University of New England

Looking Out the Windows of Heaven: Joe Keen, UNECOM Class of '09

[Editor's Note: This profile originally appeared in the January 2007 COMmunicator]

A Rise Greater than Everest

Nearly 100 mountaineers have perished on the slopes of Denali - the worst case in 1967 when seven members of Joe Wilcox’s twelve-man team died in poor weather near the summit. So large that it may be seen from 250 miles away, so large that it creates its own weather, Denali looms like a deadly pendant strung on the silver chain of the Alaska Range.

On the first ascent of the main summit in 1913, Robert Tatum peered from the highest point in North America and exclaimed later that it was like “looking out the windows of Heaven!” With a true elevation gain of 18,000 feet from base to peak, 20,000-foot Denali has a greater rise than Mt. Everest.

In 2001, Joe Keen abandoned Massachusetts for Alaska, working for a Jesuit mission in Juneau. In short order, he found himself on the slopes of Denali in early May, seeking to conquer the peak before winter storms had fully spent. With one man down and a blizzard on its way, Joe had not initially found the heaven he’d hoped.

Steven Hawking Meets Gandhi

Raised by a single mom who worked as a nurse, Joe respected his mother and responded to her constant encouragement for him to do his best. As a boy, he compensated for slight stature with diligent practice to become a star athlete. Technicalities didn’t faze him. “Somehow I missed the signups for Little League,” he recalls. “I just walked onto the field ready to play, and by the end of the tryouts, I was on a team.”

At St. Joseph’s High in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he played varsity in baseball and basketball all four years, serving as captain for both teams as a senior. His point guard prowess helped St. Joe’s to the State final his junior year, and to the semis when he was a senior. But Joe did more than sink three pointers. “My Mom taught me balance,” he says, “and that was reinforced at St. Joseph’s.” Strong in the sciences, Joe graduated as valedictorian of his class, but he also thrived as vice-president of the service-based Catholic Youth Center Service Society.  

Joe himself did not subscribe to organized religion, though he felt pulled toward eastern thought. “My religion and philosophy professors inspired me,” Joe says, “and I studied a lot on my own. Buddhism made a lot of sense to me, especially in its focus on balance.” His scientific and philosophical interests created strange bedfellows - Joe considered writing a thesis in high school to compare Steven Hawking with Mahatma Gandhi. “I didn’t have time to write it,” he says, “but I’m inspired by just about everything, and I wish I had time to explore other interests further. If you don’t let challenges stop you, they lead to exciting events.”

An Exciting Event

The blizzard was an event, but whether it would be exciting or not depended mostly on whether Joe survived. At an altitude of nearly 14,000 feet, he wanted nothing more than to find his previous camp and hunker down in a tent. Roped between two other climbers with 60-foot lengths of cord, he couldn’t see anything except the rope jerking along in front of him and snow flying sideways. The trail was an indistinct snake of packed snow slithering unpredictably over the mountain.  

Joe remembered the climb from Base Camp to Camp Two, which involved crossing crevasse fields that were mostly frozen. Hiking so early in the season meant that he and his two friends could ski right over portions of the trail that would later yawn open. Each man carried 50 lbs. of gear on his back and pulled a sled packed with 40 lbs. of extra equipment. They were ready for anything - or so they thought.

With a crack and a roar, an avalanche thundered down a slope a mile away. The three young men stared transfixed, and Joe’s mind flitted to the awful reality that it was pointless to run, since the wall of white would consume everything in its path. The angle of its rush, however, caused the snowcap to bury itself in a crevasse, and the climbers breathed a collective sigh of relief before resuming their march. They were pinpoints of life strung out in a fragile line across a whole world of death.   

Holy Cross and Appalachia

From St. Joseph’s, Joe migrated to Holy Cross in Worcester, where he majored in chemistry and math. “I dropped math when they stopped using numbers,” Joe observes dryly, “since I no longer saw the relevance to my career path.” He spent time alone studying Buddhist thought, and his inner journey to the orient moved him far from many others at the Jesuit institution. Joe compiled a list of Catholic priests branded heretics - a cohort of fellow iconoclasts who proved a comfort to him.

The further Joe journeyed inside, the farther afield he went outside. He eschewed team sports with their politics for the rare air of elevation. “I wanted a more individual challenge,” he says. “With climbing, you are alone with your fears and your thoughts. You develop your own challenges, and you find fulfillment when you meet them. You ascend because of ego, but you descend with perspective.” 

