Down to Earth
The Story of Joey Williams
By V. Koelkebeck
Joey Williams got in his car on an April morning outside of Fayetteville, West Virginia. He looked at the clock on his Subaru Forester’s dashboard; it read 10:30 a.m. He started the engine and drove for three hours, five hours, stopped for gas, then drove another eight hours, and stopped for gas again. When he finally stopped again, he had driven a total of 22 hours — all without sleeping or eating, or even using a horrific gas station restroom. Joey made his way all the way to Boulder, Colorado. Then he did the only thing that would make sense in a situation like his: he free soloed the First Flatiron.
If you ask Joey, he remembers looking at the time when he left West Virginia, then looking at his wristwatch at the top of the First Flatiron. There’s really no mention of what fueled him through driving the 22 hours in between. Nevertheless, after reaching the top of that first rock face, Joey took out his shitty handheld camera and started filming himself. He gave a quick summary of his journey over the wind whipping over him, then said, “As soon as the second-hand strikes noon, or whatever, it’ll be 24 hours since I left Fayetteville,” he exclaimed. “It’s a little windy, I’m a little winded, the altitude’s a little high, but,” he nods his head smiling, “this is probably the most productive day of my life. Much love.”
What possesses a person to get in their car one day and drive 22 hours straight, then climb more than 1,000 feet up a rock wall? For Joey it’s simple: “Because I could and wanted to.” he said. According to Mountain Project, climbing the First Flatiron is rated 5.6, Grade II — which typically takes climbers up to four hours to ascend. The direct route Joey climbed in 45 minutes is described as “pure joy the whole way up,” but as a non-climber, judging by the pictures, it looks steep and scary as hell.
I don’t think most of Joey’s friends understood what was going on at first — we saw him on social media traveling, climbing a ton, and having strange dirtbag adventures. But no one was seeing what was really happening to him. He was like an alternate version of himself that was perpetually giving off big crackhead energy, almost like he was on speed. And to some degree, Joey always had an intensity about him: the way he learned, and how he dedicated himself to practicing a new skill. But now, he was untethered from reality.
***
It’s been a lifetime since I first met Joey. We were in the 7th grade in Walkersville, Maryland. Joey had the type of personality that had girls following him to skateparks and crowd surfing together at Warped Tour. Joey was the only friend that routinely made his new friends memorize the lyrics to “Fat Lip” by Sum 41. For a short while in middle school, I was the first person he’d call when he learned how to do a new trick on his skateboard. I can’t say I cared about all the finite details that he would relay to me about a trick, but I remember being really happy that he called to tell me about it. Joey entertained a lot of ideas about the future, and the idea that came up most often was that we’d buy an old Volkswagen Van and travel across the country and live as dirty hippies.
Joey and Victoria at Warped Tour, Summer 2007 with fragments of notes from Joey.
Like most relationships made at such a young age, we drifted in and out of each other’s lives. Eventually, Joey found new friends to spill every detail about his successful kick-flips and pop shuvits and accompany him to Pitcrew, the local skate shop. Meanwhile, I started going to parties and stealing my bosses’ cigarettes. By our sophomore year in high school, we were in the same English class, and we rarely ever spoke to each other. Joey was a smart, athletic, unironic Mickey Mouse-sweater-wearing hipster in high school. By our senior year, while packing for college, I stuffed all my 7th-grade notes from Joey in an old denim purse and stopped thinking about him.
The next time I saw him was in college. Joey and his friends were driving through the town my college was in, and my best friend Bridget hitched a ride to visit me. But I can’t remember if we even spoke while he was there.
That fall, Joey was accepted to West Virginia University, where he started to refine his new skills in the Climbing Club. He became the club President, taking on the responsibility of organizing trips all over the country, managing the budget, and leading the group in outdoor activities. Joey seemed to be thriving at school. That’s why it was so shocking when Joey withdrew from WVU in 2015 for health reasons that none of us knew about.
