Jacob & Jacob Fuller
Dear Daniel, Jonathan/Anna, Mr./Mrs. Carter, the rest of the Carter family, and all wishing to remember Jacob,
My name is also Jacob so I will forever feel a special connection to Jacob Carter. We met in our first year of guiding at Noah’s Ark in 2013 during a popular time to be a Jacob at Noah’s. There were a total of 5 Jacobs during our years at Noah’s Ark, and the Noah’s leadership decided to make it easy to remember our names by rooming 3 of us together. So my first Noah’s housing situation was Jacob Carter, myself (Jacob Fuller), Jacob Magistrelli, and Zach Bush (not sure how he ended up in the Jacob room but he handled himself just fine). Jacob Carter took his guide training very seriously, and on multiple occasions I woke up in the middle of the night to Jacob practicing calling paddle strokes to an imaginary paddle raft crew or pulling vigorously on his entire bedframe to unstick his imaginary raft from an imaginary rock.
The next morning over a bowl of cereal, he would have no recollection that he had been sleep-rafting.
The first time I met Mr. and Mrs. Carter was maybe a month into our first summer of guiding when Jacob told a few folks after dinner that his parents were in town renting a cabin and were allowing some friends to stop by to celebrate another guide’s birthday. It started out innocently enough, but news travels fast at Noah’s and before long there were 50+ Noah’s employees crawling all over their small rental cabin and property.
Mr. and Mrs. Carter didn’t even bat an eye, but mingled among the young, broke raft guides, offering root beers and bags of chips. That was my first taste of the Carter hospitality and generosity.
With Jacob, the apple of generosity most certainly did not fall far from the tree. Post Noah’s Ark, Jacob moved to Seattle a few months after I did. Within weeks of him moving and finding a housing situation, I was getting regular invites to his roommate dinners. More often than not, I was unable to make it to those, so Jacob made sure we would meet up at local breweries, even after he moved to Tacoma. Somehow, at the end of our evenings together, he would usually somehow find a way to offer to pay for my beer, often with the promise that I could “get the next one”. I still owe Jacob at least half a dozen beers, so if any of the Carter family finds themselves in Seattle thirsty for a beer, look me up so I can settle my debt.
With Jacob’s passing, there is clearly a hole in our lives and in the PNW community that cannot be filled. However, I have resolved to be more generous in his memory and I encourage anyone reading this that wants to carry on his memory to do the same. Buy a friend a beer, invite someone to share a meal at your house, volunteer to create all the floral arrangements for your sister’s wedding.
In short, be a little more like Jake.
