When Heber City handyman Mr. Weefix, also known as Nathan Rushton, crouches under a leaky sink, wrench in hand, he might tell a tale of glorious warfare.
“We had to go through this alleyway, and we got hit with an RPG. … We were in between two, two stories, and every window had people in it,” he said. “It was the quintessential trap.”
Veteran Rushton was recruited fresh out of high school in 2004 — not by the U.S. military, but by Special Ops Paintball, a company in North Salt Lake.
Ruston helped assemble and sell paintball equipment for four years. Sales trips involved participating in tournaments from Oklahoma to Florida. He was his team’s tank driver, operating a Tomcar that his employer had modified with a 3,000-round paintball turret.
While Rushton has never felt the heat of real warfare, he’s had enough scrapes with death to make a seasoned sergeant blush.
For example, he fell two stories while rock climbing in Escalante.
“I put my hand in a hole that I wasn’t supposed to, and there was something else in that hole, and I did the one thing you’re not supposed to do. I let go. Well, gravity took effect after that,” Rushton said.
He also had a late-night standoff with a bear while camping near Mineral Basin with his wife and two dogs.
“The Jeep had no top, no doors. So basically, I’m like, ‘You guys go in the tent.’ I parked the Jeep against the tent with the headlights on it, so then I could push the emergency button and it would light up the tent,” he said. “That whole night was sketch.”
To top it all off, he was hit by a car while cycling not once, but twice in the span of two weeks.
“Lady smacked me at 30 miles an hour. … She ran over my foot and hit me at the same time,” he said about the first crash. “I still have gravel in my right knee, but she was all mad because I left a dent in her car.”
Because he’s come out mostly unscathed, Rushton says he’s “immortal until proven otherwise.” That, or every time he was supposed to die, his consciousness leaped into the body of his counterpart in an alternate universe. That theory, he added, would explain the Mandela Effect.
Rushton’s many close calls with death are a byproduct of his devil-may-care lifestyle. Because his time on Earth is limited, he wants to experience as much of it as possible. He calls it “grinding XP,” as though he’s the protagonist of a video game preparing for the final boss.
His quest began at Granger High School in West Valley City when his counselor suggested a career in manual labor instead of attending college. Rushton has dyslexia and ADHD and said that academic mentors never expected much of him.
“Basically, you just got put into the (behavioral development) unit with the other bad dudes, and they’re like, ‘OK, cool, as long as you graduate, we don’t care,’” he said.
So, Rushton maximized his time by taking classes like welding and auto mechanics.
His adoration for audacious antics was apparent as soon as he asked his welding teacher if he could use a plasma cutter to turn his 1986 Chevrolet S-10 into a convertible.
“He’s like, ‘Well, no, you can’t do that. But you can do it manually.’ And he gave me a little hacksaw blade. He thought I would stop,” Rushton said. “Three classes, pretty much all day, I just sat there, and I hacksawed the entire top off, basically in defiance.”
Rushton’s high school sweetheart, Jamie Moreno, is just as adventurous.
For example, after graduation, the pair decided to learn belly dancing and ended up performing in a troupe for seven years, balancing swords on their heads and sewing their own costumes.
“I just got sucked into it,” Rushton said. “Just keep grinding, and you keep learning new, cool stuff.”
After Special Ops Paintball, Rushton’s second post-high school gig was hauling reverse osmosis systems for a company with clients like Harmons Grocery and WinCo Foods. On one drive from Utah to Oregon, he had his first scrape with “snow demons.”
“I was sleeping (while my coworker drove the truck),” he said. “I woke up, and it was a snowstorm like no one’s ever seen. It was snowing sideways. All the semis were pulled off. And I’m like, ‘Dude, why didn’t you wake me up? This is really bad.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve never driven in snow. … I thought you just pushed harder and go faster.’”