Joey stayed out of school for two years and started living the dirtbag life roaming from town to town in Colorado. I was living in Utah at the time, so we decided to have the smallest high school reunion at Delicate Arch in Moab, Utah. Joey rolled up to a local pizza place in that same Subaru Forester — with the same pronounced “Pitcrew” sticker on the bumper that he had since I saw him in Maryland. The car was filled to the brim with expensive climbing gear and a makeshift camp pad to sleep on. He looked skinny, which made sense because he’d been traveling with little to no day-to-day plans from Colorado through Utah. He’d spent his time climbing, camping, carving wood mushrooms with locals, and visiting obscure skateparks in the desert. Joey had a system: he showered at gyms and washed his clothes in rivers and coin-operated laundromats. That evening at dinner, we laughed about the problems with hand-washing dirty socks, how they never really felt clean.
At this point, I was genuinely jealous of him. The thought of being free, and of being able to get in your car and stop when you want to, was so appealing, especially to early twenty-somethings working their way from the bottom of the corporate ladder. For a lot of us, an escape to the desert on the weekends was the biggest slice of freedom we could afford. Of course, I didn’t envy the way his socks smelled and the seven W-2s he stacked up that year, but it still felt like he was living a life that would make that Volkswagen-Van doodling kid proud.
After our reunion in the desert, we kept in better contact. Before long, we picked up our rapport where it left off. By this time, Joey went back to Maryland. I was convinced I should buy a tiny home and a small patch of land in Utah, and I proposed that Joey bring his homeless ass over to my place and we could get some chickens. It wasn’t the same as our van-life hippie dreams, but it was a variation that I thought offered a bit more stability.
It was around this time that I started to really see Joey’s bipolar disorder. He was still the same guy he’d always been, but like a feral version of himself now. He didn’t worry about going to school, having a girlfriend, or going to work regularly— he just left whatever situation he was in whenever he wanted. When we would talk on the phone, he would ride a manic redline, becoming a character like Heath Ledger’s Joker, then a hillbilly dude character, and then Joey as I knew him, all in the same conversation.
The average age of onset for bipolar disorder is 25, but Joey started experiencing symptoms of bipolar at 19 years old. Some of us knew Joey was bipolar, but many of us thought that just meant he had mood swings randomly. I didn’t even know that there are two kinds of bipolar, type I and type II — type II being the more well-known bipolar which typically means the person experiencing the disorder will have at least one major depressive episode and one hypomanic episode, but “returns to their usual functioning between episodes,” according to Dr. Howland and Dr. El Sehamy from the American Psychiatric Association.
Joey remembers the very first time experiencing symptoms of bipolar after a tree care job went wrong. This was one of his first gigs and he was working with a friend’s tree-care company. They mostly worked in residential areas and helped with smaller arboriculture adjustments and limb removal. It was near the end of the day and both Joey and his friend were tired, his friend set up the system for pulling the tree limb over to a safe area after cutting the limb. When the branch started to fall, it fell directly on the customer’s house. Joey remembers this accident vividly, “my friend just started screaming as the tree fell,” and while he insists, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds, “A tree did fall on a house,” he explained. He remembers the extreme reaction of his friend afterward, blaming the whole incident on him, and harassing him through text messages. “Every accident in tree care is just so intense on your mind,” he said. And after that, Joey started to experience extreme depression and mania that he would continue to suffer through for the rest of his life.
Despite the incident, Joey continued to work in arboriculture — with more professional companies that adhered to safer practices, and by the time he stopped pursuing a degree in forestry at WVU, he had five years under his belt in tree-care with no extreme accidents in between. Although Joey never really felt that he belonged in tree care because of the work culture, he felt it was a good marriage of climbing and working with trees, so he continued to take jobs in the tree care industry.
Joey’s official diagnosis was Type I Bipolar with psychotic features, and to me, his behavior seemed to read schizophrenic. First, he would be manic, then the pendulum would swing just as far in the other direction with a depressive episode, and he did this dance back and forth for an average of six months at a time. When he sounded like he was out of his manic streak again and right before his depression, we would revisit the idea of Joey moving out west. He would look up climbing gyms he could go to in the area and different sites he could visit in the woods. Since Joey fell in and out of mania and depression, I always took his excitement to move out west and live in the mountains with a grain of salt. But we kept talking about it.