A few friends and he staged a bloodless coup and took over the Outing Club at Holy Cross as a way to finance their hiking trips. “We weren’t quite that obvious about it,” he smiles, “but ultimately that was our motivation. We loved to climb.” Christmas breaks gave the gift of extended winter climbing in the Adirondacks or White Mountains - the gift that kept on giving, as Joe would later find. “I developed my ice-climbing skills during those trips,” he says, “and became accustomed to cold weather.”

To synthesize his pre-medical studies and spiritual interests, Joe spent time exploring Jon Kabat Zinn’s meditation practices used at the “Center for Mindfulness in Medicine and Stress Reduction” at UMass Medical School. But medical studies were only a part of the whole for Joe. He joined a group at Holy Cross that sent service teams to Appalachia, and when he arrived in rural Kentucky on the first trip, he felt undone.

“It sounds corny,” he says, “but it was like a mystical experience for me. I felt like crying the whole week. It was incredibly poignant to be there as a college student with these simple people, and to realize that maybe these people had more to offer me than I did to them. Yet I also had this incredible joy as I developed a connection with the people, and that solidified for me that I was going to devote my life in giving of myself to others.”

“I Wouldn’t Recommend That”

Ravenous winds gobbled tons of snow and ripped like diamond saws across the face of the mountain. Joe and Henry struggled into the teeth of the gale, mindful that the other member of their rope was a solo-climber of unknown ability. He had temporarily replaced the third man of the original trio who had bailed before the storm due to poor conditioning.

The line between mountain survival and mountain tragedy can sometimes hinge on the ludicrous. Joe knew they were in trouble - any idiot knew that - and there came a point where the white of the flying snow and the white of the fallen snow coalesced into one undulating blanket that wrapped wickedly around the men and completely obscured the trail. Joe could not see Henry in front of him, but the lead man was carefully picking his way along the path by following urine stains in the snow. “I wouldn’t recommend that,” Joe says, letting off a nervous giggle.

That they owed survival to the predictably regular call of nature that other climbers had left beside the trail humbled the men. “Yeah, it was scary,” Joe says quietly, “It could have been a much different result.” The men made it back to their lower camp and dug in for the night, letting blocks of snow break the screaming velocity of airborne powder. In the morning, they took stock, shoveled out, and headed back up to 14,000 feet.

An Eastern Soul Goes West

Joe graduated from Holy Cross without a clear direction. Burned out from academics, he felt personally unready for medical school and everything that meant. Instead, he applied to the international Jesuit Volunteer Corps and checked off every location in Alaska. Juneau was his last choice, and the program director cheerfully assigned him there. Preconceptions aside, Joe was smitten.

“Juneau is the most beautiful city in Alaska,” he says. “Where the sea ends, the city begins; where the city ends, the mountains begin; where the mountains end, the glaciers begin. We fished for salmon off our back deck. We kayaked next to killer whales. It was incredible.” His supervisors had been to the east (as in Nepal, not New England), and themselves were familiar with Buddhist thought. Joe realized that the program director had placed him among kindred spirits.

That was good, because the place he was going was anything but friendly. Joe worked as a domestic abuse counselor, running anger-management groups for convicted male batterers. For the first time in his life, Joe stood in front of a group of people who universally and impersonally hated him – no offense, buddy. “Most of these guys were convicted abusers who were coming to class to get points toward parole,” Joe says. “When they left, they were likely going to do it again. Many did not understand that their actions were preventable. I tried to get them past the idea that others are responsible for their thoughts, feelings and actions. I was essentially teaching what it means to be autonomous.”

“They Were Checking Our Mental Status”

When Joe and Henry finally arrived at the 14,000-foot camp, medical staff asked how they had fared in their tent during the blizzard. The two young men replied that they had fought their way through it. “They began asking us all sorts of random questions,” Joe recalls, “and we realized that they were checking our mental status. Sometimes decision- making faculties are compromised due to hypoxia and hypothermia. The Ranger was making sure we were still thinking clearly.”

The 14,000-foot camp is the staging area for the summit, and climbers are afforded an incredible panoramic of the surrounding Alaska Mountain Range. The view can come with a price: while Joe watched, a member of a Korean team was medevaced off the mountain due to altitude sickness. Joe himself took ill at 16,000 feet. “We sacrificed acclimation time for speed and elevation,” he says, “so that we could take advantage of breaks in the weather on summit day.”