After working in such a white-knuckle role, Rushton decided he wanted something more laid-back out of his next job. After moving to Washington, D.C., with Moreno in 2009, he applied to Starbucks. To his chagrin, he was hired as a shift manager instead of a “peon” barista.
Rushton was later promoted to store manager. The only upside to that role, he said, was learning the business know-how that eventually helped him open his own maintenance and repair company, Mr. Weefix.
After two years in D.C., Rushton and Moreno moved back to their home state. They lived in a home in Cottonwood Heights until 2017, when they decided to shed most of their belongings and become nomads.
Moreno dove headfirst into amateur motorsports around 2010, and when she said she wanted to live a life on the road, hauling her modified 2009 Subaru WRX from one race to the next, Rushton was completely on board.
Living out of a 500-square-foot trailer wasn’t entirely glamorous, and there were difficulties to not having a permanent address, but Rushton loved meeting new people, working odd, temporary jobs and exploring areas of the world map outside of “the monoculture of Utah.”
One of the couple’s pit stops as they ping-ponged from coast to coast was in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Rushton temporarily worked at Intel’s semiconductor fabrication plant.
Rushton worked with Front-Opening Unified Pods, or FOUPs — sterile, plastic containers that hold silicon wafers. His job was to transfer FOUPs across the facility as the machines that typically moved them were being replaced.
Rushton called it a job straight out of “Severance,” Apple TV’s dysotpian workplace thriller.
“We picked up a FOUP and looked at the phone. It told us where it needed to go, and we just walked it there. It was a 14-hour shift with two one-hour breaks. You were in a clean room. It was this nasty orange light,” he said. “There’s always noise, so it felt like you were in a machine, and you were wearing a garbage bag.”
Not even allowed to listen to music during his monotonous shift, Rushton spent much of his time thinking through deep, philosophical questions, like the nature of consciousness.
“I tried to separate my mind and my body. When you’re in a car, are you a car? … Are you a body, or are you whatever’s driving this dumb meat mech?” he mused. “I call my meat mech Agnew because, in ‘Futurama,’ Agnew is the headless vice president for (Nixon’s cryogenically preserved head).”
Letting Agnew take the wheel is how Rushton survived some of the grueling cross-country road trips during his nomadic six years with Moreno.
They slammed on the brakes in 2023. Rushton had picked up steady work with a maintenance and repair company, and both he and Moreno had grown tired of the trailer life.
Rushton and Moreno moved to Heber City early last year.
“We always call Utah our main campaign because it drives us back. I think we’ve tried to escape at least three to four times, and we keep coming back to the main campaign,” Rushton said. “So, we’re like, ‘OK, there’s something here that we need to do, so I guess we’ll just do normal people stuff.’”
For Rushton, that turned out to be starting Mr. Weefix and becoming a self-employed handyman.
His goal is to be a “safe contractor” who takes on jobs for “disenfranchised groups.” For example, he recently helped build the basement game room of The Legendarium, an LGBTQ+ fantasy book store in Salt Lake City.
Rushton’s other heroic aspiration is to become Captain Planet. He recently earned his general contractor’s license and wants to design and build homes similar to the Earthship community in Taos, New Mexico, which incorporate garbage as building materials and run on renewable energy.
“There’s so much trash everywhere,” he said. “Everything’s parts. You can rebuild anything out of everything.”
What is the final boss of Rushton’s main campaign? He’s not sure. But, at 40 years old, he still has plenty of time to find out.
Rushton’s advice to anyone wanting to get more out of life is to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
“I try to make myself uncomfortable all the time,” he said. “Just be loud. Talk to somebody. Get their experience. You never know what they have.”
For Rushton, seizing the day is as simple as treating his life like a timed match in a competitive video game.
“When you get a rocket, you think, ‘Oh, I’m going to save this rocket. This rocket’s going to be the best.’ Then, you finish the game, and you never used your rocket. You don’t get to use it anywhere else. It’s just for this game. So, why are you saving all your rockets?” he said. “Just shoot them off into the sky.”