I don’t think a lot of people have any concept of what living with Joey in a manic state is like. To me, the gravity of his bipolar was suspended through the distance of a phone call. Joey would describe his feelings in mania, “It’s irrational, there’s no sense to it, you’ll spend all your money on the stupidest stuff, you’ll drive until your car breaks down, and you’ll run your mind until there’s no escaping the insanity that consumes your whole existence,” he explained. This matches exactly what doctors and experts in the field describe when observing a patient going through a manic episode. According to Jennifer Payne, M.D. at Johns Hopkins University, “When people are manic, they pursue pleasurable activities with great enthusiasm and with no regard for the consequences.” Treating bipolar is often difficult because “many people miss the euphoria and energy of manic episodes,” she writes.
Although Joey didn’t have schizophrenia, he did experience “severe bipolar episodes of mania or depression that may include hallucinations or delusions,” which has been linked with a wrongful diagnosis of schizophrenia according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. To some, his bipolar disorder reads as eccentricity. In reality, Joey driving to Boulder and ascending over 1,000 feet in under 24 hours was a documented red flag that it was the beginning of a manic episode, said Dr. Melvin McInnis, professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan.
Despite my naivety about his bipolar disorder, I didn’t think his moving out west was the best idea, but I wanted to provide a place Joey could stay for a while. And I never minded if he was happy somewhere climbing and skating and doing Joey things instead of making unrealistic plans with me. While he was in Maryland, he got a job working in tree care again. As time went on, I heard from Joey less, but I was thrilled he had more stability and was able to climb every day. Soon it was April 2017, and Joey sent me this picture of us from Moab on April 7th— my birthday. He had to email me the photo because he said he lost his phone.
Just twenty days later, the picture of Joey and me at the Delicate Arch lit up on my caller ID. I answered the phone — it was his mom. Hearing from someone’s mom was never good, so I prepared myself to hear what she would say. I don’t think I would have ever imagined what she said. That morning Joey fell an estimated 50-70 feet backward with all of his tree care gear on his harness — including his chainsaw. When he hit the ground, his coworkers expected him to be silent, but he was screaming in pain, saying over and over “I can’t feel my legs”. I took another breath, feeling like the seconds passing in between her pausing were the last moments my friend was still alive. But finally, she said: he’s alive. He’s in a coma and the doctors are trying to figure out what to do.
On April 27, 2017, around 9 a.m. there were two tree-related injuries reported by OSHA. The first accident resulted in a concussion that did not require hospitalization, the second resulted in a fractured four vertebrae — including the L1 vertebra, a compound fracture on the left elbow, a fractured sternum, and bleeding from the brain in three places. The latter report was on Joey. In 2017, there are some grisly descriptions of the physical injuries and deaths from tree care, descriptions like leg amputated from a woodchipper, struck by a chainsaw and killed, crushed by a tree, contacted power line and sustains electrical burns, and 42 total falls reported. Out of the 134 tree-care-related accidents reported that year, 28 percent of the injuries were fatal. To say the least, tree work is a very dangerous profession.
For the first 36 hours, it wasn’t clear if Joey would ever walk again, nevermind climb or skateboard. It was hard to imagine Joey confined to a wheelchair. His whole life up until this moment had been spent in perpetual motion on his feet and scaling mountains. By some witchcraft, luck, or intervention from God, the doctors reported that Joey would walk again with lots of physical therapy. But he would live the rest of his life with Cauda Equina syndrome due to the trauma on his spine — you know, in addition to having type I Bipolar.
I would Facetime him when he was in the hospital healing. In between our calls, he would send me funny pictures. I’ll never forget one picture he sent of a fork on the hospital floor with a caption saying that he was fucked until the nurse came in to help him. By the end of his hospitalization, Joey spent eight days in the ICU, 30 days in rehabilitation, and ten more months in outpatient physical therapy before he was declared “MMI” or maximum medical improvement. It was a grueling mending process, metal fused to bones, adjustments, and surgeries, and constant work to relearn how to walk and move in what seemed like a foreign body to Joey— but eventually, he did heal as much as possible.