While Henry scouted ahead to the 17,000-foot camp, Joe swam in a green sea of misery as he descended back to 14,000 feet, suffering the effects of altitude sickness. Physically spent, Joe would not be defeated. “Henry said he wouldn’t summit without me,” Joe nods appreciatively, “so I felt obligated to summon the strength to solo the headwall one last time to rejoin him before we abandoned the mountain.” With a groan, Joe began his lonely ascent.  

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

Pieces of his life came together for Joe amidst the jumbled ice blocks and adventures of Alaska. He met his girlfriend, Megan, who went off to Tulane University to get her Master’s in Social Work. He befriended a couple of serious climbers who were with him on Denali and with whom he made several “first ascents” in the Juneau ice field. A painting by the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich shows a lone figure perched atop a mountain crag. In rugged isolation, the man peers out upon the mountain peaks that jut like islands above the swirling mist. Joe, too, felt like that Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog. In Alaska, he surveyed his life, and for the first time he saw clear peaks above the confusion.

Joe moved to New Orleans to be with Megan after his second year in Alaska. When Megan earned her degree, they moved to Boulder, Colorado, where Joe was accepted to get his Master’s in Buddhist Studies from Naropa University. He also honed his climbing skills in the Rocky Mountains and worked for the Mental Health Corporation of Denver as a crisis/homeless outreach worker. “I went out on the streets and looked under bridges for the homeless,” he says, “then conducted psychiatric evaluations, suicide evaluations, and was responsible for hospitalizing those in need.”

Medical school was the logical next step. “I was spending a lot of time with patients in the hospital, making preliminary diagnoses, but I was frustrated that I couldn’t do more,” Joe says. He recalled his days as an operating room aid in Berkshire Medical Center when he was in high school and college. “I seemed to be naturally drawn to certain physicians because they exhibited a more sophisticated bedside manner and generally seemed to have a better command of their duties,” he says. “It just so happened that those particular doctors were D.O.s from UNECOM, so naturally UNECOM was high on my list of prospective schools.”

Joe was highly impressed with the chief surgical resident at Berkshire, Dr. John Tomicik, who was a graduate of UNECOM and who combined professional skill with personal winsomeness. “He has existed as the model by which I have measured myself and all doctors,” he says, “he exuded a perfect balance of humility, confidence, and compassion.” Dr. Tomicik unfortunately passed away a few years ago from a brain tumor, but his memory has remained a strong inspiration to Joe.

Oxygen-Starved Minds

Joe made it safely back to Henry, but his efforts seemed squandered when an unthinkable event occurred. A climber from Seattle, whose partner fell ill, was allowed to join Joe and Henry’s rope in exchange for carrying the cooking equipment, but in an astounding breach of climbing etiquette he abandoned them at 17,000-feet - leaving them without a stove and virtually no food. Because of the dangers of being storm-trapped high on the mountain without food, Joe and Henry were about to descend when they noticed a guided team’s stove left temporarily unattended at high camp. “We boiled some snow,” says Joe, “hydrated, split a snickers and a freeze-dried package of lasagna, and made our one and only attempt at the summit.”

On the slope up, Henry periodically turned to shout, “What?” to which Joe replied, “I didn’t say anything!” After several go-arounds, the men realized that their oxygen-starved minds were hallucinating. They climbed steadily in the perpetual twilight as the sun revolved around the horizon. Joe’s last picture, taken before his camera froze about a hundred feet below the summit, was of a glorious magenta sunrise/sunset spilling across the sky. The men summited and stood for a few moments surveying the tops of the clouds and the pink peaks scattered like a Zen garden beneath them. The agony was worth it, Joe says: “It was the proudest moment of my life; it was the first individual dream that I had ever fulfilled.”

Many Windows

Now at UNECOM, Joe is continually challenged and invigorated. He has found a core group of good friends, he says, “Without whom my incessant complaining/whining would have no home.” He is particularly interested in the interface between neurology and psychiatry, and would love to incorporate osteopathic manipulation and principles. “Having access to Drs. Carreiro and Willard is a special privilege of this school,” Joe notes. Direct patient care is most appealing to him, but research and teaching would be nice professional additions. Joe has not limited himself to either domain.

As usual, synthesis is the key. “Any path that will enable me to address my intellectual curiosities while giving back to society and allowing some freedom to explore and find adventure sounds good to me!” he says. His plan assigns Joe the daily purpose of serving others on earth.

That is, when he’s not busy “looking out the windows of heaven.”

-Steve Smith, RSAS

Joe Keen, MSII, on the summit of Mt. Meeker (13,911 ft) in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. Photo courtesy Joe Keen.