just trying to give someone an experience and hopefully find hope and love in the outdoors. It’s going to the top of Nebo. It’s being at Burton’s Pond and going off the rope swing. It’s paddle boarding. It’s riding a side-by-side out in the desert. It’s going to Topaz Mountain and digging for rocks and finding Topaz. It’s watching the desert sunset. It’s watching the mountain sunrise. It’s the little things in life that have given me my hope again. And if people can find hope in Juab County, great, because that’s what helped me.”
Memmott hopes that those who are looking to find themselves in a place that heals the body and soul, that they will find themselves in Juab County.
To experience Shanna Memmot’s bucket list and more, go to https://juab.is/.