One of the keys to Joey’s successful reintroduction to society was meeting Sammy. About two years after the accident, Joey wasn’t settling into his new body or coping well with having to abandon his dirtbag dreams, so he began using drugs like cocaine and other stimulants. It’s not uncommon for those with bipolar to exacerbate their condition with drugs, because it’s not a disorder that offers logic — it’s completely irrational. Finding himself in a new low, he ended up crossing paths with Sammy. She graduated with a degree in photography from Shepherd University and had a soft spot for training animals. Sammy was patient with a calm demeanor — just what Joey needed.
When he met Sammy, they had a symbiotic relationship right from the start. Their relationship moved quickly, although Joey was slower physically, not much had changed in regard to his break-neck speed of experiencing life. Sammy ended up moving in with Joey just five days after meeting him. They had a complicated start, but they both agreed things needed to change in their lives. One evening, they both decided the drugs had to go and they flushed them all down the toilet and never looked back.
To hear Joey explain his relationship with Sammy, “She grounds me, and I bring her up,” he said. Manic Joey and Joey on drugs was too high for his own good or anyone around him. When I see their relationship, I can’t help but think that they would have never met if Joey hadn’t been forced to slow down after the accident. I would never say that this was a positive of the accident — a life-altering accident has no positives, except for maybe the fact that he lived. That said, I am happy he met Sammy. With her by his side to support him, make behavior charts to track Joey’s bipolar red flags, and offer love and stability, he ended up returning to school at Salisbury University after five years of being out of college. “It’s like she was the final step of my healing and being able to somewhat build my functional capacity back to be able to finally graduate college and get a career,” Joey explained.
***
It's been six years now since the accident that Joey refers to as his “second birthday”. Talking to him now, he is undoubtedly a different person. The inflection in his voice is still uniquely him — but what he says now comes out with the clarity of someone who has quite literally been grounded by his experience. When we talk about the future, he starts with what he can’t do. “I can’t be a mountain guide, and I can’t thru-hike the Appalachian Trail,” then he paused, “And I’ll stop there with the negatives,”. In his voice, you can hear the reluctance to feel sorry for himself. “I don’t get to grieve about my problems to people with spinal cord injuries because they’re in wheelchairs, and I can walk, so I have nothing to complain about,” he explains. Perhaps this type of injury would have been more palatable to someone who didn’t ascend Mount Rainier twice, and who didn’t once experience the mountains in almost every state in America and some Canadian territories. But that’s how Joey used to live his life: one climb at a time.
Joey reaches the top of Forbidden Peak in the North Cascades National Park, July 2015.
Joey admits, “I guess I’m used to it; it doesn’t get any easier,” when asked about the constant back pain, difficulty doing day-to-day tasks, and managing his bipolar disorder. In the era of addressing toxic positivity, people understand that there is a legitimate need for people to express negativity in a healthy way. Author of “Build the Life You Want” Arthur C. Brooks writes, “Grief does not have to be a private misery and net harm to our lives. We can learn to comprehend it, manage it, and grow from it. And in understanding our own grief, we can help others heal.” Of course, that’s easier said than done.
So how can we do better for our differently-abled friends? Because of how monumentally difficult it is to tailor Joey’s past life’s dreams to his current state, it’s easier for him to accept that he can’t do some things and pivot to another dream. And when speaking to those with life-changing injuries, it’s better to not offer any solutions and just provide a space to listen, Joey says.
Joey has no choice, but he embraces his new life. Last winter, I received an exciting text from him, he needed some feedback on a ring he bought to propose to his Sammy. He had some grand plans for the proposal, but the day after going to a Dispatch concert in August 2022, he got so excited that he popped the question the next day at Assateague Island. Joey recollects, “it was sunset, with a beautiful purple hue in the sky, crashing waves from the ocean, and her favorite animals flying by, seagulls — because they’re all named Sammy.” They are engaged to be married this upcoming Halloween.
And on the academic front, after six years in college, three years at WVU, and three years at SU, “with five years in-between of absolute insanity,” Joey said, he finally earned a B.A. in Outdoor Education on May 25, 2023.
With Joey’s degree, he plans to create a nonprofit to help other differently-abled folks who want to engage in outdoor activities. I told him I thought that was the best idea he’d ever had — even better than traveling all over the U.S. in a Volkswagen Van.
And to Joey, I’d say: I’m proud of you, my friend. You inspire us all to persevere. Thank you for letting me write a small piece of your story.
